Today, the 12th of january, I subscribed to Newgrounds one year ago.
This is about how Newgrounds influenced (read: totally changed my life) in one year.

First of all, I'll tell you how I got on Newgrounds.

I got into a game called 'Flashflashrevolution' or 'FFR' in short. My skills at the game improved steadily, so I got to play songs by Cornandbeans. I got really interested in his music after a while, and then I found out he had a profile on that site too. From there he linked to his Newgrounds artist page. So yeah, I went on his newgrounds profile, and found out that he had quite a lot of music on here. I spent hours browsing his tracks and downloading them.

I went on his myspace profile, which said that he uses reason 3 and Fl-studio 7. I got inpired to make music too, since I read that he was actually my age. I had already used FL-studio 6 before, but I sucked majorly at it. So I decided to get my hands on reason after watching some videos about it. Ofcourse I chose the most recent version, number 4.

So then my music production adventure started, I played around with reason, and got to know it a bit. I wrote 'DnBcore', later renamed to 'Cold Revenge'. I had little or no knowledge about music production at that time, so yeah, you can hear it's not that good. I didn't get much feedback on it, as I knew no-one on the site. I wrote another song, 'Absolute waviness', a 5 minute long crappy 'trance' track, even worse than cold revenge in my opinion. Same thing goes, not much response to it.

Then I wrote 'Obsession Of Force'. This is were things changed for me. I started writing it in reason only. At the time of making it, I was also browsing some other artists I had discovered, including Kr1z. I found out that he was tired of the 'zerobombers', and he was about leave NG. He wrote this on his blog. I pm'd him about it, telling him his music was great and he shouldn't just quit because of that, since he had quite a bit of legit fans one here too. He replied that he wasn't going to leave after all, so I replied again, saying I was happy about that, and I also aked his msn. Since he's also Belgian, I could just talk Dutch to him.

Kr1z started giving me advice on writing my song. He told me he uses FL-studio, and he uses this great VST plugin, which most of you audio artists know, Refx Nexus. He showed me some demos of it's capabilities, and I was instantly in love.

So yeah, I still had Fl-studio, and I got myself nexus, and I started writing little pieces for 'Obsession of force' in fl-studio (with Nexus) and then exported them, and added as samples in Reason. The song still sucks though, though I didn't really realize that at the time. It got majorly 0'ed, and I got a bit pissed off about it.

I joined 'TEH 5TEAM', which was founded by Kr1z and F-777. I started really advertising it in reviews and such, and we got quite a bit of new members. It were the 'glory' days of teh 5team. One day, we got a group conversation of 5team people started on msn. It was quite funny, but pretty spammy ofcourse. I decided to add everyone from that conversation to my contacts.

On an unrelated note, I made my song 'Frozen mind', which was my first full song in FL, and it turned out quite nice.

A few days later, one of the people in the 5TEAM group chat started talking to me again. I don't remember how we got to it anymore, but we ended up talking about pretty personal things.,

At this time I started writing 'Twilight to Mydnite', a song decicated to the girl who made that banner up there at my profile. (Mydnite) That song was also my first (and only so far) song that got a weekly best spot, which I was very happy about.

We kept talking as the days passed, and we got really good friends. REALLY good friends, and well, fell in love right around the time I was writing the second part of Twilight to Mydnite, which caused it to be filled with love emotion. (Like in the author comments)

We ended up finally meeting in the summer, which was fantastic. We talked a lot over MSN in the following months. During the holiday season we met again at last.

I played around with FL-studio for months and months, but I never got enough inspiration to finish a whole song. Which might have been a good thing, since I learned loads through all that practice. Kr1z was learning new techniques too, and he told me about them, so when he learned, I did too. My girlfriend taught me some things too, and vice versa. There are also various other people who have influenced me on my music skills. Zenon gave me some really helpful tips for goa. Karco gave me some mastering tips, I read Nav's blog, and many more =)

I also started going to the audio forum, first as a newbie, but ah well :) I got involved in a major audio people chat on msn, including Chronamut, Envy, and another bunch of people. I added most of them to my contacts. So yeah, more people to learn from, You know who you are, how insignificant it may look in your eyes, you're all part of me developing my skills. I started going on that forum more and more, and I really fell in love with the atmosphere there.

Thank you Newgrounds. For turning my life upside-down.

Thanks to this whole year on NG, I found the girl I love, I got to know a whole bunch of new friends and I learned so much about making music. My English greatly improved too, since Dutch is actually my first language.

All because of Newgrounds. Thank you for reading Newgrounds. Thank you for being here for me.