The Beginning

I can’t remember my age at the time, because frankly age is not important to me, but at one particular birthday a long time ago I got a red kids drum kit as a present. I loved it and started trying to play basic rhythms. Getting my hands and feet to play different rhythms at the same time was a challenge at first, but I learned fast. Once I also played ‘The Little Drummer Boy” live with somebody beside me in the church I used to go to with my family. I believe that was the first live performance I ever did. I continued playing on it every once in a while, but I was following drumming lessons as well around that time and the drum kit I had was too small for what I needed to do. I still loved it, but the drums teacher said “He is going to need a bigger drum kit”. So after a while we decided it was time to switch the one I had for another.

A Professional Drum Kit

After some searching my parents found a place to buy a good drum kit. We actually bought one from a professional Jazz drummer; Huub Janssen. It even has his signature on the bass drum. I had a good time visiting and I’m grateful for the opportunity we got.

My own professional big drum kit. As much as I loved my previous one, this was even better. Some days I played the sheet music I needed to practice from my drumming teacher, other days I just improvised or played along to my favorite music.
I always had a knack for music and rhythm; my teacher used to tell me that I practiced really well, even though I sometimes barely touched the thing for an entire week. Once every year the music school organized a performance where all the students played live in front of an audience. I had a good time playing drums and performing live, but this was more or less where playing drums stopped for me. I was asked if I wanted to play in a band. I did not want to do that. The reason for that is complicated, but suffice it to say I didn’t like dealing with people. “You like being in the lead but you don’t like dealing with people”? Yeah, like I said; complicated. I still loved the drums and continued playing a while until something else crossed my path.

My First Electronic Music

It was also around this time that I listened to a lot of Hardstyle CD’s. And I do mean the original Hardstyle of course. Euphoric Hardstyle and Rawstyle didn’t exist yet. I loved listening to it, and still do, because of the hard full-bodied kicks and steady rhythms. It felt both powerful and peaceful. Just like playing the drums it allowed me to forget everything and dream away. I was thinking how fun and interesting it would be if I made electronic music myself. One time I saw a computer program being on sale in the store called “538 Music Maker” I believe it was called, I’m not sure. A music program created by a radio station. Using that I made my first electronic music. It was just playing around with very simple results, but it definitely felt like more.

I was looking to expand my capabilities and found “Magix Music Maker” created by the company Magix. It was a program that came with a set of samples and loops that you could use. There weren’t a lot of those though, so the results you could get from using that program weren’t really varied. However, it was pretty satisfying to work with. The first piece of music I had created using Magix I had called “Magic Sounds” and I still have it today. When I listen to it now I realize that the mix is incredibly unbalanced and there’s lots of clipping. However, the composition is actually quite good. Around this time I also started to listen to Trance CD’s. I loved the emotional quality of it and tried to integrate it into my music.
I used it for some years until eventually my focus shifted to other things in life and my music making had stopped…

Taking It To The Next Level

For years I lived my life and had the greatest vacation travels ever until a combination of things made me want to make music again. This was around 2018. Feeling stressful inside my own body, living in a place of which I was genuinely honestly grateful to be there, but it didn’t feel like home. And my friend had moved to another country making it impossible to see each other more frequently than about once a year. It made me want to express myself again and music for me is the best way.
I was still thinking “How do those artists make their music”. Because I still didn’t even know the term “Digital Audio Workstation” (DAW). Eventually I did, and started comparing different DAWs. I really wanted to be more serious about my music this time. I knew about the existence of Fruity Loops and that it wasn’t that great in the past. I noticed the name had changed to ‘FL Studio’ and that it was very different than in the beginning. I looked some more and compared it to Ableton and Cubase among others. All great programs, but after all FL Studio attracted me the most. And that is the DAW I use today. It is a great program for original sound creation and I noticed on the website of Image Line, the company that made FL Studio, that it was used by some well known names. Names like deadmau5, Avicii and banvox come to mind.

I started with some experiments and moved on to other genres, among others Techno, Psytrance and House. FL Studio offered me a lot of freedom and it has taken me a while to get used to it. It works great though. What took me the longest time to learn is to make the mix sound balanced. How to get into that sweet spot of creating strong bass and sub frequencies without them overpowering everything else and muddying the mix? Now I am a lot better at it than I was in the beginning, but I am still learning new things frequently. It is a learning process that never seems to stop. But it is one thing that feels fun and good to learn.

Every once in a while I make music where I specifically focus on the drums. I take drums and percussive elements and integrate them into Techno or other Electronic genres. For example like I did with ‘Tenacity’ and the ending of ‘Truthseekers’ (about 6 minutes in). The genres I make are varied. Whatever intuition tells me to do, I’ll do. When I feel my mixing skills have progressed enough maybe I’ll also try to make some Hardstyle!