Rec | IT ALL STARTED ON AN IPAD

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Throughout my whole life, I had awful music teachers. I had a piano teacher that made me sit on my hands because he was frustrated with the way I played scales and a music teacher in primary/middle school that gave me so many anxiety attacks that my doctor finally gave me a note so I didn’t have to go anymore. I was told so many times throughout my life that I had no music talent, discouraged from going further than scales but all of those people (teachers!!!!) were wrong. They just couldnt fathom that I had a different musical brain than them. When I was 23, I ended up having to move back home from LA after my job rescinded their promise to sponsor me for a visa. I was depressed and heartbroken and lonely. I went to school for writing but didn’t want to write anymore so I ended up opening GarageBand on my iPad. I was inspired by all the things I could do on it. I suddenly felt like I was entering a new world. After making a couple beats, I started moving everything over to the laptop version of GarageBand. I bought big headphones, a cheap usb mic and a keyboard off of a guy from Craigslist and continued to tinker. One of my favorite things to do at the time was to download karaoke midi tracks of popular songs I loved, import them into GarageBand and change the instrument until I felt like I was making something new. I would then use my shitty mic to wail on top of it. I used GarageBand for years after that to make tons of songs that I just uploaded to SoundCloud without thinking about it much. Eventually I got a controller/sampler and access to Ableton and thats when the fun really started. My love for music making snowballed after that, I amassed more gear and skill and eventually made an album after a couple years. I was obsessed with making it and while I feel really whatever about it now, I don’t feel whatever about the experience. Music has allowed me space to express parts of me that there are no words for. The best thing I can impart is to take advantage of this. There are some things that you can only explain with a kick drum or a sine wave or a really hard bassline. Music is still a huge part of me! I made another album after that first and now I’m working on my next project. I recently reincarnated myself (everyone in the ~industry~ advised against this but I’m a different person now) and I’m excited to see what’s in store for me. I don’t expect to make money or become famous but music feeds my soul in a way nothing else can. Have fun!!

@nicky999doors

May 4, 2024

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my journey as a musician

started in middle school wanting to be skrillex and made some heinous dubstep, got way too heady about music theory and wanted to be machinedrum for a bit to flex that I knew other time signatures than just 4/4, then i went to college to study music and realized music theory is actually dumb and 4/4 is sick and I wanted to be kaytranada and make the simplest lil house tunes to dance to, then a friend from college and I shared our love for 80s new wave music and John Hughes movies and we made some fun synthpop to play at an 80s prom night as our senior capstone project, then that friend and I graduated in the pandemic together and made depressed synthpop that we were way too heady about because we needed to prove that our music degrees were valuable and that we didn’t waste our time in undergrad and that we weren’t failures as artists, then I moved away because having a music degree in NYC in the pandemic got you no jobs and shelved music for a while because I felt like a failure, got into early digital production from the 80s and got sick of working with plug ins and switched to synths and drum machines instead, figured out what post-music degree life looked like for me and moved again for grad school to get an MBA so I could actually get jobs on the business side of music, then I covered a Todd Rundgren song with a friend that I met at grad school to represent establishing a healthier relationship to my music now that it wasn’t tied to my self worth/career and just generally being on a better path in life. now I just make weird synthy stuff for fun and only release music when I care enough about a song to finish it TLDR I listened to skrillex once and now i’m studying finance because I’ll never live out my fantasy of actually being him

@royallmonarch

May 4, 2024

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Stuff I do: Music

I've been writing/playing/recording/releasing my own music since around 2016. Music's been one of my passions in life since I was 10, all I wanted to do was write songs and play them. I had this purple notebook throughout middle school that I would write song ideas down in, mostly lyrics that I had a tune in mind for. But as with a lot of things in my life, I felt insecure and lacked confidence in my abilities and that led me to pursue the visual arts, which is a passion I'd had since I can remember and I got a lot of praise in growing up. I've been trying to make music for the sake of making it and not for the pipe dream of making a living off of it. To me, doing things like art and music for money is a will killer; it strips all the passion and creativity from the work and it becomes solely about money. It would be nice if some day I luck into making enough money to support myself via my art, but I don't think that's going to happen and I'm not going to play the systems available to me and sell my soul in the process. Going to art school was a bad idea. Anyway, I have been daydreaming here and there about making some instrumental work and making a portfolio, try to get composer work maybe. Don't think my style lends itself to that but you never know. It's less personal that way too, with no words. The words are the hardest part. I don't know what to say, don't know what I should put my voice behind. I want to be honest about myself, my life, my experience since that's the only thing I would call myself an expert on. And I've been trying to build that up like a muscle, trying to get myself comfortable with writing and singing what I've written. Singing in general. Trying to improve my playing too. I'm not sure if I'll ever get to a point where I'd be playing in front of an audience night after night, that's not really something I want. I believe in the power of performance, something I've been wanting production wise is to keep it simple. Vocals and me playing whatever instrument at the same time, a live recording. I think having to perform the same song every day kills that. I've been listening to a lot of different music to learn from it, appreciate it. This started with the blues and folk, and where the name Sam the Wayfarer comes from. A lot of folk and blues musicians have names like that- First name the something. Rambling first name, Blind first name, etc. I'm going to switch to a different name, more of a band name than my first name being involved. Not willing to do my first and last name. Not sure if I should make it its own project or just put it over top the wayfarer stuff. But it'll be more of the same. I don't have a big sound and I like to experiment, play around, do what comes naturally. I'd love to make louder music, but I don't have the space to scream and yell and thrash just yet. I just want to be me.

@ridykeulous

Jul 10, 2024

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Get the old gear out of storage

I went on a seven year hiatus from making music. Life happened, I didn’t have time, and overall I wasn’t having fun when I tried to play. A few months ago I played for a bit with a friend and fell back in love with making noise. This weekend I got my old gear out of storage, and it brought back so many memories. It felt like I was playing with the ghost of who I was all those years ago. I’ve been radically transformed by time but parts of who I was exist still. I don’t play like I did back then, I’m a lot softer and this time around I am only playing for my joy. I like aging, I like becoming a softer human, and making music helps me celebrate that. All of this to say, get your gear out of storage and play if it’s been awhile. visit who you were so you can celebrate who you have become.