I have always wanted to start producing music since I was pretty young. I always listened to the songs on the radio and wondered who was behind it. I looked into different programs but I kept on going to Magix's Music Maker and while it was functional, you couldn't make a beat on it.
I started my journey in February 2018 when I downloaded a copy of FL Studio and started playing around with it. I made what is essentally a drum loop and a song with nothing but a distorted 808 and DJ Mustard-style "Hey" shouts. It was a horrible track but I worked my way up to May 2018, when someone at my school hooked me up with a famous Scottish artist known as Horse.
At first, I laughed at the name but then it kicked in that I was working with someone with a Wikipedia page. I started work on a song that is now known as "Take Control" with Horse and her producer. This was the first time that I met someone with more knowlege of music production than me and I even taught him some stuff about FL Studio and he taught me stuff about Ableton.
I released my "first" album on CD entitled "BTL II". Before you think about listening to it, please don't. It is a repetive mess that has tracks with no redeeming values that are 5 mins long.
I decided to go back to the drawing board and decided to make another album. This time, I would try a bit more of a hip-hop approach and while I was working on it, I got the "Take Control" files back from Horse and it was glorious. It really pushed me to make and release the album.
At first, I was only going to release it on SoundCloud and CD but I subscribed to a platform known as DistroKid. It uploads to Spotify/iTunes/Deezer/etc. and is one of my favourite services to use when releasing music.
Finally, I finished work on this album and to celebrate my roots, I called it "Scottish by Nature Part 1" and released it on the 1st of September, 2018. After finishing it, I started work on some beats to give to people. I didn't have much luck until I chatted to this guy known as Charlie J. He's a British rapper who I discovered through Reddit (r/makinghiphop is one of the best ways to network) and I gave him a beat that I called "Space Cocaine".
After he put 16 bars on the beat, he asked around the subreddit to find people and one of then was a guy known as AnTone. He put a nice 16 bars on there and I released it on Spotify/Soundcloud. So far, it is my most popular song but it took me 2 months to get 200 plays but I had to endlessly advertise on Reddit to get plays.
With that in mind, I started work on a mixtape. I hired people from my school and AnTone to make a mixtape known as "III: The Mixtape". I know that it's not a very creative title but it's all I could think of at the time.
Currently, I am trying to sell some beats to rappers and I got my first one on Discord. This guy contacted me and asked for me to make a beat for him. I said "I will look through my beats" and I got this nice one that I sold for $5. It may not be much but it's a decent start for a beginning proudcer like me.
If you want to check out the songs I did, I have a Soundcloud with some of the stuff on there:
https://soundcloud.com/asendo-music
Thank you very much for reading my producing story and I will see you guys around.