When Did I Start Making Music?

I started making music as a hobby probably in junior high school at the ripe age of 12 or 13.  My buddy at the time Daniel had stumbled upon a relatively small known program at the time called FL Studio and quickly introduced me to it.  See back in those days music software was not as easily distributed as it is now.  I am talking about the early days of the internet in the 2000s where the real potential of the World Wide Web had not even been seen yet.  Before the smart phones.  Before Facebook and TikTok.  Those were the days of chat rooms and fan sites for your favorite artists.  Online multiplayer wasn’t even a major draw for console gaming at the time, though it was growing bigger on the Xbox and PS2.

Here we were.  Daniel had discovered a program called FL Studio 6 by Image-Line.  The simplest program for making any type of music.  Only problem.  We did not have the money to obtain a legitimate copy of the program. Therefore, we were stuck to a Demo only mode that allowed you to save projects but never open up the file again until you paid for a full licensed version.  As 12 year olds without a job or any credit cards we were pretty limited.  Until one day we stumbled upon a site called TRShady.com - an Eminem fan site.  There we were introduced to a community of tech savvy individuals that also had an interest in making music.  It was here that we learned the subtle art of downloading a file to “crack” a software and allow it to be completely functional.  Can’t say we were proud of illegally obtaining the software at the time, but we did learn some things.

It was at this time that we started to develop some new skills and a love for making beats.  See Daniel came from a family that already tapped into the music industry.  His dad happened to be in a band at one point in life.  This gave Daniel a wide range of guitars to learn to play.  No doubt that this environment of music helped influence his time making beats.  My family however was not as musically inclined.  The closest thing to music I had was an upright piano that I used to bang the keys on over at my grandfather’s house in the 90s that eventually was lost to his ex wife in his messy divorce.  Other than that, we never had a guitar, piano, drum set, or even a shaker available in the house.  Yet, I still somehow found a love for music.

Since those days of playing the keys on my grandfather’s piano, I was enchanted with the sound that a piano made.  The sharpness. The elegance.  It was pure.  When I was younger, I was often know to “beat box” sounds throughout the day, even to the point that my parents would yell at me to be quiet because to them I was just making noise.  Spoiler alert: I was just making noise.  I had no idea how to construct a composition that made sense with my mouth.  But I would still try.  That’s where FL Studio began to help shape that point of my music endeavors.  I now had something that could help translate the noise in my head and give me the tools to straighten it out.

But let me just back up a second.  Beat making wasn’t necessarily my first foray into music.  Actually, about a year earlier I had wanted to start recording lyrics.  I wanted to get turntables and be a DJ.  I wanted to get involved in music in some shape or form but I did not even know where I could start. I had my mom take me Fry’s Electronics, and we looked at all sorts of turntables.  But I didn’t know what I was looking for.  Hell my Dad even said at one point that it would just be a hobby that I would put down after a month and there goes a $600+ investment.  Needless to say, I didn’t get the turntables then.  However, during the holiday season that same year, I managed to convince my mom to pick me up my first microphone from Circuit City.  An Audio-Technical ATR20 wired microphone.

I was on my way.  I had obtained a coveted microphone and now I could become the next hottest 11 years old artist straight out of Sacramento.  I plugged that 3.5mm jack into the computer, loaded up Windows Audio Recorder, and started rapping my heart out to instrumentals of songs I liked.  I would then take those .wav recordings and use Windows Movie Maker to make a song.  Okay song may be a loose interpretation.  I put together a file that had me rhyming words over an instrumental…. Horribly out of sync at times.  But I didn’t care.  The rush I felt from just recording was euphoric.  I would immediately upload the heavily compressed mp3 file (actually it was Windows’ version of an mp3 file that completely escapes me right now) to MySpace for all my friends to see.  I’d get some hits and definitely a few laughs, but I still enjoyed the high.  Honestly, if anyone out there has any of those recordings, please send them to me*.

This time of recording was short lived however.  I got stumped.  I didn’t know what to write about or how to make a good song.  Something was missing.  That’s when FL Studio and beatmaking became a bigger influence to me.  After we had cracked the software, Daniel and I would meet up regularly at his house (he had the better PC) to just mess around and create something.  Daniel was starting to pick things up fast and would start to show me how to create things on the software.  My drum patterns were completely off beat at first.  Eventually through trial and error, we started doing remakes of popular beats in order to learn how to create certain styles.  I gravitated more towards Eminem, Dr. Dre, and Timbaland beats.  Daniel gravitated more towards Scott Storch beats.  We started to hone our crafts.  I was maybe cranking out 20 beats a week and a handful were actually something decent.

It was this creation that really got me started in making music.  The subtle art of taking nothing, a blank canvas, and turning it into an extension of your emotions was beyond anything I felt.  Most musicians would say they started making music as a way to escape their environments, to cope with a troubled childhood, to face a difficult challenge, etc.  For me, creating music was about expression but more just a facet to create.  And what makes it more enjoyable now is I’m still trying to find way of how that form of creating can be done differently.  How can I push myself to do more.  I can still crank out 20 beats a week if I wanted to, but I’d rather focus on the new ways I can create.

With that said, I was able to also start developing my understanding of song making and could start making songs I write over the vert beats I was creating.  This evolution has fueled my desires in making music ever since.  I don’t think there is any other outlet like like creating music that can give the rush that it does.

*Seriously if you can find my recordings over G-Unit’s “My Buddy” or that “Chicken Noodle Soup” song from 2006, then I will be eternally grateful.