I taught myself guitar in high school and generally enjoyed making up my own stuff as opposed to playing existing songs. Things started to get interesting once I started recording many layers with a looper and arranging & adding effects in Audacity.

During college I started experimenting with music production in LMMS. This initially involved cutting up, stitching together, and overlaying a variety of interesting-sounding samples (sourced from looperman.com) to form a background, and then creating a melody from scratch using guitar or violin/cello, sometimes throwing in piano for bridges or general support.

Midway through college I became interested in film scoring and created an orchestral album fully from scratch. After that I created some more mainstream pieces including a remix as well as some pieces from scratch (melodic EDM and a beat).

While sorting my life out at the end of college (2018), I realized that although I really enjoyed making music, I enjoyed math more, was better at it, and it was more marketable. So I ended up dropping music production and leaning fully into math instead. Years later, while consolidating my personal archives, I re-discovered a bunch of old songs and uploaded them to YouTube for safekeeping.

2022 Update: While listening to covers of popular songs, I realized it's possible to create an even better "compound cover" by layering good covers on top of each other (and cutting up, rearranging, and/or leaving out different sections of each cover). However, it's very tedious to sync up the timing of each cover -- I got it close enough manually for a proof of concept, but I think some kind of auto-synchronization algorithm would be needed to really solve the issue. I'd like to explore this further once I have more time.

Below are all the musical pieces that I feel are interesting enough to share, organized into several playlists.

I played live a couple times. It was fun. I don't have much footage, but "pics or it didn't happen," so here's the proof. (Photo credit: Jonathan Baker; video credit: my dad)