After several years of not really messing around with music production, I’ve decided to finally bite the bullet and actually buy a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). I bought the Standard version of Ableton Live and I’m really motivated to get back into this hobby and actually learn it from the ground up again.

As mentioned, I definitely already have some experience with digital music production - I used to have a once a week course in music school back when I was still taking piano lessons but this is now more than a decade ago (Oh god, I’m getting old). Additionally I played around with some DAWs (Cubase and an older version of Ableton, and for a short time FL Studio) but I never took the time to actually learn any of those tools.

I started playing piano/keyboard when I was 8, and guitar when I was around 18 - I’m now 29 - and in all this time I never actually wrote or recorded a single piece of music. I definitely played around with some ideas but I never worked on them enough to turn them into a real song.

But over the last couple of years I actually got some of the hardware that would enable me to do this more comfortably and now that I own a “real” DAW, there’s nothing really stopping me. And I’m overall pretty motivated to get into this hobby more - both because I felt that recently I’ve kind of neglected my instrument practice and this would definitely help with that, and also because it just seems like a hobby where you also get to learn a worthwhile skill alongside it.

Initially I think I’ll just pick some tutorials from YouTube and follow them to refresh the basics of Ableton Live again. Overall I’m actually pretty excited to try all of this out. I’ll probably create another blog post soon where I talk about my hardware setup for music production and some things that I’d still like to improve about it.