My music journey
Music has always had a special place in my life. Read on to learn about my song compositions, songwriting, and where I am taking it from here.
Welcome to the third installment of my hobby journey series! In this post, I will be writing about my music journey. This is a topic I’m extra excited to write about since I’ve been a bit elusive about it on Hobbyisms thus far. Continue reading to learn which music undertakings I’ve embarked on, what is currently in progress, and where I’m planning to go with it.
My Early Experiences with Music
I have loved music for as long as I can remember. Music holds a special place for many of us, and there are many experiences I had with playing instruments and writing original music growing up. It started with playing the viola in the fifth grade (which I incidentally use in much of my music now), loosely teaching myself how to play the piano, and singing in a choir class for a year or two. Then life became dark and difficult in my teenage years, and I wrote songs about some of the hardships I experienced. None of these were conscious decisions where I thought to myself “I want to pursue music”; these are just activities I found myself gravitating toward and doing.
It wasn’t until later in high school that I started spending more time in nature and had my first “official” songs come to me. I say “official” because these are songs I actually plan to do stuff with and have written down. The first song came to me as vocal impressionism for the chorus (by this, I mean a short melody where the pitch of the vowel changed a few times to bring the musical phrase to completion, thus a melody). This initial sound concept is still in the song today, and it is what I constructed the rest of the song around when I wrote the lyrics and came up with a composition for it.
From there, I continued writing other songs for what soon into a fleshed-out album concept. I don’t recall exactly how those other songs came about because the whole process came so natural and surprisingly quick, in my case. In my writing journey post, I mentioned how I wrote poetry before writing songs. It was in this period that I ended up pivoting entirely from poetry into songwriting. All of this sets the groundwork for how I started becoming serious about music and what steps I took from there.
The First Compositions
2020 is the year I started working on my first compositions. By compositions, I mean notating sheet music in a computer software to create a proof of concept for how I envisioned these songs (I use MuseScore). The first compositions were very rudimentary, as I was very new to all of this. I decided to set this project to the side for a bit, which ended up being a year.
When I came back to this project again in 2021, I took a crack at that vocal impressionism song and made it a bit better. Playing it back, it made me cry a bit because it is a very beautiful experience to take an idea from your head and hear it with your own ears. That was also not the final form of that song, but I put it to the side for what ended up being another few years while working on other projects I deemed as priorities at the time.
Enhancing the Compositions
In 2024, I was ready to pick the project back up yet again and found a music theory book on archive.org that explained essential music concepts such as harmony, melody, intervals, chord progressions, etc. I took notes on this book and used my expanded understanding of music to not only standardize my scores’ notation, but take the scores to the next level. I spent the next few months experimenting with various harmonic intervals, coming up with new melodies for the instrument parts used in the compositions, and breathing new life into these songs.
Words cannot describe what this album means to me and what I experience when listening to the finished proof of concepts I’ve created. If it seems that I’ve been a bit guarded about the contents of this album, it is because putting my heart and soul into it has made me careful of what I want to disclose before releasing it. The first thing I will do after it goes live is share the specific inspiration and vision behind it. I will be more than excited to do so!
Spontaneous New Songs
Last year, as I was working on these compositions, there were a variety of new melodies and lyric lines that came to me. This can happen when I’m at home, in the car, or just about anywhere where my mind is free to wander. When lyric lines emerge, I never really know what to make of them; I just make note of it and let the song piece itself together in its own time. That is what makes my music folk as well, I believe; my process involves letting the music come to me, rather than me trying to ideate the music. It may take some time for the song to fully come to me (as was one of the songs I finished composing in early 2025), but it comes to me nonetheless.
But back to these new songs, though. There were six or seven I wrote and composed this year, all of which hold equal or more weight than even the first songs I wrote. I started experimenting with new sounds more and have a strong handle on the concept of this album as well. It is, again, truly wonderous to see an album start to come to life and be everything you envisioned it would be and more.
Learning How to Sing
The next critical milestone in my music journey is continuing to strengthen and have more command over my singing voice. I will write a separate post specifically about my singing journey, but I will touch upon it here since it does impact my next steps for seeing my albums through.
I began taking healthy vocal technique seriously in February 2025 and have been practicing vocal exercises every week, a few times per week. Right now, I would describe myself as a beginner+ when it comes to singing, as I understand most of the critical concepts but still have a ways to go in terms of readying my voice for recording. Singing is one of those pursuits that is ever-improving, rather than having that moment where you’re like “I can sing!” and having nothing else to do to improve upon that skill. So, I plan to spend more time working on my voice and achieving more consistency in specific areas to improve how my end recordings sound. Once I am more comfortable with my singing abilities, then I am ready to start making preparations to record from there.
An Unexpected Offer
As of the VERY DAY I am writing this post (which is few weeks sooner than it is actually going live), I received an unexpected offer that completely alters the trajectory of when I thought I’d be able to make this happen. I never had a formal timeline on when I thought I’d record my first album, but a new connection surfaced out of an entirely different matter that could make this come to fruition much sooner than I thought.
Today, someone who has their own independent recording studio offered their space to me to create my own recordings, which is absolutely surreal. You really never know who you could encounter and in what ways you could possibly collaborate. For this reason, I always keep an open mind and see where the conversation leads.
Final Reflections and Thoughts
As everything in this post has indicated, music plays an important part in my life. When I was evaluating in 2024 what I wanted to keep and toss from my life, it made me realize how far I had deviated from music. I vowed from that moment on that I would never again forget how important making and playing original music is to me.
There are a couple miscellaneous mentions I’d like to make before wrapping up this post. The first is that, to date, the instruments I have include a keyboard, two Native American flutes (A minor and G# minor), tank drum, balalaika, ocarina, and, more recently, a bass guitar for George. I plan on continuing to get better at playing the flutes since they are necessary to my albums. The next is that I used to play the piano and tank drum at past open mics. I sounded a little rough, but I had fun with it; I hope to do more open mics in the future.
The Beginning of the Journey
Thank you for reading my music journey; I hope it has inspired you to find and pick up a hobby that you are equally as passionate about. Starting doesn’t necessarily mean doing the actual hobby today; it could mean figuring out what your first steps are and where you need to start. Take some meaningful step toward your hobby today; there is no better time to start.
Happy hobbying!