I'm an amateur music producer that has been heavily involved with music since the age of 15..(33 now). Guitar was my main instrument and then I picked up a synthesizer back in 2001 and started playing lead guitar and synth in a band..then a couple other bands. After graduating from college, I decided to go to law school, which really put my music on hold. The idea was to go make money as a lawyer and then have the freedom to do what I wanted with music.
In law school, I began playing with electronic music. Fruity Loops (now FL Studio) was a program that I had been playing with for several years but I only used it as a drum machine. Fruity Loops would be used to create a beat that was then fed into a digital recorder and guitar and synth tracks were laid on top of the drums. It never really occurred to me that one could use Fruity Loops for anything beyond that. During the second year of law school, I won a contest and came into a little extra money..so for some reason I sprung for FL Studio producer edition and began actually making music that was "in the box." A couple of years of that and the music was getting decent..not great but decent. Well that computer bit the dust with a lighting strike (yes, now surge protector) and so went my electronic music.
Fast forward to spring 2015..the bug was back. After a little research on the available DAWs (a new term to me..lol), I settled on Ableton Live. The Ableton Live suite, an Ableton Push controller, and a pretty swanky Akai 25 key controller and I was off to the races. Shortly thereafter I had to add some other things: a focusrite audio interface, a pair of jbl monitor speakers, a jbl subwoofer, a m-audio 49 keystation, a big monitor for my laptop, Native Instruments 10, etc...you get the idea.
Since then, I have been rigorously practicing and making music with a goal of becoming a "good" music producer. I'm friends with a couple of professional producers and recording engineers and am fortunate to have them to bounce questions and ideas off of. The downside is that it's work and takes time. I forget that it really takes time, practice and patience to get good at anything!
This blog will be my journal to have an outlet for sharing what's going on, what's working and what's not. In other endeavors, I've found that a blog is a great way to stay focused and motivated. A similar pursuit that I started in 2007 (and likely the pursuit that was responsible for music being on the back burner) was trading. Yes, financial trading..as in stocks, options, forex, etc. I've maintained a blog for that since 2008. thelawyertrader.blogspot.com if you want to check that out. I don't really update as often now but I keep it for the heck of it. It was a great tool for meeting people and keeping me focused. I know run a small algo-trading hedge fund that has been very profitable, so I don't have to spend quite as much time in the trading realm as I had to when I was learning and developing.
I'm hoping that 8 years from now this blog will be similar. I'll be on here posting about music, vsts, chord progressions, effects chains, and anything else one could think of. Thanks for reading and I'll be posting soon.
{OvO}
George
--also, night owl producer because the bulk of my work in music is at night..seemed fitting and owls are cool.
