So it turns out an old dog can learn new tricks.
I started playing piano fairly early (8? 9? Hard to remember.), but I despised music theory. I tried to learn all my assigned pieces by ear. Which wasn't always easy, and my teacher could tell. What that ultimately led to was my quitting piano lessons. On one hand, I regret that; I still had a lot to learn. On the other, I was much more interested in writing my own music than playing what others before me had written.
And so I wrote. A handful of compositions, some of which are lost to time and faded memory. Some of which I liked and played often enough that they are still committed to muscle memory. But after high school, that interest faded. Computers, the Internet, college...my thoughts were on other things. Except for a brief interlude in college when I attempted to write some game music over a couple of days, my abilities lay dormant. I barely played the now far-out-of-tune piano in our house.
Then COVID-19 hit. I was home all the time. I had time. And I was working on an independent game project with a friend. We were going to need music. "Oh, I can do that!" Of course, in the time since I had a dinky Yamaha keyboard as a kid to now, an entire industry had been created. MIDI controllers (oh so many options!), DAWs, plug-ins, effects, synths, VSTs (and such beautiful samples!). So many things that were too expensive, or of poor quality, or simply out of reach for a kid growing up in the country...that had simply passed me by. At 37, I had a lot to catch up on.
But I did. And it turned out what I thought was true, was true. I can do that.
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