My Journey So Far…
Welcome to my abyss. My name is Chee Kuok Cern, born in Johor, Malaysia. You can call me KC for short. If you’re curious and want to know more about me, keep reading!
The time when I came into contact with music unconsciously was when my mom brought back a Yamaha synthesiser which she won it from a lucky draw. I had fun making sounds from the presets and playing pre-loaded music and also dancing along with it. This was during primary school years.
During secondary school years, I was really fascinated by songs played on radio. One memory that sticked until these days were me leaning in to hear the instrumentals of “Won’t Go Home Without You” by Maroon 5. For some reason, I was really fascinated by the instrumentations made up the track instead of the vocals.
During 2015, my aunt gave us an electric keyboard and that was the time I watched tutorials on YouTube and learnt to play some of my favourite songs, mostly simple chord progression at a manageable tempo and I would prefer playing chords and sing out loud the leads.
A few months after that, I really had the urge to record music and after digging through the internet, I discovered a multitrack recording software called “MixPad” by NCH Software and this begins my journey of music production, mainly reproducing the instrumental parts of my favourite songs. I would record the sound straight out from the keyboard’s speaker, using the built in microphone from our HP notebook (back then me and brothers shared one notebook), and the result was “good” enough for me at that time. I clearly had no idea about MIDI back then.
My very first track uploaded on SoundCloud was remake of “No Good in Goodbyes” by The Script. The song was nowhere near as polished as I wanted it to be, but I remembered I was in so much joy thinking I was able to make “songs”. I don’t even know about the term “music production” back then. I was doing it purely due to my curiosity and love for music. It served as a humble reminder that I’ve come a long way and I’ve never give up on music despite receiving little support to pursue it.
I would continue to make instrumental tracks and cover songs for the next few years. It was just me taking on these fun little projects. Somewhere along the timeline, I switched from recording on MixPad to Adobe Premiere Pro, and of course it’s the cracked version. This was probably in year 2018. Thinking back, making songs on a video editing software was wild.
In July 2020, I remembered using Premiere Pro to record Coldplay’s The Scientist cover. It was me on the acoustic guitar while my elder brother on the piano. At that time, I just started learning to play the acoustic guitar and you can see I was struggling with chord change. At one point, I thought this is it. We’re going to be the next Jonas Brothers. I keep persuading my eldest brother to take up a music instrument. Of course, it never happened as he had no interest with music and he’s quite tone deaf to be honest.
Several months after that, I switched to using Cakewalk as I remembered vaguely searching on “Professional Music Recording” so that I can be more professional in making music. I continued to watch tutorials in hope to play better at guitar. At one point, I wanted an electric guitar but it was out of my budget. The reason is that I want to make some of my favourite anime’s original soundtrack.
But the absence of electric guitar doesn’t stop me from exploring ways to create similar sound. I was in joy when I discovered about amplifier. I would track the sound from my acoustic guitar into a Razer gaming microphone and into Cakewalk with the stock guitar amp. It got me close to sounding like an electric guitar and voilà, this was my first instrumental track that has electric guitar sound in it.
From there onwards, I’d reproduced several some of my favourite anime’s OST. The shortcoming was me not being able to play in fast tempo so I had to record bits by bits and play around with audio stretching.
On 13 July 2023, I’ve decided to enroll in Andrew Huang’s music production and songwriting class from Studio.com. Andrew Huang has been an inspiration to me and my top favourite video from him was the “First of October” series. While there’s nothing wrong and bad on the lesson, I find myself not sticking with it to the end for some reason.
Updated last on 31 October 2026.