Flavour Blog 🌸

When I was a child I learned playing the piano for a few years but stopped after changing from elementary to high school. From then on I would only play for fun and by ear, not understanding much of music theory. As the years pass and I became a teenager I started getting really into electronic music and listened to Techno, Hardstyle and similar genres almost exclusively for many years. For a short time around 2017 I tried my hand at making my own electronic dance songs using the free version of FL Studio 12 but found out very quickly that I lacked the skill for it and my interest waned.

Fast forward to October 2019 when my best friend, who is today known as amici466, wanted to try out making rap music. Using his own money and without any plan on how to approach the elusive goal of "becoming a rapper" he bought a gaming laptop, FL Studio and the AutoTune Pro plugin. When both arrived, he wrote me on Whatsapp whether I would be interesting in playing around with the software. I hesitated at first because I remembered being very disappointed when I had first tried to make music using FL Studio but he convinced me with a now legendary sentence (paraphrased from German):

"There's not much more to it than playing a beat and tweaking the Autotune settings."

Little did we know that this would be the start of a now three-and-a-half year long journey of learning how to make modern music from scratch. Fortunately we had the opportunity to use a recording studio at his work place (he works at a company producing music instruments), so we didn't have to pay for a microphone and audio interface right from the start. After three months making the first steps we fell in love with the process of making music and started buying equipment to set up our very own studio in an empty room in the house my best friend's father lived in back then.

And then Covid hit.

Only two weeks after our studio was ready to use for the first time Germany declared the first nation-wide lockdown. In hindsight this was the best thing that could have happened at the time. While the company my best friend worked at switched back and forth between home-office and normal work my university decided to hold most of the courses of the next three semesters online. These next one-and-a-half years offered us the freedom to pour a lot of time into making music. Some weeks we met on four evenings to write, record or mix songs. Looking back, most of the songs we made in 2020 are somewhere between cringe or really bad, yet it somehow didn't feel like that at the time. Every song was a little bit better than the one before and that kept us going. I never felt like I wanted to be a singer and was happy to learn vocal mixing so I could enable the amici466 project while remaining in the background for the most part.

On New Year's eve 2020 amici and I were on our own in our music studio feeling very sad because we could not meet friends like we had the years before due to strict rules during the pandemic. As we celebrated the new year we decided to write a song together. And so it came that I wrote my first verse in German which would later be released on a feature single with amici466 in January 2021. I started enjoying the art of song-writing and slowly wrote more feature parts for German songs with our friends from the way2wavy collective.

And so, in the September of 2021, I started to work on my first English solo song "Flavour". At that point my artist name was "joshyficated" and I would write, record, re-record and mix the vocals for "Flavour" for nearly half a year in total until I was satisfied. Somewhen around February 2022 I finally finished my debut single and was looking for a new artist name that would have a more modern pop-music vibe. And so I took "Joshy", which is a stylized spelling of my first name, and the name of my debut single to create the artist name Joshy Flavour.