Being a self-taught songwriter and musician, Sydney is expanding her skills and horizons with her courses at Explo. She shares her story on how she came to pursue music and where she aims to go with it.
I am taking Graphic Design and Songwriting + Music Composition. I took Graphic Design because it sounded fun, but I’m really interested in music. I really like to write music and I want to be a songwriter when I grow up. I play saxophone, the flute, and I’m working on the cello right now. My regular school has only one teacher for all of the music stuff, so she’s really busy, because we’re not a music-based school. I never had a lot of attention while writing or playing instruments — it’s all self taught. So it’s pretty awesome when there’s a teacher teaching you.
I started [playing music] in 4th grade, when I started with the flute. Up until high school, I hated playing the flute. My parents told me to stick with it and keep going. And so as soon as I got into high school, I started playing and my teacher was really helpful. I fell in love with it. I started self teaching myself with other instruments. Saxophone is definitely my favorite one, because it has so many different tones and a broad range of music to play from. With the flute, you can play mostly classical music. No one is going to play jazz with a flute.
[For songwriting] I’m really more writing instrumental parts, so I’m not very good at writing lyrics just yet. But that’s what I’m learning right now, which is exciting! It’s going really well, I’m enjoying it a lot. I wrote a song in my class. It was a love song, because it’s easy to write. And we had a ukulele and writing love songs with a ukulele is cute. I like rock and punk generally.
I either want to be a writer for a band or a movie soundtrack writer. I love to watch movies just for the soundtracks, because then I can pick them up and get my inspiration from those. How to Train Your Dragon is one of my favorites. John Powell is an amazing writer and he’s so great with different instruments and especially in that movie, all of the works in that are amazing.
Mari Armei