2020/2021 Recap

An intro and 2020

At the start of 2020 I knew absolutely nothing about music. I'd always wanted to learn piano but hadn't ever touched one. I grew up in a fairly musical household but apart from a one week half hearted attempt to learn the guitar around the age of ten I'd never shown any interest. So when work slowed down a bit in the summer of 2020 I subscribed to an app called Playground Sessions and fooled around with it on a cheap small midi controller for six months plugged directly into an iPad.

By October I was hooked but felt like I wasn't progressing as fast as I'd like to, so I picked up a fully weighted 88 key midi controller, found a local tutor(virtual at first due to covid, in person came later), and started making much faster progress. The midi controller came with a copy of Ableton, Analog Lab V, and one or two other Arturia plugins. So in December I started this Ableton course But I didn't get very far until the following year.

2020:

Learned some very basic piano skills
Learned to read sheet music
Bought a nice keyboard to play on
Found a great local piano tutor
Pushed some buttons in Ableton, got scared, ran away

2021

In 2021 I really dived(dove?) in, I finished a coursera course on basic music theory and a LinkedIn Learning course on ableton. I picked up some studio monitors and an audio interface so I could actually play out loud for my wife, I learned way more than I ever thought I'd want to about how computer audio works. Spent way more than I ever want to again random audio software(oh god can music be expensive)

Finished https://www.linkedin.com/learning/ableton-live-10-essential-training
Finished https://www.coursera.org/learn/edinburgh-music-theory
Had my first Piano Recital where I played Carol of the Bells and didn't fall on my face or screw up too badly
Started Audible Genius
Started Syntorial
Started reading through the Sound on Sound Synth series.
Started learning Blender for visuals
Created a Soundcloud and uploaded my first two finished songs
Created this blog I hope, based on https://github.com/timlrx/tailwind-nextjs-starter-blog literally working on writing this while I work on making it all work

What's Next?

So what's next? Well, I probably have at least another year of creating stuff that will hurt better musician's ears, but I also improve at things a lot faster when I have some extrinsic motivation. So I'm going to try and post here at least once a week to document my progress and put out a lot of amateur music. I've got a stack of theory/composition books I want to work through, some goals on how many songs I want to put out and hopefully I can stumble across a few other people who can give me solid constructive criticism as I grow as a musician. 2022 Goals post incoming soon.