Spektrem was the name I produced music under as my first career. It began in 2012 when my first song, In a Dream became a surprise hit in my college town. It ended in 2016 with the last song I made, Don't Look Down.

The most significant recording from this period is “Shine”, which found a home in the world of NoCopyrightSounds and has amassed over a hundred million plays as of today. Ten years later, it's amazing to me that Shine, and the other songs, still have a loyal base of support.

I don't make music anymore, but it shaped my understanding of the creative process. I still view every creative project as a song, just with different tools and instruments.

A year after I released what I thought was my final song, I wove together fragments of old songs I had never released, and turned them into an album.

As I was working on it, I knew Don't Look Down would be my last song. It captures the sadness of something ending, with the hope of something new beginning.

Miles Above You took me longer to produce than any other, almost two years. I tried so many versions before it finally clicked. It was by far the most intensive production I ever did. It felt like it would never end.

I worked on Shine for over a year. I never felt like I got the sound right. For the first two months after releasing it, I was disappointed and felt like I had wasted my time.

Then I woke up one morning to discover that NoCopyrightSounds had shared it, and it changed the course of my life.

Of all the songs I made, Loretta was the one that made people go the most nuts when we played it live.

Enter The Spektrem was an EP I released in 2013 consisting of 4 songs. The first three all have their own pages. The 4th was a remix of a Calvin Harris song.

Dirtybuzz is my least-listened to song, but its probably my favorite. It was my first venture outside of the standard 128BPM house music. I think of it like an electronic version of Rage Against The Machine crossed with Tomorrow Never Knows.

Sugar was released during a phase where I was trying to spend less time perfecting my songs. This is where I started to learn the difference between wasting time on details that don't matter, and taking the time to get the important ones right. There's a difference, and a lot of people don't know what it is.

Corr is another example of a song I released before I’d gotten it right. It’s a really subtle thing, getting the kick drum to gel perfectly with the bassline, so that when you hear it, you just have to move your body.

So when I hear Corr, I hear unfulfilled potential. Because I was trying to cut back on production time, even if it cost on quality.

All Too Soon was the follow up to my first song, which was a big hit for me. It was also the first of my electronic songs that I sang on.

In a Dream was my first "hit" song. By hit, I mean it was a hit in my college town, where I would hear it blasting out of cars and playing at parties.

And it did well on the music blogs of the time. It rose to #1 one on a popular music-ranking website at the time called FindNewJams, which was like a Reddit for new music. It stayed in the top spot for almost a month. A team in Miami found it and wanted to become my managers, and I agreed.

For me, who had never released an electronic song before, it was a massive experience, and it gave me the confidence to keep making music.

I made music since the age of 12. My focus was always on songwriting. I only cared about instruments to the degree that I could write songs on them.

One of the first things I was really proud of was reaching my goal of writing and recording 100 songs before I left for college. It felt like a big accomplishment, and it laid the groundwork for my time as a music producer a few years later.