The last couple of months have been a bit of a journey. It all started on Christmas Day. I’d spent more than enough time being sorely beaten at Wii tennis and thought I’d have a look around the iPhone App Store. BeatMaker caught my eye so I downloaded a copy and started playing around. Half an hour later, I’d put together a pattern which developed into a track called Bad Habit.

Inspired by BeatMaker’s simple interface, I began to dig into DAW software by researching product features – Reason, Ableton, Cubase. I settled on Cubase and bought myself version 4.5 (wish I’d waited a couple of weeks until 5 came out as now I’m enduring the rigmarole of Steinberg’s rather onerous upgrade path). Since then, I’ve composed a couple of pieces, using the grid editor to hand key each note on the screen – a process even more tedious than upgrading Cubase! But that’s all about to change and I’m really stoked about how the Axiom 49 will impact upon the composition to mixdown time.

Time to pull the wrapper off.

Last night, I stayed away from the Apple believing that everything I was doing was pants and that I had absolutely no ability whatsoever. Musical tastes aside, there are aspects of production which simply work or don’t. This is my first foray into composition and mixing, so I’m keen to get early feedback (thanks Doyle for your tweets).

First thing this morning – feeling brave (or suicidal) – I uploaded one of my dev pieces to Cubase.net, TranceAddict.com and DanceMusicProduction.com:

So thrilled am I by the response, that I’m posting a couple of lines from Glyn who went to the trouble, not only of enduring my work to the very last chord, but of writing a detailed and extremely valuable response.

The purpose of quoting Glyn below is not to “blow my own trumpet” (though after all the pencil editing, I wish I had one to blow!). It’s that I’m sure those dark moments will return. When they do, rather than hurl my Steinberg Key out of the window, I can return to this post, read the feedback and press on.

“You sure you need a lead? This peice feels more of a ‘beats and breaks’ work than necessarily a background for an extended melody. stucturally, the only alteration I reckon would be useful would be to get that final chord happening ten seconds earlier. That harsh synth stabbing those little melodies, assisted by delay provided me with all the melodic I could have wanted. More than that might lost the ‘carrying’ quality of the ambience.”

“At no point did I think ‘Oh Feck! this guy does not know what he’s doing’, and my attitude here is that since this is ‘work number one’, then you’ve already got rock-solid foundations of musical thiking which, even with nothing other than your own exploration, will rapidly develop to a most robust quality.”

and most importantly of all….

“I look forward to hearing more from you.”

Continue I will.