Mike Shinoda -- Defining Moments

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Mike Shinoda Learns to Fly With Technology

Like millions of Americans, Linkin Park vocalist and producer Mike Shinoda started out as a kid with a piano. Every week, he took lessons and learned scales, chords and melodies. At the time, he wasn't being groomed to be a superstar producer, he was just playing music. Then he got a keyboard, sampler and a four-track recorder -- and everything changed. He went from playing classical songs to tapping into the cultural zeitgeist of his own generation.

"My friends and I did serious rap songs, and we did joke ones and we imitated other rappers from Snoop Dogg to Wu-Tang Clan at the time," Shinoda told Noisecreep. "If you can imagine me doing that at the time, it's pretty funny. But it gave us a little bit of a taste of both how easy and difficult it is to actually do that. On one hand were like, 'Oh we can make a song that sounds just as good.' And then you play it back to back and 99 times out of 100, it's definitely not."

There's a magic ... that everyone who does what we do is chasing.

The songs Shinoda wrote in his early teens may not have lived up to the caliber of his heroes, but with time and lots and lots of trial and error he learned how to structure songs both poppy and experimental and blend various genres, including rap, rock and metal. While Shinoda cut his craft with archaic cassette tapes and four-track recorders, today's starting musicians can enter the playing field equipped to sound professional right off the bat.

"Young musicians have a distinct advantage in the sense that the technology allows them to capture their ideas and share them with friends," Shinoda told Noisecreep. "Everything is more readily available. I mean it's cheaper, it's easier, everything about it spells out, 'We're gonna have more kids making awesome music, right?' But the [real question] is who are the ones that shine? Who are the real inspirational musicians of that new batch? And the batch is gonna be exponentially higher every year that this stuff grows and gets better."

The question is rhetorical. However, having learned from experience, Shinoda stressed that it's just as important to challenge and inspire friends and music listeners as it is to please yourself.

"One thing that I like to believe is that -- as more and more people get a chance to experiment with music and experiment with recording and actually writing a song -- they'll realize as they do it how hard it actually is to get it right and make a song that not only makes you, but somebody else go, 'Wow, that moved me. That feels important to me.'

"There's a magic ... that everyone who does what we do is chasing. You want that thrill that what inspired you and was exciting to you also made someone else go, 'I'm a fan of that.' Whether it's one person or millions of people, it still feels good.

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