Making Music

I sat and stared as I flew down the road. My father was driving, and all I did was stare into space, through the windshield, being absorbed by the music playing through my earbuds. The bass was pulsing like a heartbeat, the piano came in like breaths, and the strings flowed through my ears like a waterfall. It was as if I was in a different world. It became the soundtrack to my daydreams, and the surroundings became the stage for this scene in my head.

I have been interested in music for as long as I can remember. Listening to music gave me a feeling that nothing else could ever provide. When I was little, I loved to play the Nintendo 64 with my brother. The music and sound in the games always engrossed me. Before I listened to any other type of music, I listened to and remembered video game soundtracks, and I would be transported into that world. It’s not the way people typically experience video games; to them, the experience was more about the gameplay than the ambiance and the environment. But I loved the games’ environments so much that I’d go back through areas that I already completed just to experience them again and to hear the music. In a way, that was how I learned music is important to me.

It wasn’t until I was about 5 years old, however, that my interest in playing the piano grew. At that age, I didn’t really know how to play anything, but I would press keys at random and I had fun with it. As I got older, around the age of 7, I started to learn songs by ear - songs from video games, songs on the radio, and songs from church. I would sit at my keyboard, remembering the pitches in my head, and trying to place those pitches on the keyboard. Within minutes, I would be playing a melody, and my mom would overhear and say “Wow! That’s awesome!” with utmost sincerity.

But for some reason, I didn’t feel proud of myself. Instead I felt a little disturbed. It felt like my world of music was being infiltrated by someone else.

This feeling carried on through middle school, when I started taking piano lessons. I simply did not feel comfortable playing the piano in front of the teacher. He’d say, “Go ahead, play what you’ve been practicing,” and I’d tense up. I knew the piece so well that I had it memorized, but somehow I wasn’t confident in my abilities. Eventually, I’d play it in a hesitant manner, and I’d forget he was even there. I’d be transported to my music world - the world where nothing else matters, and nobody was there but me and the music. My fingers would move where they needed to, slipping up a little bit, but not too much. My focused gaze rested upon my hands, rather than the paper, where, according to the teacher, I should have been looking the whole time. But after that was over, I found myself in that uncomfortable spot again. I quit piano lessons within the year.

I had an epiphany when I was 10. I wondered to myself as I listened to a song by The Black Eyed Peas, I want to make music like this. How do I do it? The music sounded so futuristic and cool, and some of the sounds gave me a feeling of nostalgia - they reminded me of the games I used to play. I spent a long time searching the web, finding obscure programs that were confusing, and in the end, not very good. But I soon came across a program called FL Studio while searching through YouTube. It was easier for me to understand, and I got to work. Using what little knowledge I had about the program, I made arrangements of songs I knew, and when I had finally made my first composition, I was proud. But I did know that it wasn’t anywhere close to the quality I hear on the radio.

That all changed when I got my hands on a program called Ableton. I took to the program a lot better, and within about a year of using it, I was making the type of music I loved. As I’d listen to it, the scene that I had imagined would play out before me. I listened to every element carefully and thought about what kind of changes I could make to perfectly replicate this story. It’s like the small props in a play - you don’t really look right at them or notice them consciously, but the scene would seem empty without them. I would spend hours putting in these details that nobody else would notice, but I would hear them, and it made all the difference for me.

The future is looking up. As long as I keep making these stories, these plays, and these environments, I can’t go wrong. And to have a career doing this - that would be amazing. I would feel like the happiest person in the world. The world of music is so immense, and every musician has different stories to tell, and every listener hears the stories in a different way. So, as I sit in the car, not yet at school, I begin listening to another song, and that scene, that environment, that story - it surrounds me once again, and another book of luscious sound is opened.