I started making music on FL Studio back in 2010/2011. Well… actually, that’s not true. I started making music on a program called Acoustica Mixcraft. Looking back now it’s definitely not a professional DAW in the same way the well-known ones are, but I was able to do what I needed on it, and what I needed was to simply record my vocals over some beats I’d downloaded. For a while it seemed like all I did was download beats and write to them, I had huge folders full of beats from all over the internet. These days I don’t plan to use any of them for my songs, but I still have them stored on my external drive, a memory from times past. Anyway, I always knew I wanted to make my own beats, and that’s why I download FL Studio and started figuring out how it all worked. I made a lot of beats back then, but I don’t know why I didn’t get deeper into it, really. I mean, I don’t remember thinking much of the idea of using a midi controller or hardware. I guess it’s because my main thing in those days was rapping, and since I was getting beats done, I had no need for anything else. The beats themselves were necessities, because I couldn’t be spending money on beats, and I couldn’t do what I wanted with the songs I made over beats I ripped from YouTube. Being a producer wasn’t really a big deal to me back then, I wasn’t thinking of it much. Over time though I started getting more experimental with my beats, and I started leaning more toward an electronic or ambient style, which made me start getting more interested in producing. I had always been a fan of Pink Floyd and all kinds of psychedelic music so I was intrigued by the idea of making spacey music to blaze and trip or just zone out to. I don’t know exactly why I stopped making beats. I mean, I never stopped completely, but there were some years when I barely made like five beats, and that’s not to say that I took much longer than usual on them. I was travelling a lot in those days, partying and doing all sorts of dumb shit, just trying to be a hippie or whatever. Anyway, after travelling around and eventually meeting my wife and us coming back to Canada together, it feels great to say that my love for making music has been reignited and multiplied a million times. It all started with an MPC One. I guess I decided it was finally time to get down to business and learn how to start making those jazzy, old-school beats I always wanted to make. Fast forward almost four years and I can’t exactly say that’s the direction my music ended up taking, but believe me when I say I have no regrets. Sitting here in front of a mess of patch cables, with my first modular system, the NiftyCase, patched up to the Behringer 2600, baked out of my mind and having loads of fun, recording everything into the Tascam Model 12 with effects, plus the dry signal to maybe arrange later in the DAW. Basically, starting this project of building a home studio, and learning all the necessary things that make it work, has been an extremely rewarding experience for me, and the type of workflow I have now has me the most excited I’ve been to make music in a long time. It feels really nice, and the funny thing is I had no intentions of starting a home studio. It all started with a groovebox, but learning that led to learning more, and now a whole world of infinite musical possibilities has opened up for me. I’m trying to keep motivated to keep on rapping and not leave it behind, but if I’m being honest, production is what I’m most interested in these days, and I would recommend most people to get into it if it’s something you think you might be into, and even if you don’t, because it could very well surprise you. I’ve always said that music is magic, and I stand by that more than ever.
I appreciate you reading.
rebel eye 