In case you didn’t know, this blog is run by two people who go by the artist name Sahin Meyer, we’re a married couple. We have both been DJing since 1999, and Shy has been producing since 2001. When we moved to London in 2007 we decided to join forces in DJing and so Sahin Meyer was born… later on we decided we would make music together too but in all this time I’ve just been the one sitting there verbalising, I’ve never been hands on.

I have wanted to make music ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a pianist but I never got round to it. When I was little, say 8/9, I asked to play piano at school and they wouldn’t allow it as I didn’t have a singing voice. When it comes to electronic music I’ve tried to sit in front of the computer a few times but I can’t handle the things anymore (I worked in the IT industry for 8 years – when I started it was the only career I wanted to be involved in but towards the end didn’t want to see a computer ever again).

I came across this video of Underworld performing at Fiji Rock in Japan a few years ago and my desire to produce music has been really frustrating me since, I so badly want to make people feel the way this video made me feel (similar to the reason for me becoming a DJ actually)…

I came to the realisation that I would need to do a course to learn the programs otherwise I never would… I’d been wanting to do an intensive 6 month Electronic Music Production course but was finding it hard to justify spending £3,000.00. I was very close to doing it a month ago but then at the last minute decided against it. There are a lot of cheaper online courses but let’s be serious, if I couldn’t handle trying to learn Ableton by myself for 5 minutes, how would I self-motivate myself and do an online course.

Then I read my colleague’s (Hannah Briley) piece on RA about the Point Blank Logic Course and it actually sounded good, something I could do. The fact that you have a set schedule every week and don’t have to work at your own pace is what interests me.

So I’ve enrolled. The reason I chose Logic is because if I need to learn Ableton later I could probably self teach myself applying what I’ve learnt on Logic to Ableton. Logic looks a lot more complicated.

I’m a little nervous but mostly super excited and looking forward to being able to work hands on with my husband (get your minds out the gutter). He’s very talented, especially for someone who’s never had formal training in DAWs or any kind of music training and I know that together we’ll be amazing… or at the very least have some fun.

Before the course starts Point Blank have put up some Getting Started notes. They mainly tell you a) what you need (Logic 8 or 9, a midi keyboard, speakers and sound card), b) how the schedule works (Mondays they release your week’s lesson, Thursdays are an hours live chat with the tutor and your classmates, Sundays assignments are due), and c) info on your set-up, sound-card and how to make sure your sound-card and keyboard are connected. You also get to read a little about your ‘classmates’: there are 11 students in my class & they came from Australia, USA, India, Brazil, Canada and UK, there’s even 2 other woman – which makes a welcome change as pretty much most of my DJ career I’ve been the only girl. For the first 5 years I was the only female DJ in my hometown (Durban, South Africa), and the first girl moved in from another city… only now with the advent of computer mixing as a norm are there more females (I’m of course excluding bedroom DJs which I wouldn’t have known about).

The first week started on Monday 7 Nov, so join me next week as I talk about my experience of Lesson 1 :What Is MIDI Sequencing?

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