2018: The Year of Practice
So in order for me to start making music, I downloaded GarageBand on my phone and started making beats. They were horrible. And I knew that but for some reason I just kept going. I kept making beats and kept progressing and… I didn’t get any better. I was just using the stock loops in the Apple library. I didn’t hear any progression whatsoever. But what I didn’t know that I was teaching myself at the time was an appreciation for musical arrangements and sounds. I started having an ear for what sounded good and where it would sound good. I started noticing little details in my favorite songs that I wasn’t picking up on earlier. Small details like in Chop Suey!, there’s a piano that starts playing at 2:49 or in Save Me by X, there’s a vinyl crack at 2:03 and stupid shit like that.
I kept using GarageBand for a while until I started watching a music producing YouTuber named Simon Servida to try and learn a couple things about producing and any other content that he produced at the time. I noticed he was using a program I didn’t have so in order for me to follow his tutorials, I downloaded FL Studio 20. It was definitely a hassle to try and get used to at first, of course, but I did find it fun. It was like a video game. And little by little I started getting better. I started downloading asset packs from Reddit and other corners of the internet. Slowly but surely I was getting better at producing but I never posted anything or was able to work on it for longer than a day because I had the trial version of FL Studio so I couldn’t save my projects. I think that’s why I have a quick workflow when I’m in the zone nowadays; having to rush to finish a project and make it sound good in that timeframe is not for the faint of heart.
Regardless, I was getting good at it (relatively), but I had to take a break. The most important trip of my life was about to happen and I didn’t even know it. For the summer of 2018, I was invited to go to my cousin’s quinceñera in Costa Rica. It was a good chance to go on vacation for the first time in 6 years and see my father for the first time in 2 so we packed our bags and took the 2 hour flight from MIA to CR. The first 2 weeks or so was just kind of a blur to me. I spent a lot of my time on my phone using social media, playing games, and the worst part, I was texting and calling my girlfriend at the time straight from my phone with no international plan. On no Wi-Fi. As you can probably tell, as soon as my mother saw that bill, she called my dad and told him to take my phone IMMEDIATELY. LIKE YESTERDAY. And of course I was pissed about it the first week but after that… man. It was the greatest time of my life. We were going to the beach and I was getting tanned like crazy, even burnt on a couple occasions. I was walking over to my Tio Pitoy’s house pretty much every day and I ended up sleeping there more than I was at the main house. It was a great time. Damn near all my uncles on my dad’s side are pastors and Pitoy is no different. That means he had a keyboard at the house and when we went into the church, there was a drum kit and a couple guitars. Now, as someone that was recently getting into music production, I was ecstatic. Before I got to Costa Rica, I would mimic jacksepticeye’s drumming video to Chop Suey! to try and learn the song. That means I would only practice with my hands or sometimes chopsticks so finally being able to use a drumkit after all that was like a dream come true. And that practice translated surprisingly well. Of course it wasn’t perfect or anything and I was missing a couple segments but I could play the drums well enough for my uncle to tell me I had some talent. That was the first time anyone said anything positive about my music or anything musical whatsoever. And it lit a fire inside me. I started playing the keyboard too (completely raw.) I would watch tutorials on YouTube to learn some songs I liked at that time such as Orlando, Dead Inside (Interlude), and Jocelyn Flores by X. Yeah I was obsessed, so what. I kept practicing the keyboard and drums as much as I could in the time that I had, knowing it wouldn’t last forever.
Some people say they know exactly where they were and what they were doing when a specific thing happens and I only have 2 of them. One of them for me is when X died. I was in my grandma’s house playing GTA V with my cousin Luis when my brother walks in the door and tells me, “yo X just got shot.” And I was kind of in shock. I started asking all the questions I could like “how many times did he get hit” and “is he still alive” and “where did you get the news from” and things of that nature. It was kind of a weird day after that. I walked in the room and kind of just cried a little. I didn’t have my phone at the time so I couldn’t even search up information. I was kind of just in the dark. And I was hoping and hoping and praying that he survived it but at one point, my brother told me that X had been confirmed dead. The rest of the trip was filled with good moments but there was just an odd feeling around it, I couldn’t really explain it.
