“You will be in charge of the sound design for this film.”
The teacher told me that in the film club I attended in 9th grade, when we were about to start a new film. In that club, we needed a person with sound design experience, but none of us had such experience to do that. The teacher then asked if there were any people in a music club. At that time, I was part of a music technology club that focused on music composition, but I was completely new to music and had not yet composed a complete song. But the mission fell on me, so I had to take on the task.
After I got home, it was a sunny Friday afternoon, and it should have been a chill day if I hadn’t had that task. But it genuinely troubled me. I kept wondering how the teachers and classmates in the film club would react if I couldn’t finish a demo by next week. At that moment, I felt really anxious because I had no confidence. I truly knew that I couldn’t possibly complete a finished music track. But there was no other choice, and I had to give it a shot. I slowly walked into my study room where my desktop is, and slowly launched my computer. After I double-clicked on the FL Studio software logo, which is used for composing music, the program launched. And then a huge blank project view appeared on the screen in front of me. I froze totally because I had no idea how to start. I could only hear the noise of desktop fans as time passed, and I sat still in my chair, doing nothing. At that moment, I thought that I could never finish that.
Although I was so anxious and frustrated, I found that I should at least do something. I was seeking tutorials somewhere, so I opened YouTube and searched for: “FL Studio electronic music tutorial”. I didn’t know what specifically I was looking for, and just randomly clicked into a video. Fortunately, there was something helpful. Although I had no idea why I had to do those things and what would happen if I followed the video, I just followed everything that appeared in that video. If he changed a parameter, I just changed the same thing. If he dragged a pattern into the track, I just did the same thing with no reason. Even so, I did change some notes to make sure that I wasn’t copying the melody.
I kept doing that for almost the whole weekend, from morning to night, and sometimes even forgot to have lunch or dinner. Finally, I completed a track, and I was really proud of the track and the software, full of different things compared to the intimidating empty view at the beginning. Although it sounds awful if I listen to that right now, it was a really meaningful piece to me. Next week, during the club block, I showed this demo to the teacher, and she said it was really good. I think she was probably just being nice to me and sugarcoating, since that sounds actually awful, but I was largely moved by this praise. Even beyond that, I found that it was pretty interesting to work on or play with those plugins or MIDI files when composing music, and that became one of my hobbies in the following years.
Blank white screen, scary. Describe
YouTube, copy, don’t know
Feel proud
frustration, fear,
vs. full software
intimidating