Are there any feel-good stories of your mom(mum) or dad turning you onto this electronic music production world. Whether you’re 12yrs old or 60 yrs old, please tell me how your parent mentored you into this life.
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Just feel-bad stories here.
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My mum got me my first guitar for my 17th birthday, that was nice.
How I got into it electronic music is a bit strange. I’d bought a box on eBay that was marked as deceased estate or something lime that. Anyway, it had a Zoom multi fx pedal that I wanted for a good price, and some other random stuff mentioned in the listing but not pictured. One of those was Matrix 1000 switch.
So after some internet searching I figured it was most likely to be a footswitch for the hughes and kettner matrix 100 amp… but in the process I discovered the existence of the Oberheim Matrix 1000. I’d never really thought of synthesisers as something I could buy and use, but I knew that I liked those electronic sounds in songs that weren’t guitars. Now was that ever the start of a rabbit hole.
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My father had a massive record collection but was very dismissive for the most part of stuff that I liked and I often felt I couldn’t admit to liking the things I did although he bought me a Kraftwerk lp for my 13th birthday. I can totally understand now though why he was so dismissive of much of it. Now I’m even more jaded and critical then he was. My mother agreed to buy me an acoustic guitar when I was 11 but only if I would to take lessons so I took classical guitar lessons for a couple of years from this very nice old lady with arthritic fingers and it gave me a major head start as I learned to play bass and melody without a pick. The catalyst was a teacher at primary school who used to play Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells in the assembly hall for the other class and I would say i needed to go to go to the toilet so I could go and listen to it and it was nothing at all like the music that my father played. I was absolutely enchanted by that record and became totally fixated on wanting to play the guitar and make sounds like that. I asked my dad to buy it for my 10th birthday. He bought it from WHSmiths and then put it away until my birthday and when I got the chance I used to sneak into his wardrobe when he went out and play it then put it back again. That record literally set the course of the rest of my life, as cringey as it might seem now.
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A few memories stand out for me. My dad was heavy into music, showed me piano at about 5 years old. He had an Atari ST sequencer… and I want to say a Roland D50? Can’t remember the model but I do recall repeatedly asking him to replay the demo song of flight of the bumblebee…
I thought it was the most amazing thing I’d ever heard… to see this machine generate all these crazy sounds!
We had a Hammond organ in the house, that somebody gifted to him… I learned to play keys on that! lol. Crazy in hindsight…
Fast forward to growing up in the 90s and I remember dad having a QY sequencer, MC 303, a Korg M-50… basically a bunch of gear I would come to appreciate much later, once I got into production seriously around the time I entered college…
One of my first experiences with sequencing or creating music was using Magix music studio on his computer… creating sequences with a bunch of different sample CD’s, (Future Music stuff, Zero G, Uberschall etc.)
So dad really set it all off for me… not only teaching me piano and a bunch of theory but the lust for gear probably started way back then when I got to mess around with all of his stuff!
Funny thing is he still swears by that QY sequencer to this day! I try to show him all the cool stuff that’s out now but he would rather stick to what he knows lol. very much Anti-GAS!!
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He bought this :
My father was in a hip-hop group in the 90s, which was on the outskirts of Hieroglyphics in Oakland. All of the members know Del personally (one was his childhood friend, one was his hype man, one was on the cover of his first single, etc.), so I was around SP-1200’s, Ensoniq EPS-16’s, and Yamaha QY70’s from birth lol I’m grateful that I was around these individuals, collections of vinyl, and these machines too. Definitely shaped me into who I am today
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My dad isn’t into electronic music, but he certainly was responsible for my love of music and technology. He’s an electronic engineer, inventor, general creative type and played guitar and a bit of banjo in various bands for most of his life. He introduced me to bands like The Shadows, Deep Purple etc which were pretty good at establishing a foundation of my music tastes. Deep Purple’s Made in Japan album has a lot of extended jam freakouts, sometimes bordering on noise, thanks to Jon Lord running his organ through ring mod and distortion. The Shadows’ 80s work got pretty electronic with drum machines and synths, even including a cover of Jarre’s Equinoxe:
Bonus content
Me with my dad in ~1995 playing bluegrass standards 
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It would be interesting posting ages.
My guess is at a certain age parents become more supportive.
At 48, I only have stories of my parents trying to talk me out of anything I was interested in.
That goes for most people I know aren’t my age.
At some point parents started to change, probably post internet in every household.
You just see there’s more options
By any chance do you know DJtminusone?
My dad was into rock rather than electronic, but he loved playing the Yamaha PSS-480 when I was growing up; he went through at least five of them. It was my first introduction to synths and also sparked my love of the FM sound (along with the Sega Genesis). He passed away a couple years back, so I inherited a few semi-functional 480’s. I’m hoping to combine them into a single working keyboard.
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My dad always had an acoustic guitar around and could play a good bit. I learned a little bit from him, but a lot of it came from friends and internet as I got more and more interested in it.
When I was a teen they got me an electric that I loved.
Well, that might be how I got started playing music, but getting into gear has to do with being a part timer for a while when my oldest kid was very young and having that free time to play music. I used to watch a lot of videos about guitar pedals and somehow I started seeing stuff about small synths and eventually Korg Volcas.
I think I first got a Volca FM, tried out a few others and slowly moved on to different gear. Messing around with hardware synthesis really got me back into actually making music and re-sparked my creativity. Guitars are very nice, but messing around with filters and envelopes and all the crazy stuff you can do with these boxes feels like I’m in another universe of sound.
I do really wish that I had been in a situation where I could just try out different synths instead of buying and selling and buying and selling to try to find the right ones for me, but I am very happy making noises with them. Maybe TMI. I’m working on getting over the GAS.
nah, not hip at all. is he out in the Bay?
He used to be, maybe LA tho. Was a DJ for one of the guys from Jurassic 5.
I met him living in Shreveport Louisiana. Super cool cat who knew so many of my favorite hip hop artists personally.
I’m pretty sure Del got heavy into the Octatrack.
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My dad got me into gear indirectly by listening to Genesis’ Abacab a lot when I was little. Later on when I was in my early 20s, I heard Beaucoup Fish by Underworld, and the ending of the song “Cups” reminded me of the synth riffs in Abacab which sparked some weird nostalgic reaction (did I forget to mention the acid?) that lead to me trying to figure out synths and how that kind of music was made. Several poor financial choices later I was into gear.
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He definitely does. I was over his house last week, and will actually be going back next week. He offered to swap his OT for my M8…but I just couldn’t do it lol I LOVE the OT, and hope to get another soon, but I love the M8 and won’t let this one go.
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That’s bad ass!
Heiro was hella influential to so many.
Cool that he’s still at it
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absolutely. he’s got a ton of gear and is super into modular right now. Still raps his ass off too lol
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Saw a gig with Blackalicious and Del headlining in Dallas. Blackalicios wasn’t as well known, most everyone there went for Del.
Blackalicious killed it, and Del got hammered at the bar. His set reflected that 
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No, although my parental figures did show up for my final exam with the non-idiomatic improvisation class (listed as “Introduction to Music Making”), and said “you better keep working on that song!”
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