How I started composing

My world changed, or like shook, when I heard Bon Jovi the first time, and Alice Cooper. Before that I only heard some pop music, dance music. And when I heard this rock music, I was shocked, shaken to the depth of my entity, because I thought, wow, this is a real music. This is amazing. It sounded so amazing to me, just incredible.

Since then I was trying to find even more, even more. I was trying to find more complex music, because I saw there were patterns, these heavy metal, basic metals, I would say, the patterns that they followed. And I was trying to find some incredibly profound music genres, some complex music. I was trying to find them. And that's how I found black metal. I saw that, yeah, they were exploring. These are the ones who were trying to explore, while heavy metal didn't really try to explore.

And then I discovered that classical music is actually way above all that. When I heard Shostakovich, I thought, wow, this is more doom metal than any doom metal, actually. And it's pure genius, talking about the eighth quartet, symphonies of course, cello and violin concert. So yeah, it was a gradual travel. Started with Mozart and all the way to the latest ones, Shostakovich and Schnittke, Prokofiev, Stravinsky. And this baggage gave me a really good understanding of, not the understanding, but more like how to compose the music, how the melody should be done and stuff like that.

I was trying to compose all this time, actually. When I started playing guitar I was just composing little pieces, but I could never compose the entire thing. I had some nice riffs, maybe some nice ideas, but I could never compose the entire thing. It was always a problem, the transitions between melodies. I could compose one melody, but I couldn't make a transition that it would feel so organic, like it should be there. For years I struggled.

At some point I discovered Guitar Pro, and I tried to put my ideas in there. Actually, I remember now, I was 18. Yeah, it was between 18 and 20 years old, and I was born 1982. I think I was actually 20, because I already collected a really good experience in classical music.

And actually, I had a friend who gave me chords for his song called Rasstayala Noch (расстаяла ночь, "the night melted away" in Russian). Four basic chords progression. This is where I put them in Guitar Pro and just looped them throughout the whole song and put some melodies on it, and I realized it sounds good, actually. And when my friend gave me that loop, this is where it happened. I just put it into the loop, and I started putting melodies on it, and somehow it just worked. I was just blown away, because I could listen to this music forever and I wouldn't get tired of it. I wouldn't say, oh, something's wrong there. I felt it's so organic, and I reached what I wanted, the first time. It still exists, of course. It's still there. I have the original MIDI, or Guitar Pro even.

So this was my starting point of the composing.

And then I just tried again, but now entirely on my own. I think the second one was Iron Man. I just did the opening part. I remember very well that it was just riffs, standard metal riffs, fifths. And then I put some melody, and I heard that, wow, it's amazing. And somehow it's just stemming, that something that I wanted, that there was stemming, not squashing one part into another, but so that they were stemming from one another, growing. And that happened. That worked. And I was super, super excited about that.

It just clicked, and I composed a lot of stuff in one year. It was one big burst of most of the material that I composed back then. But yeah, it was stretched in time as well. But crazy creativity. I thought, oh my God, I just unlocked some kind of genie from the bottle, some talent that I didn't even... I always admired composers, and I wanted to be that, but I couldn't. And I unlocked it. I remember the excitement.

But then, of course, I couldn't play it. That was the big problem, because what I composed, it was too hard to play.

Both things I couldn't record because I didn't have equipment. I didn't have a nice guitar with nice effects, and back then there was no software effects like now we have, what's it called, Guitar Rig, right? I didn't have money to buy all this stuff. And of course actually the very speedy solos as well.

So first, when I had the opportunity, is when maybe 2018, 2017, something like that, when GarageBand really helped me. With GarageBand I could record something, do some edit, maybe slow recording and then speed it up. I did try actually to record my old material, but it was still not good. It sounded like crap, because I'm not good enough.

But what I tried instead of that, I started composing again. I got back, because there was more than 10 years of gap. Actually, maybe even 20 years of gap. And so I started composing now without Guitar Pro. I was doing it with GarageBand and my own guitar. Then I had money to buy a guitar, buy Guitar Rig effects, and I composed some of the amazing songs that I have now too.

It was very different.