Published on 2024-02-22 11:52 by Sam Wu

Amit Bhatia

In 8th I picked up Garage Band on my mom’s iPad. I don’t even know why. I think I was just drawn to it. I started messing around with it and I got hooked instantly. I was creating beats and loops and I started experimenting with recording my voice. Obviously, I couldn’t sing or do anything but still, I would practice rapping music and stuff like that.

I became obsessed with it in high school. Early in high school, I got my first Macbook. The Garage Band on Mac is a lot more powerful than on iPad. I decided to start recording things but I didn’t have all the expensive plugins and equipment and stuff, so every day it was like a puzzle. I was like, how can I recreate the expensive plugins on these stock-free plug-ins? And I started finding out ways that were kind of unknown. People hadn’t posted it on YouTube or anything. It wasn’t documented.

I was like a pioneer. I started posting that and one day I looked and suddenly I had like 40 subscribers. I go back and check and I saw I had a few 1000 views on this video. Now, a couple of years later, I have a few videos with 304K or 100K. I started using that as a way to market my services. I do one-on-one stuff for people who don’t have a lot of money to pay for audio engineering. I paused on the YouTube channel a while back and honestly, I paused on the entire music production thing. I mostly do it for fun now.

In college, I continued to focus on drumming. The problem is I can’t just go down in my basement and play drums like I can at home. I’ve sacrificed some of that continual practice, but I don’t think I’ve regressed in school; I’ve improved actually. I think with sound engineering and music production, it’s kind of just dropped off. I can’t just whip out a mic and just start rapping, or I could but I just don’t really feel comfortable doing that. But I think I’d like to keep doing it. It’s a good passion, and I try to hold on to my younger self as much as possible because I think it’s really easy to let yourself go.

Written by Sam Wu