aliteraryhigh

I am a 29-year-old individual with a love for all things music. I grew up with all kinds of music, ranging from hip-hop and R&B all the way to thrash metal. I've been playing music since I was 5 or 6 years old, and haven't been able to put down instruments since.

While the majority of what I listen to is metal (of the tech, prog, or avant-garde varieties), I have a huge appreciation for almost all major genres. I've always had love for EDM and electronic music in general, and in late 2022/early 2023 I put my head down and focused on actually learning to produce it myself.

My beginnings in electronic music were in (if I recall correctly) FL Studio. My older brother is also a musician, and gained serious popularity writing/recording/releasing/performing rap music before the days of YouTube stars and TikTok fame.

The family computer wound up in my brother's bedroom, and between the desk and his DIY sound-proofed closet, he made himself a studio. Any time he wasn't home, however, I took over.

In those days, somewhere around 2007/2008ish, I was huge into DragonForce and any music like it. Thanks, Guitar Hero. I would load up FL Studio, start tweaking EQ settings, use any plugins I could get my grubby little hands on, and try to make "techno metal", as I called it. This lasted months, before my obsessions changed again.

Fast forward a year or two, and I got my first guitar and started learning how to play it and how to actually write music of my own. My "rebellious" years began and I started getting into heavier and heavier music. I built myself a group of friends who all loved metal, and hid my love of artists like Deadmau5 and Skrillex from them.

As I grew into an adult, I started caring less about what people thought of my music taste. I started getting real weird with it. I would listen to damn near anything I could find, at the maximum volume possible at all times, and to this day have hearing damage because of it.

In my early 20s, I discovered djent and prog metal in general. I loved (and still love) the blend of heavy music with polyrhythms and in many cases, electronic-style production. It reignited that deep love I'd always held for things like drum&bass, EDM, dubstep, etc.

Fast forward again into my mid-20s. I'm working a stable engineering job, I have too many guitars, and I've yet to release any music. A friend and I started work on a black metal album, writing tablature and sending Guitar Pro files back and forth to each other. I was still listening to electronic music, albeit not as much. I was in my "maybe I'll be a metal musician one day" phase.

Jump forward again, and we arrive in 2021. It's the middle of the pandemic, and I'm spending most if not all of my time working on music on my computer. I finally pulled the trigger on Cubase 11, and some decent plugins. I was mainly using it for metal, but noticed a LOT of high-quality electronic production plugins and sample libraries.

I went through some shit, and put music down for a while. I do this sometimes.

The year(s) get busier and busier, time flies by, and suddenly it's January 2023. Where has my life gone? Life is happening at every turn, and I'm struggling to keep up. I go through probably the second-worst overall mental health period in my entire life, and nothing is stopping the trainwreck from happening. I feel like I'm completely losing control.

One day I'm sitting at home, bored out of my mind, trying to stop thinking about everything going on around me. I finally decide "to hell with it, maybe I'll try and write some electronic music. Could be fun, even if it's bad." A few hours after I make this decision, I've completed my first ever electronic track, head in the clouds.

The week that followed was a blur. I fell in love with music again, but so hard this time I can't possibly put it down. I studied some music theory, found some instruments I liked, and started writing. And then I kept writing. And then I kept writing. And suddenly a week has gone by, and I've done nothing but write music. From January 13th to January 19th, I had produced 10 full tracks and about 2 dozen useless ones.

I had originally planned to just post them on a SoundCloud playlist somewhere, and share them a couple times on social media. But at a certain point I realized music production has always been a dream of mine. Releasing music to the world, no matter its quality, has always been something I've wanted to do. So I signed up for a music distribution service, uploaded my files, and here we are today.

If you're still reading this, thank you. I appreciate you. I appreciate anyone who's ever supported my efforts, be they in music or other areas of life. I'm still working hard, and likely will until the day I die. But I am nothing if not determined, and I will continue to write/release music as much as I can until the very end.