My first serious step towards music began at the age of 14. It was then that I started taking classical music drums lessons in a public music school. For a long time I learned the marching drum, then later the timpani (an influence you can hear in my metal project Summoning). Later I also learned to play the jazz / rock drumkit where I learned how to play independent rhythms with both arms. When the drumkit was no longer enough for me, I bought an electric guitar and a distortion device and was impressed by the fact that I could create such a powerful sound with such a small instrument. It didn't take long, and I started to buy a 4 track recorder with which I could record drums as well as guitar and vocals myself and in this way became independent of other musicians - which I really appreciate, even if it was a lousy recording quality.
But during all that time, playing the instrument was never in the foreground, but rather a necessary tool. I always had ideas and conceptions of my own music in my head and saw traditional instruments only as a kind of tool for realizing these ideas. Playing itself never meant so much to me, and it was also the reason why I never wanted to play covers. For me, reproducing finished music was a waste of time. The constant practice of already finished songs was always a burden for me and never a passion. So I have always been more of a composer than a musician.
When I finally discovered the synthesis, I had a kind of inner revolution. Suddenly everything that I create in music was so easy to achieve, in the best quality, without having to deal with the "materialization" of my ideas. I was finally able to concentrate fully on my work as a composer and could realize my ideas much easier and faster than ever before. Not only that, I also had everything much more under control than I ever had with the drumkit or the guitar, I was able to set every single note on the computer exactly as I had imagined, in the exact length, even could control each sound down to the last detail in order to adapt the sound of the current instrument to my melodies I had in mind. I felt more like classical composers of history who also created music by writing notes on paper (in my case using the mouse on the computer) without playing an instrument.
Since then, I have played physical instruments of course again, but they have always been of secondary importance, while synthesis and production on the computer are my absolute foundation and will remain so to this day.