August 21, 2009.

I was handed a copy of Reason 4 after years of trying various music editing software like Midisoft Studio, Hydrogen, Rosegarden, and a very early iteration of LMMS in the mid Aughts. I knew absolutely nothing about FL Studio, VST plugins, "round robin", and any of those fancy terms. It was only my third or fourth year of being connected to the Internet, after all. I remember being a wee, innocent country boy excited at the prospect of finally creating something that fully reflected my musical sensibilities.

I found this August 21st date by pure chance while sifting through ancient folders containing a treasure trove of Reason 4 source files. It's the earliest instance I could find on my file browser.

I recall creating my first Newgrounds account on September of that year, but I had forgotten the exact moment I began composing on Reason. I could still fire up those first project files on Reason 12, which is the version I currently own, and hear them directly from the source. My first couple of tracks were incredibly basic, but it didn't matter to me. They were my first "proper" tracks that I actually saved and stored somewhere, later surviving various hard drive failures and OS crashes, so that alone was a source of accomplishment.

My earliest compositions were quiet, muddy, and with a lot of underlying space, often driven by a deep funky bassline and a subtle, but busy pulse. It just made sense in my head. I was inspired by some of my favorite video game music soundtrack like the Ratchet & Clank and Metal Gear Solid 2, so I wanted to capture some of that magic. I knew those stylistic choices sounded right to me because they were my childhood. I didn't realize I was composing memories. I tried getting the most out of Reason's factory soundbank since that was all I had in 2009-2010.

I was just getting into Ambient music, too, making my own discoveries. I remember devouring Wikipedia articles while binging albums on YouTube. None of my immediate family members and schoolmates dived that deep into the fringes of electronic music, so that felt special to me. I was then graduating from being a semi-casual listener to an active contributor. I loved using those subtle default percussion loops, all those clicking sounds and tiny blips appearing and disappearing. They sound predictable to me now, but I had fun layering them together with other synths and messing around with the loop slicer module, Dr. Rex.

I was obsessed with subtlety. I would often turn the levels down when mixing those early tracks. My rig also looked remarkably different from my current one. It was a Frankensteined mix of various salvaged parts sporting a head-spinning 512 MB of RAM. I couldn't go too hard on Reason without it lagging into infinity and beyond and distorting the playback. This kind of "use what you really need and nothing more" mindset must have left an indelible mark in my creative brain because I still, to this day, refuse to employ templates or fill dozens of mixer channels on my projects.

I build everything from scratch and only use what I believe to be unequivocally tied to the vision in my head. No frills or extra fluff. It might sound unnecessarily restrictive nowadays considering the amount of memory I've more than compensated for, but I'm willing to die on this hill and say that limitations are good, as they allow me to squeeze every possible nuance from each of my individual layers without losing on expression.

When I look back at those first project files with present eyes, I'm flooded with thoughts on how to improve them and what I could have done differently. Too loud, too quiet, too muddy, boost those transients, cut that sub-bass, use better reverb units, de-es the crap out of those painful mids, manually notch those ringing notes into oblivion, tidy up those goddamn racks, use labels and colors, include version history in the file naming, etc.

For the longest time, I avoided reinterpreting my own past audio from a desire to preserve the original vision that conjured those first tracks. They weren't nearly as layered and as thoughtful as my current projects, but sometimes, less is more. I didn't think too much of them as I was making them. I just liked how they sounded, and I enjoyed spending some energy creating them after school. That was my truth.

It's why I'm under no pressure to perfect, remaster, or overly rationalize my early output. I'm no longer opposed to the idea of revisiting some of my earliest motifs and concepts, some of which still linger in the back of my mind as I keep growing and changing as an individual, if they happen to resonate with me at any stage of my present life. However, at the same time, I'm comfortable knowing they're somewhere in my toolbox occupying their spot, so I can rest easy at night. I don't feel the need to remix a photo album full of mental snapshots from 2009.

They stand as auditory scribbles from a bygone era, a time when I was just beginning to entertain the thought of potentially making a name for myself as an independent composer. 17 years, hundreds of dollars worth of digital audio equipment, thousands of hours of accrued experience, and an incalculable amount of successes and disappointments, pain, sweat, and tears later, I am here to celebrate the fact that I have persisted on my own terms, and that whatever beast I have built over the years is no longer just a hobby to me. This is my life.

If I hadn't encountered Reason 4, I would have probably become a comic writer and author, and maybe a hobbyist game developer as a side hustle, complete with frequent identity crises over my skill set and what I'm actually good at as an artist. I would have definitely been more of an art guy than a music man. As a teenager, I thought that was my trajectory given my penchant for drawing and a general predisposition towards visual arts. It's funny how things change and evolve over long stretches of time when I think about it.

At the end of the day, is there any profound meaning to extrapolate from an aging Millennial's ramblings on the Internet? Probably not. Any grand epiphany or mind-blowing revelation? Nah. It's a droplet in the ocean, in the grand scheme of things. A bubbling fart in the bathtub, if you will. And what a fart it's been.

So, if you've enjoyed the ride so far, kudos for hopefully making it to the bottom of the page without skipping paragraphs, I really appreciate it, and I hope you stay tuned for more. Cheers. :)