or the “how blissful life was” challenge, in which I digress about how music making begun

10+1 years ago I was giving my first serious steps into this music making scene. Here’s a bit of background of my life in the past 10 years.

Little did I know back then how much it would mean to present day me! I think I might have developed some weird obsession with sound, music and everything related to it – I learned the hard way that music store employees aren’t very keen on someone running around the shop caressing and licking instruments. Sigh.

(Obviously I never actually caressed or licked anything in a music shop – or in any shop, for that matter. I wait ’til I get home. I’m not that weird, mom!)

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I digress.

If my solar powered pocket calculator serves me right, 10 years ago was 2009, and 2009 was as good of a year as it can get. The last of its decade! Such a glorious year! That is, of course, apart from me royally fucking up my precious PlayStation Portable – serves me right from fumbling around with its OS kernel. (I still swear I’m not that weird, mom. I’m just… passionate.)

It freaking snowed where I live, which is the meteorological equivalent to finding a needle in a haystack. Better yet, it’s like finding an old portuguese man who isn’t rocking a moustache that’s furrier than a vintage italian pornostar’s pubic hair. These analogies aren’t adding up in regards of not making me look like a weirdo, aren’t they, mom?

By then, tektonik was already a thing of the past! Tech Decks were pretty much still a thing, tho. It was still acceptable to listen to Linkin Park, because, let’s face it – you’re still a 7th grader – in the end it doesn’t even matter. Heh, crappy puns.

Days were just big football matches with some classes in between. Fuck you, dude who was always unreasonably mad at us for arriving sweaty to his class.

Being in possession of a sliding Sony Ericsson phone was cooler than the snow that fell for a little while in January of that year. Here’s a selfie I took back then:

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Luckily my parents were pretty big into music so I kinda grew up amid guitars, basses, singing, drums and all that biz. I was very fortunate.

Going a little further back than 2009, I remember my parents getting me my first guitar when I was just about 4/5 years old, but I never was really that into it. Sure, I liked guitar but I didn’t really got around to properly learn to play it until I was older – electronic music tickled my fancy more than a guitar could at that time.

Turns out that my aunt Tita (which I grew up with – we were more like brother and sister than anything else. I still feel kinda sorry about having literally kicked her sometimes but, in my defence, she was also a bit of a pain in the ass, especially when I was younger. All is good now, tho. Nonetheless, sorry, Tita!) had a Casio CTK-550 keyboard.

I used to toy around with it when I was a little kid but when I grew older I began showing it some serious love because at the time it was pretty rad to have 100 different sounds at my fingertips to play with! Ensue the countless hours of ear drum piercing high volumes playing god knows what on that poor keyboard.

The 550 had a major flaw – it had no means of recording any of the stuff I was playing.

With that, I discovered early on that I loved about that keyboard was not playing per se but the ability to make music with it; But, once again, despite having 100 sounds it was very limited on its own.

Having no internet at that time, I spent some of my time wondering how modern electronic music was made but I could never really dig that deep into it.

So, with the no internet thingy, I turned to my parents and asked them about the music software stuff. Turns out that my pops had a copy of FruityLoops from 2002. A-fucking-mazing. I was in awe. All I could ever dream about and much more right there, inside some piece of software sitting in front of me.

Ensue hours upon hours, days upon days, weeks upon weeks of little me sitting in front of our trusty old computer (running at full glory with its 512MB of DDR2 RAM and its AMD Athlon 64 clocking in at 1.9GHz) clicking away on every button I found.

I still had no internet at that point and my music theory knowledge was limited, to say the least, despite having quite some resources about it. My pops even wrote me a small book containing some music rudiments applied to the guitar, but I just wasn’t having that. Lazy fucker.

Luckily, all of a sudden I wasn’t that lazy towards music at all and to help with that, FL came with some demo songs. I spent days studying every bit of them I could to check out how the whole DAW and music theory stuff worked.

Not that much later, a youtube video with some of my glorious creations had been uploaded:

With that, I was hooked. I was a music maker. A little kid spending his days glued at a computer screen making weird noises come out of the speakers.

Later that same year, my pops would get us a MIDI controller – he’d get to play the piano, which he regularly hadn’t for years, and I’d get to play around with my newly found passion.

That really kickstarted my music theory learning and I remember running home and spending every bit I could in front of the keyboard just jamming along and drifting away from this world.

The rest… well, the rest might be history but it’ll also be written in the following parts of this series of posts.

João.