I toured in a pop-rock band, spent almost 10 years writing and playing that style of music.

One night about 4 years ago, I went out and got drunk with some friends in downtown Chicago. We all took a cab home at about 2AM and the driver had a top 40 station on that happened to be playing a massive DJ mix. "The Devil's Den" by Skrillex came on and I was completely blown away, had never heard music like that before. I came home, researched it, found him and a whole shit ton of other people in the electronic scene, and I've been writing it since.

I never exactly planned to make music. This has probably helped a lot because in the early days of producing I was completely unaware of how difficult it could be to make music. In school I began using Cubase in music lessons. It made me realise I could make music without even being able to play an instrument which was completely game changing for me. We only did composition for the first few years before even touching synths. It was the slower path but made producing much less intimidating in the end.
 
Later on I completely dived into producing electronic music. This was also when I started listening to the electronic genres more often. Strobe by deadmau5 just blew me away and it still does. If I had to name only one track that completely inspired me it would be that one.

I had started taking guitar lessons at around 9 or 10 (after getting extremely hooked on the Beatles), which gave me some general musical knowledge, but it's still a lot less than I wish I had. This really helped spark an interest in music for me, but not necessarily in production.

I started listening to electronic in around 2011 (at age 11) when I heard some of Daft Punk's stuff. I heard Ghosts n Stuff by deadmau5 by accident in 2012 and was addicted to it for weeks. I eventually happened across some other producers like Skrillex and had phases where I really obsessed over an artist, but I don't think I decided that I wanted to make my own music until mid-to-late 2013 when I saw Madeon's Pop Culture video.

I was so mesmerized by how he had managed to pull such a thing off, and I looked into how it was done. I received a Launchpad Mini as a Christmas gift and began learning how Ableton worked. I spent too much time doing other things, and when I was using it, I was wasting time by simply playing with other people's projects and trying to make things with very little musical knowledge. After losing a lot of confidence in myself, I pretty much quit altogether, but then realized that not producing wasn't going to improve anything. I started again, and met some people that have really taught me a lot about music. I have a lot of room to improve, but I'm working on it. Aren't we all?

My cousin showed me a dance video for reptile by skrillex in 2011 and the song blew my mind. I remember coming home from school and just sitting on spotify all night, listening to dubstep and other types of electronic music. And one day I had watched an interview with skrillex where he was talking about producing on his computer with ableton, and I thought it would be kind of fun to mess around with that, so I downloaded the demos of ableton and fl studio and ever since then I cannot stop.

Back when I first heard Sandstorm by Darude on TV years and years ago, my interest in electronic music began. I didn't know of any other electronic music at the time though so it kinda just faded out and I went back to listening to rock and metal until I entered highschool where I found out about hardstyle. After listening to a bunch of hardstyle alongside my metal and emo stuff, I produced my first track. It was a cool project but I quickly went back to writing metal songs on guitar. Years lately in like 2011 I heard Skrillex and Knife Party, and from then producing has been primary and guitar has been there just to compliment my production.

My uncle was starting to making beats on FL Studio back in 2008 and I was pretty intrigued by it, but I never thought about giving it a try. It was only after getting into electronic music (Daft Punk in particular) in 2011 that I started becoming increasingly interested in production and considered making music of my own. I finally started producing in July 2012 and made an awful "chiptune" track called Level Up on a browser program called "Aviary Music Creator" which ended up closing down, and led me to start using the copy of FL Studio that my uncle gave me. The rest is history.

For as long as I can remember, I've been fascinated with music - if I was anywhere near a piano, I was drawn to plink on it... even if I wasn't allowed to. When I was 5, friends of the family played "Dark Side of the Moon" for me, and it was in stereo!  My little mind was blown, that was some radical stuff right there!  (This was in the 8-track tape days.)

Then, in the mid 80s, I got hooked on "The Art of Noise," originally because they had Max Headroom in their music video.  The bits with him in weren't even on the album, but I was hooked anyway.

Around 86, I got my first keyboard - a Yammy toy, but even so, I started making (really terrible) music on it, then later on my Commodore 64 and my best friend's Amiga whenever I could get him to let me use it.

In the early 90s, I finally took some music theory, and suddenly, my music wasn't completely random noise, it had proper harmony and structure.  It still wasn't exactly great, but it wasn't horrid either. 

A few years later, I bought my first real hardware synth, a Yamaha CS1x, followed by a Roland JX305, a Yammy RM1x and a Yammy WX5 (I used to really dig Yamaha hardware).  I made an electronica album with some friends (I was composing, she was singing, he was muddying up the engineering), but that fell apart because they were dating... and then, they weren't any more.

I took several years off, only making the odd tune, but then I took a job as the Tech Lead at a small indy video game company in Amsterdam and moved from Alaska to the Netherlands.  While there, life got very challenging, and I started looking for something to help my mood.

Around the same time, I discovered Ghetto Funk.  Woah, now that was some shit, man, I can dig it! I connected that with needing to improve my mood and decided I was going to learn how to DJ, playing at a private party every Friday for some folks from the A'dam game and movie industry, and occasionally small shows (100-200 people) around the Netherlands and Germany.  However, it wasn't long after that to where I wanted to try making that kind of music, so I picked up Ableton and Massive, and started hacking away.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped absolutely hating my own music, but I am still my own harshest critic.  That said, every track I make, I learn something new, and I get better.