Hey everyone,

I’ve been really curious lately about how people found their way into music and what the turning point was that pulled them in. Everyone’s story is different, sometimes it’s a slow burn, sometimes it hits like a lightning bolt and I’d love to hear how your journey started.

I actually came into music pretty late in life. I’m 33 now, but I didn’t start producing until 2021, when I was already 29. Before that, I spent nine years in the military, and music wasn’t really part of my world in a serious way. But something shifted during the pandemic. Maybe it was the extra time, maybe it was the need for a creative outlet, but I found myself buying my first step sequencer and a couple of analog synths just out of curiosity.

That curiosity exploded into a passion.

What started as experimenting with hardware led me into full-on production. DAWs, sound design, mixing, the whole rabbit hole. I recently finished my service commitment in the military, and for the first time in my adult life, I have the time and mental space to fully dive into music. Right now I’m studying, learning the business side, improving my workflow, and trying to get better every single day.

Even though I started later than most people, I’ve realized it’s never too late to build something meaningful if you’re committed. I’m genuinely excited to see where this path leads.

So that’s my story, now I’d love to hear yours.
What sparked your journey into music or production?
Was it a person, a moment, a crisis, a random accident or something else entirely?

Looking forward to reading your stories.

 

In my early teens was given a mixtape of electronic music, played at illegal parties, by an older relative who DJed at those parties. Ten years later, discovered that the style of music I was into, could be produced on a PC without any additional hardware. Nonetheless went to a store and bought some shitty alesis monitors, a crappy m-audio sound card and a small midi controller and started writing tunes in "fruityloops".

 

It's pretty simple for me: I started taking piano lessons at 3. My teacher was an 82 year old lady, just a minute from my school on my way home, so I'd stop there, climb the stairs, sit on the bench. It was awful: she was born in the 19th century, so she taught me accordingly.

But at five, my parents moved, and I joined an after school complex nearby: downstairs was Ken-do (samurai sword martial art - exhausting), and upstairs were piano classes. The teacher was a guy in his mid-twenties, and his passion for music was infectious.

Then, at maybe 10 years old, I discovered Stevie Wonder's "Songs In The Key Of Life." That was a revelation for me: way cooler than the stupid, boring classical pieces I had to learn and practice.

This discovery and revelation coincided with puberty, and being neurodivergent, I sought social refuge and emotional comfort in the piano, in music. It helped make me make sense of my projection of the world: I couldn't envisage a future where I didn't have music in my life, where I didn't live and breathe music daily.

I had excellent grades then, I suppose I could've gone into engineering or physics, diplomacy or economics like my cousins, but they were not neurodivergent, and I was, so I reckon music was comfort air and water to me.

Also, I was very, very naturally good at it, and (very pretty) girls had started to notice, and guy musicians too. I found my tribe.

 

Near where I grew up there was a forest and way out in the middle of nowhere there was an abandoned circus truck. I used to go out there after school and drum on it with sticks. All the different pieces of the truck had different metallic sounds and I would spend hours climbing all over that truck serenading the animals with majestic clangs and bangs.

 

It started as a school thing, music class in my school was basically "do whatever you want, i don't get paid enough for this shit", so we did just that. A friend of mine played guitar, and i picked up bass because the alternative was a fucking recorder. Never did much with it aside from playing a few gigs, but it helped me discover music and overall develop a personal taste. It also got me curious about amp sims and later on DAWs and working with sound.

Years went by, picked up a few more instruments, grew an interest in music production and hated it, had a bit of an existential crisis (for unrelated reasons) and began to use music as a therapy of sorts.

And that's it, i've been a bit of a musical hermit ever since, seeing music as a personal necessity than anything else.

 

At age 13 I discovered Queen. After listening to all their albums (up to 1982) back to back for months on end, I realized I was no longer content with just listening passively. I had to figure out how those songs were put together and if I could do that myself. Saved up, bought a guitar and amp and never looked back. Still listening to Queen though!

 

Hearing the prodigy and thinking "i want to make music like that"

 

Living in survival mode as a teen and having it as the only emotional outlet, where most songs from my favorite band at the time felt like they were written "for me". Before that I had an ear for music but I didn't listen to anything in particular besides what was being played on the radio. I just appreciated good music when I heard it. Before discovering my favorite band, I listened briefly to another band and there was a war going on (not the survival mode I meant before), so that made me pick up my guitar which I had in storage since I was a kid as I was supposed to take lessons but quickly dropped it, and I started trying to play what came to my head. The war led me to pick up the guitar for fun, but my life prior to that and irrelevant to that event is what made me connect to the music I discovered later which resonated with me so deeply. Now it has become a bit different. More related to cultural heritage which resonates with me for other reasons.

 

At 17 years old I bought my first guitar, a steel-string guitar, I learned a few chords, and later bought an amp and effects.

I once heard a Klaus Schulze record and was very impressed. I had previously listened to Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd. I bought my first synthesizers from Roland in 1998, and then came the internet, the first DAW, and so it continued from there to the present day. I've been doing sound design for software and hardware synthesizers for about 12 years.

 

Last edited: Dec 2, 2025 at 4:53 PM

Interesting to read how others got into music. My brother and I had piano lessons from an old lady who drilled us. playing from sheets, exercising our fingers, playing endless scales etc. We did not know what that was good for as we had no tuition in music theory. So after 4 years we quit. And then came the revelation in the form of our English teacher who played the piano really well and sang gospel and country songs with us in class. One day a school mate of mine sat down at the piano and played a boogie woogie song from memory. Whe I asked him who his piano teacher was, he said he had never had one. He had just been listening and found out that with three chords you could accompany almost every melody. So at home I sat down at the piano after a break of two years and started to try and find the chords to the melody of "Memphis Tennessee", a song that I liked. All in Cmajor, of course. I found two chords that did the trick (finding out later that it was Cmaj and G7). And I was hooked. From that moment I started playing with joy. My piano was an ancient one, tuned to something like 336 Hz, so playing to a tune required that I used those hated black keys! As a consequence I acquired a taste for pentatonic, bluesy music. The last tip over the edge was a friend who played one of the early Beatles songs (I wanna hold your hand or something similar) and insisted they had never had any professional tuition. So my brother and I decided to form a band, him on bass (our dad would buy him one for his excellent school reports) and me on the piano. A classmate could play a little guitar (playing Shadows and Spotnick tunes) and another one had built himself a drum kit from old kitchen pots and the like. So there we were. When our parents realized we tried to be serious they provided us with amps, and real drums, and eventually with an electric piano. All this started in 1964 and then music brought us safely (financially) through university and has never again left us . Though we soon enough split up, played in diffent bands, different kinds of music etc. we still meet up once a month to jam around and remember those old days. In the meantime each of us has aquired his own studio and we still write and produce music, just for the fun of it. So, here we are - still going strong

 

I can't remember when I started listening to music as something other than silly ditties to sing along. I'm guessing it was heavy metal from my older brother's collection when I was a kid.

What started me learning how to create music was a mysterious "PLAY" command (in Spectravideo SVI-328) that made the computer make funny sounds. That kind of simmered until I got an Amiga that could play back sampled sounds (with Noisetracker, of course), that blew my mind. I was a fan of Vangelis and JM Jarre and other synth artists so I was intrigued on how to create those sounds. Eventually got a job and money so I could afford an actual synth.

At some point in my teens, my friends got into rock music, indie and alternative stuff and I wanted to be part of that so I started learning the guitar and join bands. Along that way I started to figure out other audio tech because no one else wanted to learn how recording devices, mixers and microphones work.

 

As an 11 year old have I been since around 2 or 3 years in listening to rock music on the radio. Then came the day the BFBS in Germany announced to play the new Jimi Hendrix single at 0:00 o'clock the next day. Guess what, I had the transistor radio in bed without my parents knowing, of course. The time came, my ears to the speaker grill so that nobody except me could hear, and there ist was: Voodoo Chile (Slight Return). This was in May 1968.

The next day I told my parents, that I would get an electric guitar for Christmas. Must have been so ultimately, they said nothing.

On Christmas I had an electric guitar.

Done.

Imagine 1968 hearing THIS. That was not from this world. That was from another universe. That was the most impressing, violent, most beautiful, unhinged, infernal thing that there was in existence ever. And at this point I had not the slightest clue how this was possible with a guitar. I knew people that had guitars. These didn't sound like that. Until today I can't resist the sheer animalistic raw unchecked power of this piece of music. To this day it is for me absolutely not understandable how anyone can not want to play electric guitar.

 

Last edited: Dec 2, 2025 at 4:57 PM