My Journey So Far…
On 2 January 2026, I continued to post my daily mastering practice video. At this points, I felt like it’s becoming rather boring and repetitive. I don’t really treat it like a practice session anymore. It’s just an excuse to keep my online presence alive. And this leads me to a switch up of content. It’s perfect at that time as Joji’s was releasing singles to sort of leading up to his new album “Piss in the Wind'“. I took the opportunity to analyse two of his tracks “Past Won’t Leave My Bed” and “ Love You Less” to the best of my ability,
On February 2026, there’s a great addition of music composition call in TRE calendar host by Luke Despain. It introduced me to the sync world which makes so much sense to me as I’ve always struggling to compose and arrange my own music. Luke show case his work based on one of the sync brief in his class slides which I thought it was so good that I keep listening on repeat.
Working with sync briefs is so much more intuitive and helpful for me to get my ideas out. On the second of April 2026, I’ve put out my first orchestral piece which is based on a sync brief. If you’re interested, you can read the brief in the description of the track. Here’s how it goes.
For almost a year, SoundGym has been my go to choice for ear training. On 10 April 2026, I’ve made it into Diamond Ears in SoundGym which is a huge milestone for me.
On the other note, I’m also working on free audio engineering resources, some sort of like a cheat sheet for easy reference. I want to make it as simple as possible yet it’s still packed with information. The idea stems from me being put off by these long winded passages and tutorial videos which I have a hard time going through them. At the time of writing these, I’ve managed to put up EQ, Compression & Saturation resource pages. I tend to come back to read these pages a lot especially on compression and saturation as I’m deciding which type of compressors and saturators to use in my mastering session.
On May 2026, my outbound finally works. They’re people who took interest in me for doing a master for them. The joy I get from this is so fulfilling as I’ve been doing this for a while now and starting to wonder if starting my own mastering business is a sustainable thing to do especially in the age of everything is replaceable by artificial intelligence. If you’re curious about my work, you can check it out here.
June 2026, I focus on three things from now on: continuing honing my song mastering skill, learning mixing from the mentors from Mastering.com and working on a side project which is my very first album that I got inspired from watching anime. The original sound track from titles like Re：ゼロから始める異世界生活, お隣の天使様にいつの間にか駄目人間にされていた件 and その着せ替え人形は恋をする are so good that makes me fall in love with these titles even more. I bought my first orchestral samples library from Spitfire Audio and my album would be mainly composed from this library.
I’ve updated the free resources page with a downloadable link of Ableton Ear Training Template. It serves as a starter kit to guide engineers who’ve just begins their audio engineering journey. There’s also “How to Hear Compression” guide in case you’ve trouble hearing compression. Learning to work with compressor can be frustrating and I think can be super helpful for beginners.
The month of July 2026 was a fun one. I’ve moved out from my parents house to put as much time as I can into learning audio engineering while also doing a side passion project as a composer. This is my very first official project which I put to public, composed & programmed using Spitfire Symphonic Orchestral sample library. It turns out better than I expected. The original reference track came from here. I really like Christian Henson’s video where you can see that he’s really passionate about his music and the projects he took on. His video makes sense for people like me who had never been in music school. You can check out more of his discography here. The other inspiration were drew from the works from Kenichiro Suehiro. I’d only found out about his discography through Re：ゼロから始める異世界生活. Somehow, his composition combining with the animation made me tear up from time to time while I binge watch the anime series.
The month of August came, I’d composed two projects this month. The first one was for TCHC’s The “Summer Challenge” and this was easy to compose in terms of sound selection as you have to use the VST library that they provided. There’s no hardcore production and mixing needed, everything relied on how your composition fits the brief, how the music flows and what’s the story behind the wall of music. The other composition that I’ve made was for Venus Theory’s Discord giveaway. I’d endlessly revised the project due to timing issues. Back then, I had a hard time pin-pointing how to fix these weird messy noise that I couldn’t comprehend let alone fix it when I’m wearing composer hat. I believed my ears developed the ability to hear tiny details better over time which I can say my hard work is well paid off. And just this morning, I’d decided there’s nothing more I can do at my skill level right now, so I decided to call it done, submitted it and shoved it deep into the abyss (my external drive). Both compositions are available below.
September was hard for me as I wasn’t getting the results that I’ve wanted and I keep telling myself that it’s fine as there’s no overnight success. I know that with consistency and the right intention, I’ll get to where I want to be in the next few years. This was just one of the many setbacks that I’d encounter along the journey. I just have to keep enduring.
I’ve been pouring a lot of efforts into getting better at mixing over the past few months now. I felt like I’m getting better but there’s still much more to be done for me to reach grammy level mixing. It can be frustrating at times but I find it really enjoyable most of the time.
What happened to my usual social content post? It’s been more than a month now since I’ve posted anything. Part of me wished I can be more consistent with my uploads but in reality I barely have enough time as I have to take breaks in between learning and working in DAW session so that I can sustain my health in long term. Part of me feels like this just an excuse. Either way, I have to figure it out how to streamline my workflow and get everything done.
Also, I’ve been working on a video which is a monologue concept video and there’s jumping in between scene with my own spin of composition on it. There’re still a lot of progress to be done and hopefully to be published by end of next month (which never happened lol).
I went to open mic night at Swee Lee Lot 10 which happened at the last Friday of every month. I really enjoyed the performance by different nationalities of musicians and artists. There was one performance that really stood out to me was by JZainal. I can tell straight away that he’s a real professional singer and he was overflowing with confidence. It was a fun experience to connect with these like minded people who cares deeply about music.
Just before October came, I have the opportunity to catch very first live orchestral show by UNDERTALE: The Determination Symphony at Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre. The performance was done by Metropolitan Festival Orchestra. Though the crowd management could be better but overall it was great and beautiful show. I was hesitant at first but I will be missing out on so much value which I can get out the show, like listening to how live orchestral sounds in a real hall instead digital records. Hearing the harmonies especially from the string instruments hit me in a weird way and I teared up a bit at times.
In October, I really feel like I need to make more relevant content and therefore, I’ve posted three long form videos which I felt quite happy with it. These were me talking about new limiter from Naturl Audio, Ollo X1 review and the process of me doing test master for client. I still need to improve on making engaging video and I find my pronunciation a bit lacking.
I spent a lot of time playing Stardew Valley on Nintendo Switch. Why? I was looking for things to do when I’m taking a break from mixing and mastering session and I thought I could treat myself a bit with the game. Given that I love “Harvest Moon” and I have an addiction towards gaming, I spent almost too much time on it. Eventually, I decided to put away the console just to control my gaming addiction.
So instead, I switched to watching the anime titled “響け！ユーフォニアム”. How did I find it? I was at AnimeFest+ last month when the trailer played on the big screen and it immediately caught my attention because the story revolved around Wind Ensemble and oh boy, it a really beautiful anime in terms of soundtrack composition, voice acting, animation, character development and story telling. And as you know I am an emotional boy, I ended tearing up whenever I hear this. No spoilers but here are some of my favourite tracks from the anime. Definitely worth every minutes watching it as I thought these were really good references for me to level up my orchestral composition skill.
Speaking about composition, I’ve finished my second orchestral track and I am quite happy with it. A lot of revisions, going back and forth on production and mixing session, getting feedbacks and eventually landed on quite a decent result. The release would be on the 13th of November and it’s also part of the tracks from my upcoming album release. The whole album concept is very much inspired by the game “Harvest Moon” and “Stardew Valley”.
During this month as well, I did a test master for Gramcavë. I really like his music style so I reached out to him and the best part was he took a chance on me. The song is called “Skyscrapers” from the album “catching fireflies”. So here’s the master that I did for him.
Updated last on 31 October 2026.