When I started making music, I had a very limited tool set which I knew my way around well. I tried to read up on music production in magazines like Future Music and Sound on Sound but no one seemed to be making music using just computers. They had all this outboard gear costing serious money. I thought I could do all of that inside my PC. Why weren't they? I couldn't make sense of what they were talking about.
I was annoyed that my stuff didn't sound professional next to a commercial CD when played back on the same system. My bass lines sounded weak, everything sounded weak, but I figured I just needed to experiment and learn more with the equipment I had. After all, with a wavetable sound card you can sample any sound imaginable and use it. What more do you need?
Then software like Reason came along. This brought all these mystical bits of hardware I'd not been able to understand into the PC. I could mess around with them and find out what they did. It was a revelation, I realised I'd been doing things the hard way, I could now make the sounds I'd wanted to make. It also opened my eyes to why my stuff sounded amateur, it was all about mastering: compression, EQ and so on. I didn't know how to fix it, but at least I knew what I was doing wrong.
There was so much possibility, so many ideas to work on that I couldn't sit down and finish a song. I'd make a loop and listen to it until I got bored of hearing it, then think of something else to try. I'd made loads of little loops but just couldn't seem to stick with it long enough to lay a track down. I couldn't go back to the old set up though. Ignorance was bliss, but I'd chosen the red pill.
More recently I've become interested in music theory. I didn't like the idea of it before. I do enough mathematical/theoretical stuff in my career in computers, but for some reason I decided to take a look at it. I discovered that I already knew some music theory, and had been applying it to what I did for years, but I hadn't known what to call it and there was a lot more to learn! I bought a guitar which meant I could sit in front of the TV playing along to film soundtracks and CDs, learning how to apply this theory.
This has brought me back to trying to write music again. I've upgraded to the latest version of Reason, discovered Ableton which amongst other things is a great tool for progressing loops into tracks, and I've almost got the PC hooked up how I want it.
Now that for the first time in a decade I feel like I can really get into trying to write some tunes, it's about time I got myself a website...
