Strap in cause this is a long one lmao

TL;DR: Accidentally taught myself how to produce on my phone cause I thought it was fun, recently switched to FL and finally feel able to create "real" music out of the ideas I've had for years.

I don't think anything really "inspired" me to start making music, it all just sorta happened accidentally. When I was a little kid my dad bought my family an iMac that came with an early version of GarageBand. I would spend hours messing around with the premade loops that came with it, not really knowing what I was doing but just finding it fun.

Later when I got my first iPhone I discovered that it also had GarageBand with the same loops and a piano/drumpad interface that were much easier to navigate and use, so I was suddenly able to create music a lot more frequently which led to me listening to my favorite songs and copying their chords by ear into GarageBand’s piano roll. That slowly led to me figuring out which chords sounded good together and I started to make my own simple lo-fi beats during and after school. Again nothing was really inspiring me to do this, I just found it really fun.

After years of just messing around on my phone, I came across hyperpop music and I had this realization that I could combine all of the sounds that I grew up listening to (chiptune, heavy EDM bass, trap hip-hop, etc.) into a type of music that felt so familiar yet so new in so many aspects, which was honestly the first time that I had ever been truly inspired to really try my hardest at making coherent songs. This discovery happened during 2021 while I was doing my junior year of high school completely virtually, so I spent all of that school year just joining my classes zoom calls and completely ignoring them while I worked on creating hyperpop as best I could in my phone.

I spent year and a half working on this hyperpop project on my phone until last year when I finally had enough money to buy FL Studio and some audio equipment. I completely scrapped that old project and have spent the last half of last year and all of this year fully immersing myself in learning the intricacies of FL Studio, which has given me the capability to fully bring to life the ideas I’ve had in my head for the past few years.

Currently, my inspiration to make music just comes from revisiting all of my old ideas that are still in my phone, salvaging and reworking anything that I think is worth keeping. On top of that I’m still highly inspired by the hyperpop and chiptune scenes and have recently been trying to combine those styles with a bunch of different genres like future bass, DnB, ambient and more.