Looking at the Member Age Demographic thread, I was really surprised to see the majority of members in the 30+ category. I'm in this age bracket as well and it got me thinking about how long I've been making tunes and what a difference nearly 20 years makes.

I'm curious to find out how everyone started making tunes... not just what led to the moment where you decided on making music, but also what did you start out with?

I made the transition from dj'ing to producing back in 1998. I saved up to buy a used Roland SP-808 which is where I cut my teeth. I learned so much about production from using it, especially how zip discs would become the bane of my existence.

 

Last edited: Apr 20, 2016

My first attempt started on an out-of-date PC with an AMD processor equivalent to Pentium 75 in 1999. I had Cakewalk 7, Jammer, and Band In A Box. My wavetable synth was a midi player called Wingroove. My poor rig was incapable of recording audio without choking to death. I used the onboard soundcard and monitored through a Philips hi-fi compact player with mini jack audio in.

EDIT:
Thinking back, my first attempts at multitracking (not production per se) started with my dad's two Technics cassette decks. They had two 1/4 mic-in jacks, an input level slider, and a nice LED VU meter. It's funny that I thought they were shitty things for recording music, but they were actually pretty fine pieces of audio gear. I'd record on one deck, then bounce my track back into one input from the other deck and play live into the other input. Rinse and repeat until I had made a full recording, which was full of hiss and noise from patched up cables. Since the two decks didn't run at exactly the same speed, I had to retune my guitar/bass, and it was a problem because my keyboard playing friend didn't have micro tuning in his Kawai keyboard. Anyhow, we went through. I was a teen in the late 80s.

SECOND EDIT:
It's awful how memory fades. It wasn't Technics. It was my dad's two identical Sansui decks, and the input level was actually a knob. I found the pic of my first recording rig:

 

Last edited: Apr 20, 2016

Wow..Ive not seen one of those for some time....
For me back in 98 i think while using an old ps one i came across that little gem from sony "music"
From there i just fell in love with the process, started buying bits and pieces..
I got an old mc303 first then a quasimidi 309 /sirius/emu e64000 sampler," trial and error tought me all i needed to know coz there was no you tube back then" " Ran it all hooked up together at first via midi slaved against the quasimidi sirius then i came across the old an atari 1040st so ran it all with cubase before going the pc reute with emagic logic and just kept building my arsenal as much as i could
Unfortunatley i ended up loosing everything id built up over 10 yrs plus.. And back then there was no daws that can do what they do today
Its still amazes me to this day whats possible...

 

My story is actually pretty hilarious, actually.

I started when I was studying Sound Technology in 8th grade.
It started back in 2007 - I was home alone while my parents went out for a long trip (possibly to bury the cane? LOL). I was super bored so I decided to play some video games. But suddenly the phones started ringing and the clocks started dinging, and it threw me off and I lost a life.
Already killed by zombies in my TV screen, swearing obnoxiously and stuff, I realized my Sound tech homework assignment was to record an album of anything you'd like (given that it's appropriate for Middle school). So, being the trouble maker I truly was, I decided to record all the things in my household that annoyed me.
I started with my Mother's annoying police reporter scanner. Thing was always cranked up to max volume because my mother was too deaf. Then there was my cats mating and making loud noises. Then the clocks, then my folks' annoying ringtones.
At the time, I was into these music compilations called "Now! That's what I call music!" So I named my album "Now! That's what I call Annoying Bullshit!"
I then dug out my old shitty Casio CTK-411 keyboard that my dad bought for the house back in 1997 when I was in kindergarten. I dusted it off, and put down some music.
At the time, my excuse for a setup was an old $1 skype headset mic hooked up to audacity, a pirated FL Studio 6, with Kontakt Player 2 and Kontakt Experience.
I warped the recordings of the annoying objects I previously recorded and put them with the music. I also stole some annoying commercials from youtube via Youtube to mp3 and slipped some of those into there. For instance, there was this Kia car advertisement that had this guy dancing around the dealership with a spin off of the song "Maniac" by Flashdance. It went "He's a maniac maniac oh no! And he's selling like he's never sold before!" I butchered that up and slipped it into the tracks and got some really obnoxious shit.
The teacher gave me a C because of the word "Bullshit". But that activity made me go "Woah! This is super fun! I gotta do this type of stuff more often!"
Now, I produce actual music. But as you can see, I got my kickstart from being a trouble maker. It was basically an accident. But now I'm a professional audio technician and have a certificate in sound technology. I was only back 14 then. I will turn 23 on the 18th of next month. Which means I've been growing for 9 years in the field. It ain't much compared to most people, but at least I got a career in it.
When I look back now, I think "Wow, I've been through a lot of shit! Boy, I changed a lot." I've learned to play the guitar, drums, keyboard/piano, bass, percussion, saxophone, didgeridoo, ukulele, and cello.
I think I may still have my Casio CTK-411 somewhere in my storage closet. In the meantime, I'm enjoying my Roland Jupiter-80 and JX-3P and my Waldorf Blofeld much much more than that fucking thing LOL.
Just goes to show that your best qualities can arise from something that was intended to be meaningless and annoying. That's why it's healthy to try new things once in a while. You never know what can become of it.

 

I started in 2003 i had only acoustic guitar back than and shity pc, everything after that is a long story :D

 

Started in the lasts 90's singing leads in garage/punk bands, playing some gigs in Paris bar at night... the gear wasn't mine at the time. Then, I began to write some songs with my near twenty years old sennheiser (e835) and double tape track Teac, with all things I found (old four strings guitar from a mate, drumming on metal chairs, looping voices with trash cans etc) until I buy an old windows 98 from a collegue (near 2004) so my late debuts in computer music was a bit hasardous ;) working with cubasis (herk) then fruity loop 5 (demo please, so i had to export my works pretty much always cos I couldn't save projects, and in lossy mp3 with my old 20gb hd)... Today, the things seems very simple as I done the backlog, but I regret sometimes my creative self-made stuff. (you could say, it's always possible to do it again)

 

Last edited: Apr 27, 2016

I started on a Roland CDX-1, moved on to a Yamaha AW16G, got a Roland SH-32 synth, then started using Arturia Storm v2.0 to augment my DAW. Got a copy of Reason. Started mastering, and decided I needed VST compatibility--so I started pulling my Reason projects into Cubase. After getting familiar with Cubase, I cut out the middle man and ditched Reason. Been using Cubase ever since. I use Pro 8 now.

 

I started off on my PlayStation in 1998/1999- it was a super basic tracker style sample playback "game" simply called "Music".
What was needed back then to make the massive trance hits I listened to (ferry Corsten, Paul van dyk, etc) was beyond my wildest dreams.
Now it is all inside my laptop, we are so lucky nowadays.

 

I started making music around 2003 or 2004. I was living on the countryside and was around 12 years old. I had been given a Nokia 3200, which was the wildest phone at the time. You could design your own paper-covers, since the casing was transculent, and it had this amazing thing called "truetones". Trouble was, these ringtones were expensive as hell. Like 5 dollars each. You'd send a text saying Shaggy2523 to a 4-digit number, and they would send you the tone. One day I was visiting my aunt, who was fortunate enough to have access to the world wide web, and I stumpled upon a song online with a familiar extension. It was a midi-file. I remembered it from the ringtones on my phone, and they sounded similar somehow.

I somehow ended up with a cracked version of Fruity Loops 4 or 5 and started to make my own midi ringtones, transfering them to my phone with a USB cable (that damn cable cost 100 bucks... was worth it though). I made some for my friends too and shared them over infrared, which was basically like bluetooth but you had to hold the phones close to each other for them to connect. I was having so much fun playing around with it. I of course quickly found out that Fruity Loops had built in instruments and effects. They couldn't export as midi, but sounded really cool. In 2005 I met my childhood friend, Anders, who got me into rapping. We made a group together, and I started making the instrumentals. At that time, I was still bringing home a new burned CD with cracked VST's and oneshot drumlibraries with me every time I had been at my aunts place. I still have some of our music on a CD somewhere. It's absolutely terrible

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"Producing?" There will certainly be a variety of responses, alone based upon concepts of that word, but also because everyone's story is different, and some of the ones preceding mine are really interesting.

I started playing music in 3rd grade, on the clarinet, when I learned to sight-read and also to count rhythmically. The latter is even more important than the former - a rhythmic sense and the ability to play in-time with others is an universal skill, even among the musically-illiterate. In high school, I'd jam consumer audio devices to see what noises would result, and how I might be able to control them or to set them so that they'd establish a "system" of self-generating sound patterns.

Then I got into drugs and making tape loops which ran horizontally through several rooms of the house, with a two reel-to-reel tape recorders, one being playback-only (feeding into a cassette deck into which the signal was recorded) and the other (at the opposite end of the loop) one on which I recorded the audio on top of that already layered (and degenerated somewhat) on the tape. Sometimes, I'd make shorter loops and hang them on the wall on push-pins, and have a guest pick one at random, for a surprise listen.

Then I stopped doing drugs and played in art-bands. We didn't have much money for equipment, so we adjusted our approach accordingly, not trying to sound "good" but to make it "interesting." One performance I did with one other guy scared everybody but this Cholo type who was tripping on acid; at the end of the set, he came up to us and hugged us with tears in his eyes. It went on like that for a few years.

Next came the four-track cassette. I got pretty good at bouncing tracks with the right EQ and levels so that the bounces would sound as clean and hissless as possible. DBX heled a lot, but it was seldom available; most of the decks I used had Dolby B or C noise reduction. I'd usually play all the instruments myself, which is where that primordial lesson in timing really came in handy. Then I also was playing in bands, but I eventually realized that i didn't enjoy performing, dealing with equipment, nor babysitting drummers.

I quit making music for a long time, then someone showed me Garageband seven years ago. That snowballed into pro-level DAWs and Kontakt and all this newfangled stuff. I feel as though my life had been a waste until the recently - this stuff is what I'd always intuited as inevitable, and sometimes had even imagined vividly but never thought would come to pass.

It's hard to impress upon people even younger than 40 how much easier it is now, and how much convenience there is, to realize what's in one's head - or to surprise onself with unknown possibilities. I'm not going to say that young 'uns are spoiled and don't have to work as hard, because even though that is kinda true, all the difficulties and impossibilities of the old ways of music-making, and the prohibitive expense of instruments and gear, back-then, had prevented a lot of music from being made. In my 20s, I'd have not believed how inexpensive decent instruments and equipment are now. I play a Squier Bullet Strat that I'd bought online for $120, and though it's not a "real" Fender, it's a lot more playable than any $100 guitar back in the day (and it fits my playing very well). If someone resists contenting oneself with copy/pasting and looping and sampling and store-bought creativity "packs," and has a good working sense of harmony and rhythm, a DAW can be Heaven. $1,000 can buy one one's own recording studio now.

 

I made yet another poor decision in life and decided to pursue music. lmfaooo what was I thinking lol!!!!!

Meh, at least I learnt to get pretty okayish at it... I think mixing and mastering is more of my strength though... idk why however since I'm not really technically apt, but I have a good understanding of quality and fidelity, that's all...

For me it all started with Flash back in the day... I wanted to be like those cool guys that would make all those flashy websites and interactive games/applications and do some sick music along with cool graphics, animations and programming... it was a really fun area and that got me excited about doing cool shit with computers and I always wanted to make a living just doing it all... but flash was the main motivation...

Unfortunately, flash died and so my motivation to do any of these things also sort of faded away... so for a long time I really lost interest to make anything much...

I never wanted to be apart of the music industry, I just wanted to make cool sounds on the computer... but after being lost for a while I spent quite a bit of time just focusing on making music, I kind of regret it because I lost alot of time but I was also kind of lost with what to do for a living after I lost motivation... so I guess I learnt a bit about audio engineering...

If I were to go back I'd probably never get involved and make more informed and wiser decisions... but then again we all probably could lol...

 

Protracker on Amiga 500. Just before that I had coded my own sound in Basic on a C64. I think I was 12yo. Good times!

 

u sir are genius.

 

fasttrackerII on a highend crappy 486...

 

i started out in the summer of 92 on a 286 belonging to my stepdad, had a friend who had fasttracker and some samples that he copied for me on those silly 3'5 disks. after fooling around with those i found some more audio programs somewhere and started sampling sounds. few years later i got a 486 with an awe32 and went on with fasttracker2. the more i was able to do the more i realized this is what i really wanted to do and i was forever lost

 

nice topic thanks... memories...
actually I started late, I ve been a musician only for the first years
I ve always recorded myself with cheap recorders and tapes, UB world, no sound (but I still have it all so useful)
when I was around 25 I started collaborating with studios so I ve seen tapes, DATs, first Cubase and Notator
I have a lot of old material, since I was 19, recordings
but my very first system was an Allen Heath mixer, Mac, Motu, Cubase then Logic and Creamware Pulsar
now it s like 15 years that I m on RME.

I started mainly to record myself, my bands, some friend, as almost everybody I guess.

the best technology development memory that I remember with joy is around 1996 or so, Cubase 5 VST and the beginning of the plugs, soft synths era. Times when a Mercury synth (remember?) was the top.
Maybe cause I was with old friends, nice enviroment, the new thing of having the chance to have a virtual emulation of some synth or processor. Good old years to me.

 

Very cool thread!! I started as a DJ at 15 years old (1995) wasn't even old enough to get in clubs but I managed to get a residency at Maxime (omg memories!!) started producing my own songs in 1997 using a korg i2, later on I added an mpc and little by little I bought a guitar, drum set and bass.

 

Last edited: Apr 27, 2016

Good Ol' FL 3. Then it was Fruity Loops. Back around '01.

 

amiga 1200 technosound turbo II / protracker - '92/'93 - first hit was a tekkno mashup of a guy insulting lads on local cb radio, just to show what a stupid jerk he was - later aired on local fm