About me

Hello and welcome! My name is Jonathan. I'm in my upper-twenties and work as a software engineer.

Digital music production has been a creative outlet of mine since 2012. I also enjoy personal coding projects, such as my game Dungeon Delve or this very website.

You can reach me at kilreth@gmail.com.

How I started producing music

My parents had a full digital piano in our house growing up, and they enrolled me in piano lessons which included music theory.

My Eureka moment was playing a free Flash game called Epic Battle Fantasy 3, featuring a soundtrack by indie artist Ziyan Su (formerly Phyrnna or HalcyonicFalconX). Every song was memorable and I learned several on piano by ear, developing my skill in transcription.

Because she produced digital music using FL Studio, I downloaded the free demo and started dabbling in it. Since then, it's simply been practice.

Favorite musical artists

I listen to a lot of Japanese music. I'm fond of artists including Absolute Castaway, yanaginagi, Yorushika, supercell, doriko, Manyo, Hagali, and Mahoroba. I also listened to many Vocaloid songs when I was younger.

Other artists include Enya, Mree, Of Monsters and Men, and Gabrielle Aplin. There are many more artists I'd like to give a proper listen.

Favorite game soundtracks

These seem to go hand in hand with my favorite games.

I'd like to shout out Touhou Project, Final Fantasy X, Nier Automata, Expedition 33, Genshin Impact, Skyrim, RuneScape, Ori and the Blind Forest, and the Epic Battle Fantasy series.

Can I use your music in ...

You may use my music for non-commercial projects, just please link back to this website.

Equipment

I use FL Studio as my digital audio workstation (DAW). I enjoyed using the demo so never looked back, though now I understand it's less popular outside of electronic music.

Back in the day, I used free soundfonts and VSTs for classical instruments. These days, I imagine there are even better free resources.

For piano keyboards, I have a Roland FP-30 with weighted keys, and a Novation FLKey 37 for bringing to game jams or playing live with the modulation knob. Both work well for me.

I've purchased many sampled instruments over the years, and can recommend these which make up my current work:

  • Garritan CFX Concert Grand
  • VSL Steinway Concert D
  • Cinematic Studio Series
  • Cinesamples CinePerc
  • Embertone JB Violin, recorders
  • Ample Sound acoustic, electric, and bass guitars
  • Orange Tree Samples rock guitars
  • Steven Slate Drums 5.5
  • Impact Soundworks Tin Whistle
  • Versilian Studios Etherealwinds Harp II
  • Eduardo Tarilonte's world libraries
  • VSL solo strings

On AI

I'm not interested in using AI to generate musical ideas, let alone entire songs. I appreciate the journey in composing and arranging a song.

I do appreciate trained models that can split a song into stems, or can transcribe stems into MIDI notes. I think these have a place where sheet music or MIDI are unavailable.