Hello all, my name is Pedro.

I´m a 23 year old composer, self taught guitarrist and drumer and have been taking piano and music theory lessons for 5 months now in a private academy.

Having come across these forums a few months ago i can safely say i have learned a lot here,
so i decided to start posting now that i´m a bit better equiped with musical terms and principles.

I work in 3d animation, (wishing i could devote my whole day to music!) but i am planing to run for music coleage next year, and take a four year composition course.

Until then i have much to learn since the admission test requires basic knowledge of music that i still do not have and i´m sure i can get valuable help in these
forums.

I will be posting some work, doubts (lots of them) and interact with other posts soon, for know i´ll stay with this introduction.

Thank you and see you soon!

Hi Pedro!

I'm very pleased to meet a 23 year old composer from Portugal - how interesting!

Welcome to the Forum.

Hi. Good to have you onboard. Tell us more about your work. Adrian

Whipen boy, please to meet you too and i´m glad you find composers from portugal
interessting, altough there are a few, the truth is it´s not a country with a lot of tradition in composition.

Adrian, thank you, and about my work, well, maybe i should detail my musical background for that (do apologise if i put anyone to sleep but i really feel like sharing .

I come from a family without any kind of musical tradition, yet chance made a cousin of mine get tired of his guitar lessons
and lending (well giving) me a guitar when i was about 7 years old, he was also kind enough to teach me a few major and minor chords
as well as being someone that trough out my life introduced me to a lot of music, i owe him plenty for that.
I soon found out i had a good ear and earing memory, so i started to pick out songs (alternative rock and deviants, kind of...) and after that making my own.

But it wasn´t until i was 12 or 13 yers old that music realy barged into my life, my parents gave me a computer and a friend got me
a piece of software called Cakewalk wich marveled me, for i discovered i could get any instruments i wanted playing for me
just by puting some dots or lines in a timeline and playing it back. That coincided with me discovering classical music, so it blended with my acoustic alternative background and spend some time doing..well...some very weird pieces wich i cherish religiously today in spite of their dubious musical acomplishment

By the age of 16 i entered art school and meet who are today my best friends and togheter we formed a band, i was suposed to be the lead guitar, but chance again made it hard for us to come up with a drumer, so i dived in and started teaching myself, and that lasted for 2 years until a more experienced drumer came along. In spite of being a short experience, i loved every milisecond and i bealive a great deal of my piano fundamentals of today came from there.
Now again playing the electric guitar, we were a band for 3 more years, with a lot of style mutation (from hard rock, to hip hop, to
alternative world music to underground art punk rock, dont know, its hard to define...
At same time, when i finished school i spend a year playing guitar with a 10 element orchestra that played from portuguease and brazilian to
latin folk music, a year later i was preety fed up with it, but it did taught me a lot!

Good times, that well came to an end, life got in the way, my band ended, and me, still wishing to pursue music, aplied to coleage for
a music production course. Wich i failed cause i had never seen a music book or score in my life and here were this guys asking me about
tonality, harmonic progression, contrapunctus and all these obscure terms. As that dream ended, i had to get busy living...and of course get a job.
Chance, ( anoying philosophy i know ) made me end up living 300 miles away from my home town working in computer animation.
That was two years ago and during that time (armed with some better sounding software) i composed every chance i got. The result is, well, really hard to define, but i guess ( and all this talk was to establish just that )
that is undearsteandable if you consider the diferent kinds of music that i have been playing and earing since i was a kid.

Refining that thought, i can tell you that i´ve writen electronic, rock and ambient music, as well as pieces for strings, jazz quartets, as well as some weirder ensembles like xylophone,tambura, kalimba and wood blocks with some noise beat on top, or even pieces for piano, ( wich was an instrument that i had never layed a finger in my life yet always atracted me a lot ) in what what sumed up in a few hours of music that had no real objective, other than being extracted from my head for my own
pleasure, and i should say that for a while that was all i wanted from life!
Yet with increasing financial stability i saw an oportunity to start taking piano lessons ( dont know about the rest of the world but around here they are VERY expensive! ), and found a nice litlle academy a few hundred meters from were i work, the downside for me ( at the time ) was that i had to take musical theory lessons along with the piano lessons cause it was part of their program and havinf being scared by that previous expereience i was relunctant, still i gave it a try...

Five months later i find it to be the best thing that ever happend to me, it is much more acessible than i antecipated, but more than that, it´s beatifull, i can know begin to
undearsteand or signify what i have been doing for more than half of my life, as well as perceive that in a few yeras all i will need is pen
and paper to write down what´s going on in my head, i wont need a computer, i´ll be...well...a more portable composer!!

And the piano...it´s already an extension of myself, even tough i don´t have one:) altough i did
bought a prety decent weighted keyboard just before i started to take lessons.
I find the piano such an imponent orchestral instrument, and i felt more integrated with it that i ever felt with the guitar!
Because of the training i haven´t been composing as much as i did ( the interpretation side of music is also fascinating ), i feel know that i have wasted a lot of time and i am
trying to get it back as fast as i can, but the few pieces i composed ( 3 short piano pieces, a baroque style concerto and a Funeral March in the day my
grandmother died about a month ago...sad day ) are know a refined and maybe more academic expression that added to to my intrinsec ( is that how yu say it?!?), or intuitive
aproach to composition, and altought i do wonder "what if" i had classical training since i was a child, the truth is feel confortable with this mix and bealive this was the right time
to learn this new path!

Of course better than this imense speach is showing some of my work, wich i will do as soon as i can ( don´t really undearsteand how to post audio files yet but i´ll manage ) cause
i´m looking forward for some professional critics on it!

Ok, that´s it, i hope i didn´t over do it, sorry for any miss spelled english, i tryed.
I´ll be posting here soon, see ya.

Pedro, you are to be commended for following your dream, and for attempting things that are difficult even though you may be at a disadvantage. You seem to have the will to finish what you start.

Bravo!

Thanks for letting us get to know you more personally. I look forward to hearing your recordings when you have them ready.

By the way, your English is excellent.

Thank you very much Whippen boy for the kind words! I´ll be posting over the weekend in the composers lounge since beside work i have to study my piano pieces at night cause if i don´t have them flawless by friday my teacher will not assign me new ones.

Again thank you and take care!