I used to write music.
When I was a teen, I wanted to be
Peter Buck or
Matthew Sweet so badly. I knew I lacked the innate dexterity (and/or long fingers) to approach the virtuosity of
Alex Lifeson,
Billy Corgan or
Marty Friedman, so as much as I loved the wilder, noodlier stuff, I tried to keep my hero-emulation a bit more grounded. It was easy, too, from a technological standpoint - my parents had gotten me a really nice Stratocaster for a combined birthday/Christmas present, and I had a fairly decent small-sized Peavey tube amp, so all I thought I was ever going to need was a chorus pedal... maybe a chintzy digital delay pedal if I was feeling saucy. This changed when I went to college, and then changed further still when I started working. My increasing love of electronic music (Industrial/EBM in particular) took my interests in a direction completely orthogonal to my previous jangly-college-rock sensibilities.
And all the while I wrote. Simple REM-esque pop at first, sure, but that gave way to more atonal stuff with non-standard time signatures. (I recall sitting on my dorm room bed, acoustic guitar tuned to Drop D, hammering out some drivel in 9/4 time for the fuck of it. It was the Nineties and
Tool was getting pretty popular.) Transitioning to electronic music, however, was a bit trickier. I never studied piano and besides, synths were expensive!
Right around the time I was about to give up and/or mooch off my friends who could afford to assemble small synth studios, my luck changed.
Propellerhead Software, whose Rebirth Micro Composer was a ton of fun to noodle around with, released a software synth rack called Reason, and for the price it really couldn't be beaten. Better still, its editing interface made it super easy to correct my myriad mistakes, or "draw in" the notes when a certain phrase exceeded my technical/technological limits (arpeggiator sequences, usually).
All the while my guitars collected rust and dust underneath my bed. I eventually sold them to make rent when I was going through a spell of unemployment. I missed having them, sure, but I don't think I regretted giving them up. It was shortly after their sale that I met my wife. We did the usual thing of consolidating our belongings and throwing out what didn't make sense to keep. For me, that meant disassembling the studio rig. Again, I missed its place in my living room, but I didn't think I regretted packing it all in.
But then...
My wife came home with her old
Yngwie Malmsteen Stratocaster in tow. She wanted to learn how to play, and she had a friend who could teach her. She was excited about learning how to write songs, and her enthusiasm infected me. So I upgraded my copy of Reason, and as of yesterday I have
the means of recording audio input onto my computer. I still have a lot to do to get it back to where it was when I was single, but I'll get there.
I did, however, realize something: I did regret giving my old stuff up. Not in a "I wish I never sold my Stratocaster" way, I don't think. More like "I wish I hadn't given up on thinking writing music was important to me". It is one of the few ways I know how to process and offload emotional turmoil. Instead of letting whatever is bothering me shut me down like I was a malfunctioning robot, I can write a song. It doesn't have to be for anyone other than myself.
Hopefully, though, some of it will be for you as well. If that happens, I'll throw something up on SoundCloud or whatever.
