back to my beginnings

By the time I declared my Film Scoring major at Berklee (2013ish?) I really had no idea what I was doing- I think the most composition I did was write a few weird tracks in my music tech class, maybe some jingles I wrote in Logic 9 for community college….and at some point (in 2011 or 2012) my mom signed a contract with PMW Live to produce + write a song and music video for me. yes this is the same PMW live that made Rebecca Black’s Friday song

Throughout the whole ordeal my mom was pretty adamant that since I was a “budding musician” I needed to produce or at least write a part of the song myself. Luckily that song nor the video ever came close to being finished. you can hear the song’s WIP version right here but expect some serious RnB and Mulan vibes meets garageband: 

anyways when i was actually in school, i had no idea what I was doing re: rigs or samples or writing music, really. i looked up some forums, looked up specs, and my first step into this world was buying a bulk EastWest ‘composers bundle’ which i got for 60% due to a black friday + student discount deal. i was even convinced that i needed that really excessive OnStage studio desk in order to ‘write music efficiently with the space I needed’ hahaha

I was trying my best to fit the “serious composer” narrative. i was a teacher’s pet, i jumped at every opportunity to answer a question in my film scoring class, i acted like i was ‘writing music day and night’ (lol), I really took my 19-year-old self pretty seriously.

eventually over time, i started catching something that was in-between senioritis and also I-Was-Resentful-That-I-Wasn’t-More-Successful-At-21-For-Some-Reason. It was a painful time. But then those two things started to blend together, and I think morphed into something that was more along the lines of not taking myself so seriously anymore. so i dropped out of college, ha! i moved to LA, and i started working on projects and gaining actual tangible skills. and even in my recent years, after i’ve seen big studios like Eastwood, Skywalker, Ocean Way, Remote Control, i still had a modest rig in Los Angeles

i’ve now moved back temporarily to the Bay Area, and I’m living in my small room that I grew up in, and five days a week I work for one of the best companies in the world doing and making audio come to life. my rig is actually even tinier

and i guess the moral of the story is that i really took myself way too seriously for a majority of my early career. I made a big deal about being something just to be it. i made sure all of the variables were controlled. but if I’ve learned anything at all as an adult, it’s that there’s a fine difference between being career orientedand being ridiculous. and if people at the best company in the world are as humble and kind as they are? 
then…w h y are a lot of us in the industry struggling to be nice? 

anyways thanks for reading and now that i listen back the PMW Live song wasn’t completely horrible. i think at the time i was terrified of being made a fool if I let that song surface….ohh……i took myself too seriously…