My music journey! 🎹
The Beginning
It’s all started when I was at junior high school. My teacher introduced me to a bunch of multimedia software. And one of them was an audio editing software Audacity. He teached me the basic of using it. At the end of the class, he gave us a homework to make something using it. I ended up making a mashup of an AKB48 song “Kimi no Senaka” with a Green Day song “American Idiot”. The result was surprisingly so good. My friends didn’t even believe me I made it. That really inspired me to explore more.
Editing < Creating
Instead of just editing, I started to look for something more. I want to create instead of just edit. That’s when I found a MIDI sequencing program called Anvil Studio. This is the program where I learn so much about piano roll editing. I like working with it but I didn’t use it for too long because the MIDI sound isn’t particularly exciting.
FL Studio, of course. Just like anyone else 🤷
After a little while with Anvil Studio. I found FL Studio. It’s so popular back then and still is today. I spent quite a while using FL Studio. And this is when I really started learning making “real” music. During my FL Studio time, I really inspired by Japanese post-hardcore/metalcore band Fear, and Loathing in Las Vegas. I created a lot of covers of their song. In addition, I also learned a lot about electronic music production.
PC Broke 💔
But then, horrible thing happened. This was around 2016, my main PC broke 😭. I couldn’t ask my parents for a new computer. I don’t think they’ll get me a new one even if I do ask 💀. This forced me to use my old laptop which is not good. It was such a potato. It would start lagging, crackling, and glitching as soon as the project got bigger. It didn’t take much for that to happen. Because of the limitation, I decided to look for a more lightweight DAW.
REAPER gang! 🔥
After trying out a few DAWs, I found that REAPER is the most lightweight. Learning REAPER was a pain. The difference between FL Studio and REAPER is like night and day, their workflows are completely different. Took me a long time until I get used to it.
This was also the time when I started making Anime covers. My cover of Boom Boom Satellites - Lay Your Hand on Me was probably one of the first projects created using REAPER on my potato laptop. I also worked on my first commission with it, which was for Caleb Hyles. Unfortunately, I don’t remember which track it was.
After about a year using the potato laptop, I was finally able to build a new PC with my savings. I could work on bigger projects again, but I decided to continue using REAPER because I was already so comfortable with it. I would have had to re-learn FL Studio if I wanted to go back. And 8 years later, here I am now. Although I use a few DAWs now, REAPER is still my main one.