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

I've thought about this a few times, as music's meaning has changed through out the journey.

As for what started it. I'm certain it was a big grey square plastic button, with a sideways triangle and the word "play" written above it.
Don't know how old I was when I first pressed it but I'm glad i did.

 

my family is pretty musical so theres always been a piano in the house growing up, everyone can sing well pretty much so i never thought it was a big deal. i was in band in middle school (6th, 7th and 8th grade) where i played the clarinet, then i switched to the bass clarinet because i thought it was more masculine but i wasnt passionate about it, my best friend was in orchestra class and i didnt want copy him so i chose band - i kept being told i had a beautiful voice by everyone who heard me sing, so i started taking it more seriously and practicing

by high school i started realizing my dreams of being a pro skater wasnt going to happen, i just didnt have that natural ability and i knew someone who went pro and could see the difference - so i started playing the piano in the house more and developed pretty quickly but i didnt love the piano. one day my friend brought his guitar to school, i had started to get into rock genres more and i asked if he could play stairway to heaven, watching him i thought, i could do that. then like magic my uncle called that next day saying he wanted to fund me and my sister doing some activity. i thought about guitar but i didnt know if it was for me after and was still sad about realizing skating wasnt going anywhere for me, so i asked god to send me a sign. next morning as soon as i woke up, was a episode of George Lopez where his son wanted to learn guitar and him trying to bond with him over guitar - so i took that as a sign and asked my uncle, the next week he flew down and gave me his fender la brea acoustic guitar

a few months in i had recorded a cover of “where did you sleep last night” by nirvana with me singing and playing guitar, i uploaded it to Facebook to see if i was good or not and like everyone in my school loved it, had like thousands of likes and at school girls were asking me to sing for them and to learn songs for them; also the choir teacher was trying to recruit me for the talent show. beautiful women have always liked me; but after that it was more pressure from them at school. thats when i realized i had something and decided to pursue it and became really passionate about it

 

i always enjoy listening to music. however it all started in 2004 in school.. first doing music on the ejay software.. then going into fl studio, learning it and not giving up.. i could not even understand how to press play in fl studio.

 

I got my first job making French fries at a Grateful Dead hotdog stand at fifteen. As soon as I got enough money I bought an epiphone and amp amp.. started my first noise acid party band continued into hard improv industrial. invented instruments then started with the atari, I could do 16 bit mono samples with it. kept doing noise...from 84-2010. then I got tired of it all. a friend gave me a copy live 8 that's when I turned to disco and started learning music with the idea that eventually my style would come thru as naturally as when I did only noise.
I didn't even know how to track a kick, so I stuck to 4 on the floor for years.

 

During lunch break in 1998, a friend from school asked me if I could "help" him get this "Fruity Loops" program, since my family had this new Internet thing and his didn't.

I only had a quick look at FL at the time (I'm pretty sure it fit on a single 3.5" floppy) and I'd only dabble in music every now and then over the years, until much later when I seriously needed something to take my mind off a bad breakup and the pandemic end-of-the-world thing.

 

When I was 6 years old my mother and I were visiting my much older cousin's house at her first apartment in Brooklyn. She had a canary and a classical guitar. I picked up her guitar, and because it was much too big for me and I had no idea how to hold it, layed it on the white shag carpet on the living room floor and began plucking the strings, and to me it sounded like a symphony in my ears. Just a few seconds later the little yellow canary landed on my head and started peeping. I remember feeling that it was the most magical thing that ever happened in the whole wide world. When we got back to our car I begged my mother to buy me a guitar but she never did. I asked my dad but he didn't either. I was never able to learn how to play back then and was sad about that whenever I heard guitars on the AM radio. Similarly, there was a kid in our apartment building, probably about 12 years old who played the drums and I desperately wanted to play too because in my eyes he was soooo cool, but I never got the slightest support from my parents then either. But when we moved east from Queens to Nassau County in my 4th grade year, beside have a huge grass field with a couple of baseball diamonds instead of the asphalt basketball courts and chain link fences of the city playground, my new school district had a well funded and thriving music program. Mr. Price immediately recruited me to play the coronet and soon I was tooting away both in the band and the orchestra and really enjoyed it. Then at the beginning of 6th grade my best friend Seth, out of the blue played me the introduction of Malagueña...I had no idea that he even played! That was finally it! I got my parents to let me get a teacher who also rented me a beautiful and funky beige Danelectro in the deal. I've been at it for 55 years or so now and have significantly expanded on the number of instruments that I play.

Music is life.

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Last edited: Dec 4, 2025 at 11:50 AM

It was the No.63 bus that took me into town to buy my first guitar.

 

Had the same experience (pun intended) when hearing Purple Haze for the first time on my tiny transistor radio