Your music creation history

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fluffy
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Your music creation history

Post by fluffy »

In several places now (livestream chat, discord, slack, etc.) there's been a smattering of discussions about how people have made their music in the past and present and I thought it'd be fun to have a thread where we can all talk about that.

I'll start!

1983: Writing sheet music for the piano (it was terrible, but I was 5)
1985: Writing sheet music on the Commodore 64 using Music Construction Set (apparently I had way more patience back then)
1991: Whacker Tracker (a terrible clone of Amiga's ProTracker) on the PC, and Voyetra (a DOS-based MIDI sequencer that came with my first soundcard)
1992-ish: Cakewalk
1993-ish: ScreamTracker 3
1995-ish: Impulse Tracker 2

And that's pretty much what I was stuck on until I found Song Fight! which forced me to break out of that mold. Early on I was experimenting with a bunch of different approaches, usually mixing-and-matching between Impulse Tracker, a Tascam Portastudio 4-track, and various random programs to try to pull things together (Acid Music, various MIDI players, limping along with the original CoolEdit and GoldWave and so on).

Then in 2003, mc3p0 turned me on to CoolEdit Pro and its multitrack mode, and that changed my workflow a lot. And then I was switching over to Mac for various reasons and I had Final Cut Pro which also came with SoundTrack Pro (the predecessor to GarageBand) and that was okay but not great. In 2004 I tried out Cubase and used it for a little while but it never quite gelled with me, then later that year I found out about Logic Hit Kit (a cost-reduced educational version of Logic 6) and from that tried out Logic Express, which was pretty decent (but annoying to work with), but I ended up mostly using GarageBand which had come into its own as a pretty formidable thing by that point.

Then in 2005, Apple was having a we're-about-to-change-our-CPU-architecture sale with a deeply-discounted bundle on Logic 7 with a PowerMac G5, and I've been stuck with Logic ever since.

I occasionally play with other things like beepbox and the PICO-8 tracker (which are mostly fun for nostalgia and inspiration from limitations), and I use iOS GarageBand as a sketchpad when music ideas come to me when I'm falling asleep or waking up, but generally the output of those get imported into Logic for me to finish up unless I'm making music for a game that needs a specific format (e.g. PICO-8 or GBStudio or whatever).

There's also still a few things I miss about Impulse Tracker that even the modern tracker-style software hasn't managed to replicate; for example, it was very easy to audition samples, including non-audio-sample files to be interpreted as raw PCM, which I used to make a LOT of my music especially in 1999/2000. I haven't seen anything else that lets you just play random files in a directory on a piano keyboard, right from the file browser.
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Pigfarmer Jr
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Re: Your music creation history

Post by Pigfarmer Jr »

1983 - 2007 - Write a lyric in a notebook and try to remember the music. Sometimes, especially towards the end of all that, it was play the song for the band and they'd remember for me.
2007 - 2020 - Use a Boss BR900 for almost everything. a few years later, using Reaper to import WAV files, mix and render. Alternately use a Roland R-05 hand held recorder for a lot of one mic, room recordings of stuff.

Well, that was easy.
Evil Grin bandcamp - Evil Grin spotify
T.C. Elliott bandcamp - T.C. Elliott spotify

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Re: Your music creation history

Post by sleepysilverdoor »

Mom put me in piano lessons in 97, learned to read sheet music at 4 when my not-yet-stepmom taught me.
Throughout 97-99 I dinked around on a portable Casio in the backseat of my car when my parents were driving me around. That ended when we parked in the sun in June of 99 and it melted due to the intense heat. Womp womp.
In 2000 me and my elementary school bff Cooper made a tape of keyboard, vocal, and detuned dulcimer songs and called ourselves "The Bandits of Andromeda".
Fall 2002 I saved up my lawnmower cash and bought my first electric from my uncle's music shop. I ought to get him on here.
Christmas 2002 my parents bought me a drumset - the same one you hear in all my entries here. Christmas 2003 my parents bought me a 5 string bass - also the same one you hear on my entries here. Spring of 2002 and spring of 2003 me and aforementioned friend Cooper formed a band with a couple other dudes and did a couple of covers for the middle schooltalent show. Fall of 2003 my friend Alex introduced me to FL studio 3, which he'd downloaded off of kazaa. I promptly stayed up til 3 am that night after he'd gone to sleep playing on his computer making really droney beats.

Made a lot of experimental electronic stuff through late middle and high school under the names " volcanic telephone" and "boreaß". Had a digital hardcore band with my friend Loren called "The Kraziez" like 05-07 ish that entered SongFight once. We mostly made fun of ATR. so edgy, soo fun!

Discovered SongFight through Kompressor In 2006 and entered off and on in 06 and 07 under a slew of names, usually Lockheed Symphony. Played bass in two bands from 06 -07 ish. One with my exgf, friend emi called violets for violet that played fairly generic indie rock. One...noodly psychedelic punk something with Loren Bob and Colin called Lead Gorilla. Neither were great. But hey, adolescence (I'm 30 now, for what it's worth)

Anyway, 08, moved out, went to college, took a break from music for lack of equipment minus some hallway dorm guitar jams and learning random songs on guitar. 09 I got heavily involved in the local rave scene and wound up spending most of the 09-11 going to shows at a lot of clubs, warehouses, and random fields in the middle of nowhere and somehow staying sane, getting deep into FL studio HARD making a lot of tripped out bass heavy techno and psychedelic video montages cause my roommate was a rave promoter and dug my stuff. 2010 was in the middle of this period and saw me briefly return to SongFight as "queef mcbeef" doing bastard pop/noise collages.

2012 graduated, moved to Corpus Christ until 2015 for a job, went to a lot of house shows, lost my scene and network, and kind of drifted with no inspiration for awhile. During this time I entered SF once with my wife as "Rossby Wave" and came in last cause I never rehearsed my vocals. Also entered as the snoop sloop troop making fun of the residents while drunk with my friend DartRwfg rtRwf Went to a lot of house music events and random metal/hiphop parties thrown by the local anarchist collective because why not. Didn't make much music during this period.

2015 moved to Georgia and got reaaaaaly into computer programming. 2016 did about an album's worth of "tunes" using the "Overtone" library that wraps Clojure around Supercollider, made a number of a/v experiments synchronizing audio with graphics events. 2017 I finally got my drums back from my mom's house and played them relentlessly but never recorded anything. 2018 and early 2019 went hard into procedural midi generation and created an entire album of what would be called breakcore, if breakcore focused more on blastbeats, brutality, and free tempos. Got burnt out on zero melody or coherent structure in 2019 and so I bought a tascam digital four track, went back to songfight, and entered like 34 fights in a row with actual instruments because I was so tired of synthesized sounds and not singing.

And here I am!
"There's a lot to be said about a full-on frontal assault on the ear drums" - Pigfarmer Jr.
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Re: Your music creation history

Post by vowlvom »

I'm bad at years, but:

1993ish - formed a band with two of my cousins (and initially also my two sisters, but they dropped out early on), named ourselves Blacksand after a fantasy role-playing game handbook, recorded a terrifyingly extensive 90-minute album (gotta fill up the whole tape!) called 'Bloody Agony'. I couldn't play an instrument at this time, one of my cousins was having piano lessons and maybe knew a few guitar chords, but a lot of it is just yelling over keyboard drum presets.

1995-6ish - got an electric guitar, learned to play a few chords, recorded some extremely limited songs via cheap microphone into a tape player.

1996-7ish - started writing jokey poems with a friend during lessons at school, some of which I later added chords to and recorded, still live-to-tape at this point. Also did some stuff with trackers at this point, following the same Scream Tracker -> Impulse Tracker trajectory as fluffy. Was also playing in a band with school friends at this point and we did a few gigs, mostly at school events but also one battle of the bands at an Actual Venue. I don't think I contributed any songs to this band though.

1998-2000 - got a Fostex four-track and started recording my first semi-decent demos, both solo (as Lardpony) and with a friend (as Flameboy for the funny songs, and Half Ton Dad for the rockin' ones).

Late 2000 - went to university and kinda stopped playing music for at least a year, despite studying music technology. Downloaded cracked versions of Cubase and Fruityloops once I had a semi-decent PC the next year and resumed writing as Lardpony.

2003-8 - formed a band, also named Lardpony, and properly started gigging for the first time. Recorded two albums, partially in Proper Recording Studios, and played around the country, got a bit of radio play etc. but drifted apart when the bassist and keyboard player started having kids together. Reformed for a few more shows and some new recording around 2012-13.

2008+ - discovered February Album Writing Month, signed up as Vom Vorton and started writing a hell of a lot of solo material for the first time in a while. Still using dodgy versions of Cubase etc to begin with, eventually realising I could probably afford to pay for something and switching to Reaper in about 2010 I think.

2015 - asked owl if she would like to collaborate during FAWM, which was the start of Vowl Sounds. I think I started taking piano lessons around this point also, and finally learned to read sheet music (a bit).

2017 - owl asked if I fancied trying Song Fight!
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neutronflow
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Re: Your music creation history

Post by neutronflow »

1987-ish: I remember setting "The Man in the Moon Stayed Out too Late" from The Lord of the Rings to music to go along with a book report. I sang the tune and my mother wrote it out as piano music that I could turn in.

I think I made up little tunes all the time, but mostly they weren't preserved in any way, until...

1994: I got a Yamaha MT120 four-track tape recorder.
My method for making a recording was:
1. Find a section of a song where only drums are audible.
2. Record that song on to a tape if I have it on vinyl instead of a tape to begin with.
3. Connect the output of the four-track into the input on my computer sound card.
4. Make a .wav file of the drums in Sound Recorder.
5. Trim it down to a loopable section.
6. Make a .wav of 5-or-so minutes of the drum loop.
7. Swap the connection between computer and four-track around and record the drums to the tape.
8. Improvise any old crap in the 3 remaining tracks, wiping most takes in the belief that eventually I'm bound to play something good.
The drums inevitably carried on after the song was done, so everything had to be given a fade-out ending.

Late 90s/Early 2000s: I got a Yamaha MT4X. This upgrade had less effect on my methods than the passing of time had.

2004-ish: My tape machine was giving me trouble so I downloaded the free version of Sonic Foundry ACID (3.0 and then, probably 4.0; I don't think I ever used 5) and worked in that for a while. I would connect instruments directly into the sound card on the back of my computer, sometimes requiring multiple adapters. This would have been what I used when recording my Song Fight entries in 2005 and 2006. I also had picked up a loop library of drum samples somewhere.

2010-ish: I started recording in Audacity, which is what I still use today.

2010+-ish: I started building drum tracks in Hydrogen rather than using loops.

2018: I picked up a Behringer UMC404HD so I don't have to get behind my PC and plug things into the sound card anymore. Yay! I still usually only record one thing at a time, even though I can now theoretically do 4. I think I was using 3 ports when I recorded my live set for Song Fight Live(stream) 2020.

2018-ish: I'm using LMMS not as any kind of DAW, but just to load VST instruments so I can play them with my MIDI keyboard. I have Audacity set to the Behringer and LMMS set to my speakers and I run a cable from the headphone jack on my stereo into the Behringer to record the keyboards.
Last edited by neutronflow on Wed Sep 30, 2020 9:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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jb
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Re: Your music creation history

Post by jb »

1972 - born
1979 - started piano lessons
1980 - started cello lessons
1981 - started drum lessons
1982 - 1990 was in band and orchestra basically constantly
1988 - 1989 played around with organs and synthesizers at mall-based music stores, with my pal RxW
1990 - 1994 - went to college for a BS in Music Ed
1990 - 1994 - various semesters of lessons in piano, bass, marimba, vibraphone, and tuba, not to mention orchestra, jazz bands, small ensembles, and choirs. I mean, it was music school. Do Re Mi, motherfuckers.
1992 - Had an orchestration class that introduced me to a synthesizer with a built-in sequencer, attempted to replicate Danny Elfman's "Hot to Trot" theme music
1995 - 2005 - performed in orchestras, community bands, theater show pits, cantatas, wedding quartets, and all that bullshit, mostly on cello.
1995 - Toyed around with writing a song, and doing music on some early Mac-based notation app. (MusicMaker? I can't remember)
1996 - Bought a guitar and taught myself to play it while running the booth at an AMC multiplex, wrote a few songs, recorded them on an acoustic guitar into a webcam stick mic using Real Producer
2001 - Found Song Fight
2001 - Bought a DAW made by Magix, and made stuff like Stronger Than and New Planet
2003 - Bought(?) FruityLoops and definitely did not buy a copy of Cubase 3
2004 - Actually purchased Cool Edit Pro, I think because that's what Jeff used.
2009 - Made a song in Reaper, on a Sony Vaio laptop. The song was good, the DAW experience was just OK.
2010 - Switched to Mac, but I can't remember what I was using. Maybe Cubase?
2013 - Switched to Logic Pro X

I did have a four-track tape recorder for a very short while in the late 90's/early 2000's. I never got good at using it, and it was cheap, and I was pissed off because somebody on mp3.com made like $300k for a song called like "Me and a 4 Track" and it sounded awesome and I couldn't figure out how the HELL he made it do that. I was not aware of the history of 4 tracks and how varied the quality of them is-- I was a kid in my bubble where everybody else had access to the same shit I did but were just better at it.

The only time I've used ProTools is when my band did a "real" recording session and the engineer flaked out on us so I had to figure out how to get his protools sessions into Logic. What a pain in the ass.

I tried, for a VERY brief time, making music in Linux and decided life is too short for that bullshit and I have already read enough man pages in my life and don't even TRY to tell me "it's much better these days".

The one thing I miss about PC-based music making is the wacky audio apps you could get. Like, I made "Birds of Our Own" with this program that I found that basically let you turn on and off different notes in a 16th-note sequence of any General MIDI instrument. Including chords, so you could do runs of chords. And it had a lever to detune the whole thing up and down by like half a step either way. So that "song" of mine was all done in that app, recording it through this "All in Wonder" video/soundcard that I had-- the app didn't output to anything, and you basically had to play it live.

Anyway, this just goes to show that if you do something long enough, you wind up having gone through a lot of crap and tried a bunch of junk.

JB
blippity blop ya don’t stop heyyyyyyyyy
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Re: Your music creation history

Post by j$ »

Oh. Indulgent thread alert! But since you (didn't) ask ...

1972 Born.
Late 80s -
Made my first album "Marilyn Von Trotsky" using a karaoke machine that my dad bought and multitracking onto it. Brought on my love of misusing machines for purposes they weren't designed for.
Was in a couple of bands. "The Hideously Bloated Capitalists" with school friends, played my first gig with them. A couple of gigs with "The Weirdness Magnet" with one school friend and one guy I didn't know who turned out to be a BRILLIANT drummer but very flakey. My experience with drummers followed this path until present day.
Late 90's / early '00s Recorded some songs for "band" Sherlock Homo. First still extant tracks on the internet.
2003 Joined Songfight. (around November I think) -scared away loads of listeners by being grumpy on the boards about music / recording vocals by singing into a tape recorder and transferring. Plus ca change. Started using Tuareg 2 as a makeshift sequencer. Still do today for drum tracks.
Dates get a bit blurry round here.
2003-2005 collaborated with Niveous, Heuristics Inc and Jack Shite
2004 Met Andy Balham (out of the "Quentin Tarantino" fight). Went on to become longtime musical collaborators /good friends /put on Songfight UK.
2009 formed Matron, missing that live band experience. Played LOADS of gigs to little positivity. We were a gang. i.e. we did a lot of drinking together, between sound check and the end of the night.
Sometime round here I bought a ukulele so I could perform live. The footage of my first gig was on youtube, hopefully not anymore.
Sometime round here, played in NY and in LA for songfight live. Met a bunch more lovely folk.
2011 Split up Matron, realising I am a dictator musically and don't need my music being played wrongly by otherwise nice people.
It gets even blurrier round here.
Flew out for Niv's wedding round about this time. Possibly the best (vaguely) music-related weekend evah. Shame it didn't work out (though not for him, I believe!)
Met up with FBF in Montpelier. Then again in the Dordogne.
2017 My last "official" songfight entry (shocking I know). Though I have written a song for every title since then before deciding I didn't like it much. Had shifted over to FAWM/5090 cos I could actually collaborate with people there in real UK time. Though then just made music with Andy Balham and a few other stalwarts (Helen and Hoopshank(RIP) really but some others as well).
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lichenthroat
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Re: Your music creation history

Post by lichenthroat »

2015: In a motel room in Columbus, Ohio, I had a conversation with two musician friends about music theory. This inspired me to start writing instrumentals on MuseScore, despite having no previous music-producing experience or education.
2016: I discovered SongFight, and since a vocal appeared to be de rigueur, I began to try to sing. Somebody commented that I sounded like I was afraid of the microphone, which was absolutely correct.
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lichenthroat
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Re: Your music creation history

Post by lichenthroat »

j$ wrote:
Wed Sep 30, 2020 9:58 am

2017 My last "official" songfight entry (shocking I know). Though I have written a song for every title since then before deciding I didn't like it much.
I am strangely impressed by this.
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Niveous
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Re: Your music creation history

Post by Niveous »

j$ wrote:
Wed Sep 30, 2020 9:58 am
Flew out for Niv's wedding round about this time. Possibly the best (vaguely) music-related weekend evah. Shame it didn't work out (though not for him, I believe!)
You believe correctly. Much better off now.

It was a pretty rad wedding though. That string quartet was killer.

Gonna try and top it though with my Post-Covid Wedding and Housewarming (despite being married and in the new house now for over a year, still doing the celebration!.... eventually)
"I'd like to see 1984 redubbed with this in the soundtrack."- Furrypedro.
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j$
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Re: Your music creation history

Post by j$ »

lichenthroat wrote:
Wed Sep 30, 2020 9:11 pm
j$ wrote:
Wed Sep 30, 2020 9:58 am

2017 My last "official" songfight entry (shocking I know). Though I have written a song for every title since then before deciding I didn't like it much.
I am strangely impressed by this.
Not if you heard the songs in question.

j$
Last edited by j$ on Mon Oct 26, 2020 2:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Caravan Ray
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Re: Your music creation history

Post by Caravan Ray »

1967 - born
1974 - "Countdown" first aired on Australian TV. I saw AC/DC and thought "I want to do that"
1985 - Bought a bass guitar and started a band - "The Mess". And wrote my first song
1986 - Started learning how to play a bass guitar
1990 - Graduated from University as an engineer and grew up and stopped that music nonsense
1996 - Heard Beck's "Odelay" and though - "I want to record music in my bedroom". Bought Cakewalk
2000 - Lived in outback Queensland and started writing songs again
2004 - Daughter born and I discovered Songfight
2004 - Started learning how to use Cakewalk
2005 - Got a mac and Garageband
2020 - can't work out why my vocals always sound crap. I changed room and microphone 4 years ago - and can't work out which is the problem. I still sing like a fucking angel
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Re: Your music creation history

Post by Pigfarmer Jr »

Caravan Ray wrote:
Wed Oct 21, 2020 4:09 am
1985 - Bought a bass guitar and started a band - "The Mess". And wrote my first song
1986 - Started learning how to play a bass guitar
That's exactly the right order.
Evil Grin bandcamp - Evil Grin spotify
T.C. Elliott bandcamp - T.C. Elliott spotify

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Re: Your music creation history

Post by robynmackenzie »

90's-2001: I was a kid. Started playing violin and piano and wrote a lot of silly songs and parodies.
2002: Vanessa Carlton's "A Thousand Miles" came out and I got hooked on the riff and played it over and over. I decided I wanted to write pop songs and wrote one about my boyfriend who I thought was ignoring me.
2003: I bought my first guitar.
2004-2008: Listened to a ton of Green Day. Tried to write punk rock songs on the piano because I still wasn't used to guitar yet.
2009-2012: College. Got really into bluegrass and folk music. I started FAWM and 50/90 in 2009 and haven't stopped since. Put out my first album in 2010. I was teaching violin and piano through school so most of what I was playing was variations of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star."
2013-2016: My synthpop phase. Put out an EP in 2016.
2017-2019: Started getting back into guitar and writing more punk stuff again.
Now: Started doing Songfight in July and here I am! I feel like I'm finally writing the stuff I wanted to when I was in high school and that feels really good.
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Re: Your music creation history

Post by Lunkhead »

1977: born
1982: started piano lessons
1986: started playing French Horn for concert band, sang in choir
1991: starting playing electric guitar (some of you may not know, I was a teenage metal head, learned to play guitar partly via Metallica tablature books)
1992: gave up on the piano
1993: started playing bass guitar, learning multitrack recording on a 4-track, recorded some weird instrumental music with my best friend (started getting into more different kinds of music)
1994: started playing bass in a band with high school friends (they already had three guitar players so playing bass was my only way into the band), got an Alesis HR-16 drum machine, learned to program drums on it for whole songs, got Opcode Studio Vision Pro and started learning to sequence MIDI drums
1996-1999: played in a band with college friends, gigged around Cleveland a little bit, started listening to still more different kinds of mumsic
2001: met and played with some folks in Berkeley, one of whom would be the bass player in Loyalty Day
2002: quit my dot-com job to be unemployed for a while
2003: had time to finally go from listener to participant in Song Fight!, started learning how to multitrack record on a computer in a pirated version of Cubase SX for Mac, started singing and writing lyrics, met Ken who reached out to me when he noticed I was also in Berkeley, went to a Song Fight Presents show in SF and met Erin and a ton of other fighters
2004: started playing in Ken and the New Incredibles, started Loyalty Day with Ken and Erin and bass player Dave that I met in 2000, played a bunc of Song Fight Presents gigs
2005: Merisan, Tiny Robots
2007: Entered Nur Ein for the first time!
2008: Berkeley Social Scene
2009: Jonathan Mann and the Rock Cookie Bottoms, The Bourbon Drops, also non-Song Fight affiliated band The Fireflies

Made a lot of songs and music since then, although I haven't played as many gigs outside Song Fight Live as I did when I was in Jonathan Mann's band and the Fireflies. I got to play 1-2 songs with BSS at a few great SF venues for my work talent shows. Erin and I finally won a Nur Ein a couple years ago. Who knows what's yet to come?!
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Re: Your music creation history

Post by rkennett »

Hi, I'm new and thought this would be a good thread to introduce myself and background

1979: born
1990: started to learn trumpet, because we already had a trumpet that my brother used to use. I think I really wanted to learn Clarinet.
circa 1992: family's first computer was a Packard Bell 486 processor, Windows 3.11, DOS 6.0. I made a cover of NIN Closer using sound recorder in windows. I wish I still had it to see just how bad it was. Later on that year or the next I got introduced to Screamtracker 3.2.1 and saw how it was being used to create covers like Metallica's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Here's some of the songs I made over the next four years.
1994: I quit trumpet. I was okay, but had braces and really regressed that year.
1995: I started playing my dad's Ventura guitar. It was like an cherry Epiphone Dot knock-off. I started playing after my brother bought the 50 heaviest riffs of all time from Guitar World https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/q5kAAOSw ... s-l300.jpg
1996: Once I could drive, I started going to my drummer friend's house to jam on some Nirvana and easy stuff, got a job at Hardees and bought a Les Paul knock-off by Bentley.
1997-2002: band with my drummer friend, couple different singers, many bass players, played some dives.
2000-2002: made music with screamtracker or modplug tracker and recorded guitar tracks with it
2003-2004: another band, we were System of a Down wannabes.
2004-now: church praise band, setting up Ableton backing tracks started a couple of years ago.
2007-2008: band with other church members. Highlight being we played a cool, yet tasteful Star Spangled Banner at a service for the traveling Vietnam Memorial Wall when it came to town.
2008: started using Kristal Audio Engine and recording again; sucking at vocals, exporting drums from modplug, and recording bass and 2+ guitar tracks per song. Had a monthly song writing challenge on their forum and that's where I got started with regular songwriting.
2010-2014: played in an extremely fast metalcore/thrash band.
2013-2020: got reaper, kristal became obsolete, went to another forum that had contests.
2014-2017: couple different hard rock and 80s hair bands.
2015: paid for reaper
2018-now: joined a cover band and can finally pay for some of the toys.
2020: released some metal we (me and my drummer friend from 25 years ago) really like. He records midi from his roland set.
2020: joined Song Fight
User avatar
vowlvom
Ice Cream Man
Posts: 1091
Joined: Wed May 17, 2017 3:29 am
Instruments: guitar, keys, "other"
Recording Method: PC, reaper, ableton
Submitting as: Vowl Sounds, Vom Vorton
Pronouns: he/him
Contact:

Re: Your music creation history

Post by vowlvom »

Welcome!

It pleases me that there's so much Screamtracker in our collective history! I'd forgotten about Modplug, I used that a little bit too.
User avatar
WreckdoMelle
Push Comes to Shove
Posts: 359
Joined: Tue May 01, 2012 5:18 am
Instruments: Gibson SG, clarinet, tuba, bass guitar, baritone horn, mandolin, vox, sax (sorta)
Recording Method: Bitwig Studio
Submitting as: Brown Word and the Big Whine, sometimes WreckdoM
Pronouns: she/her
Location: Austin, TX
Contact:

Re: Your music creation history

Post by WreckdoMelle »

It all begins somewhere in the late 70's...

Record player- favorite toy
Hohner electric harmonium my mom found at a garage sale after Barbie piano revealed the spark of musical ability within me
4th grade – every kid had to learn recorder
5th grade – violin, but was not really engaged with either instrument or teacher, so quit. But did discover heavy metal
6th grade – took up acoustic guitar and guitar lessons. Was followed shortly by an electric guitar.
7th grade – we had our choice of band, choir, or general music. I chose the clarinet in band. Started playing guitars with another girl I my grade who had same guitar teacher
8th grade – got a bass guitar for my birthday.
9th grade – took up the tuba. My mom found a sousaphone in a dumpster that turned out to be a Conn 20K “Naked Lady”, possibly the best model sousaphone ever produced.
10th grade – first band, The Fucker Dickheads. Songs as awful as the name, but we did convene about 4 times and created a cassette, which I still have. Somewhere in here we got an upright piano for about 100 bucks and I took a few lessons.
11th grade – delinquency sets in and school falls by the wayside, as does band.

Mid 20’s joined a junkie band called Six Sense but had a hard time relating, for obvious reasons. Formed my own band Hate Us where I played rhythm guitar and vox and wrote all the songs. Also joined a heavy metal band called Far From Grace. Had a Washburn acoustic and couldn’t play covers for shit so wrote about 80 songs over 2 years and didn’t have the guts to play but living rooms and barbeques

Mid 30’s – left husband and immediately joined a metal band, Threads of Madness, a folksy acoustic band, Watch Yer Head, and met Colin, aka King Colon of WreckdoM joined WreckdoM. He showed me how to use FL Studio and I submitted about 9 songs as Brown Word and the Big Whine in 2010 and 2014.
Over the years I’ve been on a bunch of WreckdoM tunes playing everything from guitars, to vox, to mandolin, to brass, to sax, to Gujarati spike violin. In 2015 we adapted a bunch of songs into a live set and performed live 3 times.

Honk – discovered the Honk scene and played several horns (clarinet, tenor sax, baritone horn, and sousaphone) in several Honk bands in Austin: Minor Mishap Marching Band, Dead Music Capital Band, The Collective Dischord, and the Yes Ma’am Brass Band. I’m still in Yes Ma’am. Was involved for a time in Honk!TX planning committee and board of directors as well.

Before COVID was involved with a cover band that did a 70’s and then an 80’s showcase of 5 songs each, playing bass both times and was planning on a 90’s cover band when everything came to a halt.

Song Fight – At the end of 2019 Colin and I got Bitwig Studio for the house and it was so intuitive I sat down and did an EP of five Skyrim-influenced songs (and 1 Song Fight title), called Winterhold Timekiller.

Since then I’ve tried to do every Song Fight title that came up, did Nur Ein and was immediately eliminated though I turned in some shadow entries, did 3 tunes for SongAlong, and a side fight Circle of Titles. I’ve done a few songs just on my own too. I have collected many of the titles into EPs on Bandcamp.

I’ve also since brought home my dad’s 1965 Epiphone Casino (he finally decided to give it to me!) and it’s made an appearance on a couple of the more classic rock SF entries I’ve done (Kissing Contest and Good Trouble come to mind).

Song Fight and music on the whole have really, really saved my butt in these most trying of times! Thank you friends!
Brown Word and the Big Whine on Bandcamp:
http://brownwordandthebigwhine.bandcamp.com
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