How did you start with music?

[Mr. Bigglesworth]

Simple enough. How did you become interested in music? What made you really want to persue it? Was it gradual or really sudden?

Tell a story!

I'll start.

When I was 14, I didn't listen to very much music...at all. Like..next to no music at all, I had virtually no interest in music before then. So weirdly enough, the first things that got me really engaged in music were Rabiesx86's Pony Pitch Shift videos and Skrillex. But I wasn't interested in really making music, it was after getting onto Alex S and the like that I really, really, REALLY..wanted to make Chiptune. Like..with a Gameboy.

But a couple weeks later I was over that and wanted to make Dubstep. Now, I wanna make this clear now - I was stupid back then. I saw a video where this guy sampled a dnb track to make a dubstep wobble with his turntables and thought that it was all done with turntables. After a while I realized that wasn't the case, so I started doing my research on what you make music with and came to the conclusion that since Skrillex uses Ableton that I should to! So with no prior knowledge of anything to do with Ableton I got a trial of it. I was immensly confused by it to be perfectly honest. So after a while I decided I'd look into FL Studio. I got it shipped for $130 with my magical student discount and started messing around. In the end I made dubstep...maybe twice ever.

The rest is pretty obvious, I didn't make anything near as good as I'd hoped and just learnt everything through criminal amounts of trial and error.

[Symphon]

Similar to you, Biggles, I really started getting interested in making music from the likes of Alex S., D.notive, and most importantly, Glaze. I started making some remixes and originals using loops from Audacity (they were HORRIBLE and I was stupid back then, so be quiet.) Shortly after, I got an iPad for Christmas and found an app called "Tabletop." It was great for simple, retro type tracks. It was really fun to mess with. Shortly after, I got FL Studio Mobile. Started getting a tiny bit better. Right after that, a friend gave me a copy of FL Studio 10 that he had. That is when it all began. From horrible beginnings to slightly less horrible present-day.

[Viricide Filly]

I was homeschooled for like 5 years. It was only when I went back to school and met a guy who is now my best friend that he got me into music like The Who, Led Zep, Pink Floyd etc. I had no interest at all in music before then.
When I joined the fandom I HATED electronic music. It was only after a few listens of some more underground brony music (the famous stuff was too much for me at that time) that I slowly got a taste for EDM. And then it grew, and I saw that Glaze used FL studio for his music, so I pirated that. I had already been playing the bass guitar for 3 years before that.

[colortwelve]

When I was a little kid, I had this idea that someday I'd be in a rock band, specifically a singer, which kept me in the choir all three years of middle school. But when I entered high school, there was nothing like that, so I just let it slide, content to just find and listen to good music (my taste in prog was just starting out around then). In 2010, I saw Tron Legacy, and the soundtrack immediately opened me up to the idea of electronic music, which I previously hated. Then I got into ponies, really digging into the community during the summer of the first Remix War. That sparked my interest in music again, and so I looked into production software, got the trial of FL, and let it sit there for half a year, not knowing how to do anything but sequence drums. Eventually I figured stuff out and scribbled a couple of track ideas in February of 2012, one of which became my track Everfree. Then I remixed Cyrricky, joined TLK, and now, hundreds of keyboard smashes and facedesks later, here I am.

[Motivfs]

As a kid, I grew up loving metal and rock and I loved to play the drums. I really don't know what sparked my interest to want to play drums over anything else, maybe it was my ADHD and smashing things combining together, but in a good way.

I had played the drums from age 7 to 15. I haven't touched them since. I lost all inspiration to play drums because of the way I was brought into it. I loved playing them, but I secluded myself from society so I never got into a band, I never progressed, and my teachers that I was taught by never really gave me a push of inspiration to build upon, and for the most part, didn't teach me much. Although I won't blame them, as it's my fault for not pushing myself harder more than anything else.

About 4 years had passed since then, at that point I dropped the whole metal/rock stage and jumping into House, Uplifting Trance. That phase didn't really last long, and eventually I jumped into Drum & Bass via Pendulum (Which I discovered by playing Forza Motorsports). From that moment on it was really the only genre I have ever loved. There is nothing more I crave then Drum & Bass, I understand that can be quite stale for someone to only grasp one genre, but I have little to no interest in anything else.

Anywho, enough rambling on about my life. Lets get down to the point of how I came to produce EDM. After my love for Drum & Bass expanded further into the genre, I found Camo & Krooked, I was watching a behind the scenes studio session with them, and I saw the program they were running. Someone in the comments pointed out it was "FL Studios", so with that, I searched it up. I found it right away, and I downloaded the demo. I was fidgeting around with the presets, only using C-major (Lul cause I had no music theory knowledge [THE LIFE OF A DRUMMER RIGHT THERE]), I ended up getting FL Studios 10 a month later in January of 2012, and from that point it was just trail and error. It took a while to pick up (Until about May 2012 when I started crunching and watching tutorials, and ACTUALLY LEARNING STUFF!).

Now I'm here, a generic Drum & Bass producer, a crappy one at that, but still improving atleast.

[Facade]

around the age of 12-13 i picked up a guitar and just started playing

so i took some lessons and learned really fast (i learned the first page of chord in my class after two - three lessons and it took the rest of my class the entire year to remember more then a few)

after that i got privately tutored by a life long friend who has been playing guitar for many years(not sure but i know its more then 10)

he taught me how to read tabs and taught me my first scale (i still need to learn more lol)
after that its been all self taught stuff

oh and while all that was happening i learned a bit of piano (not much just enough to read sheet music and how to build chords)

a few years later i picked up fl studio out of interest in making EDM
so i looked up a few tutorials on youtube and started to make my very first song

ever since then i've just been producing / practicing though i do want to take some classes on theory / sound design and maybe how to structure songs cause i suck at that right now

[simonli2575]

Since I was 6, I started playing the piano.
In November 2011, a friend told me about the MLP fandom, and then after watching a YouTube video about the fandom and that has a Skrillex song, I started listening to Brostep and Skrillex. After another pony video that has a Hardstep track, I also started listening to DnB. During this period, I had the idea of producing my own DnB and Dubstep. I started watching Dubstep tutorials, but they didn't help at all. Sometime after that, I realized how true Dubstep actually was, I stopped listening to Brostep and Skrillex.

I finally managed to shit out one DnB track using nothing but samples at the end of 2012.
After shitting out 3 mediocre DnB tracks, I took a 3-month break and started trying harder.

That's basically it.

[itroitnyah]

I was listening to Alex S. and Skrillex and decided I wanted to be just like them.

With my 6+ years of piano or so (with a 3 year or so break between when I stopped piano and started music production), I didn't get off on too bad a foot.

[CaptainFluffatun]

I picked up guitar thinking I'd get chicks and hate it. It got me no chicks and I love it.

Then I gradually got into film music. One day I finally quit the band I started because no one was productive at all, where with music production you don't need other people to be productive. That was a big selling point for me. I picked up music programs and worked with 'em for a while until I was adequate with them.

[Captain Ironhelm]

I've always been interested in composing since I can ever remember. I've been in computer music for only about 8 years.

[Acsii]

It's always been something I've done... I picked up a guitar at 5 and haven't looked back

[Conduit]

Picked up guitar in grade 7, and got serious with it for a while in grade 10. I looked into ways to record with my computer and found Ableton. I've been producing ever since. Funnily enough I haven't played guitar in nearly a year now.

[Sonarch]

When I was younger I had probably been exposed to plenty of music, but when I got an iPod in 4th grade I had trouble actually finding songs I wanted to listen to, so whenever I encountered a song, mainly on TV or in movies, I would get it and listen to it constantly until I lost interest. Because of that, I never really had too many songs on my iPod, and it was a pretty narrow range of music. When i got a bit older I decided learning the guitar would be cool because I would be able to play songs I enjoyed, so I took that up. When I moved to DC for 10th grade I took a legit guitar class and learned to read sheet music and built up my skills, and over the previous summer I got into ponies, and discovered the huge music community and started listening to tons. Having very little musical experience to begin with, I enjoyed just about every song I found, despite some of them not being very good, and started downloading tons of brony music. However, I hated the idea of dubstep, because it sounded like a stupid genre, that I remember my friend describing as "robot sex" so I avoided anything with the word dubstep in the title like the plague. I slowly warmed up to it though, I think the song that made me say "alright, I like dubstep" was Silva's One Trick Pony remix, and after that I started finding out about all the different types of EDM, but stayed mainly in the realm of pony music, which is why I have so much more pony music than other music on my iPod to this day. I was exploring so much music and I loved every minute of it. ANYWAY now that i've built that whole picture up of how I came to love music, I should get on to why I wanted to produce it. I listened to a lot of great music that really inspired me to make it. I thought it would be the coolest thing ever to be able to make a song. On top of that, I saw all the interactions between the musicians while looking at things like their tumblrs, which looked like so much fun. It's hard to explain, but it made me really want to be a musician myself, but because I had acquired such a wide range of interests from listening to tons of pony music I had no idea what to do. Then my parents got me ACID music studio for christmas or something, and I had no clue how to use it, and there were very few tutorials, but it was something. I somehow made my way onto MLR and started trying to get a grasp of how to start, posting threads and talking to people, because at that point I didn't even know that MIDI was used to dictate which notes were played, I thought it was all some crazy stuff done with samples. Then I realized that ACID was hard to work with and got the demo of FL, and eventually bought it, which has gotten me where I am now. I'm slowly gathering knowledge and everything I need to produce music, and i'm finally on my way to having a legitimate track done.

So there, more than probably anyone ever wanted to know :3

[ExoBassTix]

This is a thread that I like.

Well, I've had piano lessons for 2,5 years, trumpet lessons for 0,5 year, some guitar lessons, and some bass guitar 'lessons'.
Those were kinda throughout my life.
I've been listening to music ever since I was born, much helped by my parents. My dad used to play in a jazz/blues/funk band on the sax (until recently, because of a conflict between him and another member), and my mom occasionally sings in a chamber choir.
I liked it and all, but when young, I got a big fascination for Metal music. Long have I been addicted to, only listening to, Metallica and Opeth. Those were the names for me in the time. I got all albums still, and occasionally I dig up a song (I recently found out that I want to remix Metallica's "The Call Of Ktulu", whaddya know).
Eventually I got into other bands, like Goatwhore, Whitechapel, Amon Amarth, Lazarus A.D., Barn Burner, and whatnot (if you know Tap Tap Revenge ...). Oh, Frank Klepacki is an exception.
The only sections that totally freaked me out at the time were Doom Metal and Black Metal, but that aside I listened everything.

Then, secondary school came. My first year started the same. Only after 3/4th year in did it change, when I changed school (and kind of returned to the kids I used to be on primary school with). There were two kids that dragged me into Dubstep through Skrillex. The same with Metallica and Opeth happened here with Skrillex.
Eventually, that too spread out. I don't know how exactly that went, but I do know that it completely took over. I didn't listen Metal anymore.

And then, on that faithful day, 2012 April 21st, I downloaded Mixcraft because I found it and was being all like "haha wtf why not" kind of way, not being serious at all.
In one day, I made Midnight Pursuit, my first actual 'song'.
What started as fun, actually became serious. I rendered the song, and wanted to upload it, but I needed a name. As fascinated with bass that I was (especially Hardstyle), I first came up with Bass Kiqker. Dafuq xD
Well that quickly changed into ExoBassTix, combining the words "exotic" and "bass".
And the next day I asked my dad to make me a logo based on a geometric drawing that I made 3 years ago.

And here I am.

[JSynth]

I started playing the drums in sixth grade. (I was really bad back then.)

When I was in 10th grade, I got serious about music and composition.

I also finished my first album. (It was extra bad.)

I wrote my first song (with lyrics) in 12th grade.

I got serious about music production shortly after I joined the fandom.

Wait... a story?

The end.

[Ocular]

My grandparents got me FL Studio 6 in the box for Christmas because I loved music and I'd already been playing guitar for a while. Then I decided to do drums in middle school and now I've been playing that for four years. In all honesty I've been "making music" for 5 or 6 years now but I hate telling people because I could be a whole lot better if I had actually practiced :/

[Freewave]

I didn't get much in to music until about senior year of high school where i first started really seeking stuff out. College was really where i discovered my love for it and a huge part of that was going to nightclubs and discovering first 80's new wave and then industrial / alternative and then later EDM. I picked up gear and started being a bedroom dj shortly after that, started actively collecting music, and then worked at a used cd shop for awhile. I just kept going with that and the collection grew bigger, i started getting work at a few clubs, and then i started learning how to find and download music and then all the restrictions and restraints were gone. After that i got more into indie rock, more genres, collecting live audio and video, blogging, making lists, and then in the last few years into making music because that seemed the next logical step. Before that I'd only done some piano lessons, air drumming, and some half-assed electric guitar playing. I only dj occasionally now but the equiptment and the knowledge still holds up.

[Alycs]

Both my parents were into music. They both went to college for it (though both switched majors fairly soon). My dad played piano, organ, and trombone, my mom played bassoon and trumpet. My mom was pretty good, but my dad... was incredible. One of my earliest musical memories was of my dad playing "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Toccata and Fugue in D minor" (both incredibly difficult songs) on the piano and organ.

When I was 7, I wanted to play drums [because who doesn't at that age], but my mom said I had to learn piano before starting any other instrument to get me used to reading music.
Here I am, 9 years later, and still playing piano. I also now play Organ, violin, viola, cello, trumpet, trombone, french horn, and flute.

About two or three years ago, I became a brony but, plot twist, I didn't actually know about EQD, the music scene, or really anything. The only two musicians I had heard of were WoodenToaster and Odyssey. I really liked their music, and - with no prior knowledge besides classical piano and composition, I tried making EDM. (I didn't even listen to EDM. Almost all the music I listened to was classic rock, alternative, and some 80's stuff [my dad had a GIANT collection of CD's and vinyls. Like literal mountains]

I sucked.

I did a little bit on and off for about a year, not knowing anything really. Doing some acoustic, some digital, until I found this place, and realized how bad I was. So I started trying to improve, reading up on mixing and composition. Trying different things, watching tutorials, listening to more music. And now I'm here.

Still play piano a lot better than I make EDM, though.

[Coloriot]

So I've been a pianist since about the age of six. Back then, I enjoyed playing music, but not really listening to music, as the only music I ever heard was stuff from Christian radio stations. But then I heard skrillex, and I was like ERMAGERSH DERBYSTERP!!

Then about last year I got into the bronydom. My friends suggested I listen to people like Tombstone, Glaze, and Twitch. I thought that their music was so awesome and I wanted to know how people made stuff like that. So I told my dad about it and turns out he had a copy of Live 7 lying around. So I learned the ropes and got some stuff out on youtube, then got a soundcloud, and put some stuff on EQD. Now I have a copy of FL Studio, but I don't know how to use it. I'm hoping to learn.

[Lying Pink]

I played music since I was about... I dunno, 8? I started composing/making it because when I was 11 I decided I was gonna make an RPG and I wanted to do all the assets for it so I had to work out how to make MIDIs, and the RPG idea fell apart but I carried on making music in my spare time, and 11-12 years later here we are. I got sick of just working in general MIDI wavetables and wanted to create something that was complete rather than just a vague idea of what I wanted a song to sound like, so I downloaded Reaper a year ago.

[S.P.P]

Back when I was 9, my best friend started playing guitar, and he got real good real fast. Id go round his pretty often and he'd let me mess around with one of his guitars whilst he played the other. Eventually we decided that he'd "teach me" a bit of stuff that he knew. The first song I ever learned to play was The White Stripes - Seven Nation Army. We carried on in this setup, just sort of jamming together on his equipment. We both loved it because we shared musical tastes. We even wrote and recorded a couple of classic rock songs (although they've been long since lost by now).

Anyways, i decided that THIS is what i wanted to do, and one day i went home and begged my parents for an electric guitar. I got one for Christmas, not long after my 10th birthday. I played it for like 3 days solid before realising it was out of tune .. (It was a Behringer Centauri, btw). It pretty much went from there, i tough myself his to play it and all the other things i needed to know. Before long I'd bought myself another guitar, and had pretty much given up my social life to persue guitar. This pattern continued and now I've been playing 8 years and have 8 guitars.

I didn't get into electronic music until much later. Because I'd been so heavily into playing guitar, i wasn't into any electronic music, with the weird exception of trance. It wasn't until my friend (a different one) bought a copy of Pendulum - Immersion round to mine that i got into it. We spent ages chopping up tracks to make "edits" (they heavily sucked). I had no idea how to use the demo version on FL that i had, so i went back to playing guitar whilst still having an interest in electronic. It wasnt until i went to college to study music tech last year that i started producing properly. And now i make crappy EDM on FL11!

Fin.

[FLAOFEI]

I have been drumming since the age of 5... but didn't really take it seriously until I was maybe 15 or so... so I'm not as good as I should be... People tell me I am good though... I think I should be better though.

So music has always been a part of my life, but I didn't really always like it. I never liked all those slow boring songs with some silly lady singing about being killed softly with a song. I got bored by most music centred around vocals, which frankly is most popular music. So most of my favs where usually those classics on hits 4 kids, "I'm blue" and "Around the world", stuff with less brain power put on lyrics than drive on the beat. When I got my ipod I graduated to Hard Dance Mania volumes 1 through 11 (i think), and other such dance music.
My music listening exploded when I found the interwebs, around age 11 I think. And what did I find? RENARD!!! I LOVED IT!!! I remember not liking break beats to much in the beginning, I don't know why, but I must have gotten over it, cause now I love those too c:

I decided to try making music my self when I realised how much music was out there which I thought sucked! I always thought when listening to the radio "Wth, I can do better than that! This sucks! Why do people even listen to this!?!?" And so I sent out to set things right and show people what REAL music sounded like!.. :I
I wished for FL studio for mah burfday, and got it. I think I was about 15. And as it turned out, I could not do it better than the pros strait away... Big surprise there...

Well here I am, allot better than when I started (mostly cause I started so darn bad, but still). Thought of quitting quite a few times cause it feels like I suck and nobody likes my music :'c Srsly, I have 31 followers on soundcloud :'c I love making music, but working hard with no validation from the rest of the world that you actually are good... It gets you down sometimes.
Quite a few times the only thing that convinces me to continue is this silly poster

[Conchetupony]

^Great infographic, I can certainly identify with it right now.

My interest in music - listening and playing - sparked when I played Guitar Hero, since all my friends played GH3 back then. I was like 11 y/o. Loved Metallica's "One"; so for a while I pretty much only listened to "Justice" era Metallica and Linkin Park.

My family has quite the musical background - playing Chilean and Latin American folk music, and protest songs, especially in the times of Pinochet - so convincing them to get me a guitar wasn't hard. First song I played was the intro to "One" by tab, and immediately after I started writing MIDI songs in TuxGuitar with no knowledge of theory.

To this day, I haven't ever played cueca or a Mexican corrido. xD Pretty fun stuff to listen to though; cueca is always in 6/8 and that corrido is damn catchy.

Flash forward two years, and I got FL Studio and other soft by alternative means and somehow produced stuff like this VGM remix without even listening to electronic. My most popular track to this day is this orchestral track, meant as OST for some friends' indie movie.

Then I got a bass, and started playing in thrash/metal bands, but never got gigs haha (I actually could've gotten one filling in a school-wide popular cover band just now, but I'm too goddamn lazy and I rejected the offer D: ). Been told I'm pretty good playing in a "lead bass" style a la Cliff Burton or Billy Sheehan. I'm just a bit rusty now, since I never practice. xP

And apparently, I'm rusty in just about every aspect now, since I think my current stuff isn't as good as the various WIPs and "just messing" tracks I got in that SoundCloud. D: I'm regretting having pirated music stuff in the past, so all my current stuff is being produced in Ardour and LMMS, under Ubuntu Studio.

[cplbradley]

Growing up, I've always loved electronic music. Through elementary school and middle school I listened to rave artists like Cascada and Tune-Up, along with hard rock/metal. I was raised to be very musical by my dad, who grew up playing guitar. I had a big PA system, a mixing board, and a high amount of guitars and a drum set. It was everything I needed to record some rockin' tunes. I've always wanted to record music. Hell, when I was about 9, I borrowed my dad's walkman recorder, got together with a friend of mine, and recorded shit on it under name "Hangman." I always loved it, and eventually my dad decided "let's get him a small studio." So he bought me a new computer, a recording audio box, and a copy of Pro Tools. I dicked around with that for a while. Eventually my brother introduced me to FL Studio, because one of his friends was using it and making some cool tunes. This was around the time that I started listening to Pendulum. So I started making some cool tunes.
It all went downhill from there.

[Fimbulin]

Since I was 4 I've been writing computer music. That was the Windows 95 days- I used Q-Basic blips. hahahaha. I started piano and recorder lessons back then too, and also began my studies on what makes music tick. I had to use frequency charts and stuff to get my notes right because I didn't have anything that looked even remotely like a MIDI. All I had was straight numbers to work with! I even wrote dubstep using the floppy drive scratching sound before dubstep existed! lol

BEAT THAT STORY! hahaha



Now I'm in college for classical guitar, theory, piano, and music administration!