Standard #renoise circlejerk:
- Listen to good music
- “That sounds easy!”
- Make song
- “That’s crap!”
- Get frustrated
- Give up
- Moan in #renoise
- …
- Someone in #renoise links good music
- Repeat
Childhood influences… the theme tunes to naff 80’s action series were what got me into synths, mainly this:
and this:
And my parents listening to lots of this got me into beats and rythm:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu33ayLe1JY
Then Amiga Format magazine gave away Octamed as a cover disk and the rest is history… I think my first tune was some synth thing with tabla beats…
Lots of people gave me the overall motivation of musical expression, even if my little music finally don’t sound like their music at all - and is far from being able to produce the same emotions.
The first band open my ears to electronic music “indirectly”, is Pink Floyd, on their Dark Side of the Moon record, with a very clever usage of the VCS, and of course, this concept-album is perfect.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=328WhjAXpcs
Even if I’ve previously discovered Kraftwerk with Radioactivity, I’m not ashamed to say that he’s one of my the first artist being able to bring “directly” a 100% instrumental electronic music to my ears when I was very young :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiY_TbG3GEk
and
I was more or less trying to find a way to get synths & keyboards, and do the same genre of music, (but without the money required) and found some computergames like that :
My musical brain is haunted by those hundreds of simple chiptracks designed for known games, like pinball fantasies, turrican, bomb the bass style, for example. I realised that “tracking” would / could become huge in a near future.
I’ve played a lot some artist / bands performing a proper integration of electronic tools in their songs, like :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCEhO6b6cyQ
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9kpBXTvRXs
For the same reasons, I also like to play some bands like Fear Factory, Rammstein, KMFDM, Pitch Shifter, even the last KorN albums, because the way they try to use electronic gear in the trash/heavy/death/neo/whatever metalgenre.
today, I play lot of things like that
By the way it has nothing in common with electronic music, but I also play lots of film/movie music like this :
or
I’ve been wanting to make music for as long as I can remember, so unfortunately I can’t recall exactly what or whom led me to music. I can say with a utmost certainty that it was Mr. Bungle’s self titled album that led me to want to be a bass player.
I remember having, “Invisible Touch,” at a very young age too. I remember the really funky MTV Video for, “Land of Confusion.” Also, “In Too Deep,” was like a real sappy song I ran around singing non-stop.
But the good new for you, and for me: “In two weeks, nobody is going to remember, we posted this.”
story of my life 
Trance and techno music of the early 90’s and Scream Tracker.
More than anything else, all the music I have listened to strongly influences my projects and my motivation to create. Indeed MC Hammer, Michael Jackson and the Beachboys were some of my first favorites. I went through a hard and classic rock phase in middle school with the likes of Metallica, ACDC, smashing pumpkins, Led Zeplin, and the Who. Then I started getting into electronic by way of the Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Junior Vasquez, Photek, and Richie Hawtin. I got really into the midwest techno scene when I lived in the twin cities Minn/St. Paul (with a brief interlude into the world of more mainstream drum and bass (aka dieselboy and Ronni Size)) and threw a couple of sweet parties with Woody McBride aka DJ ESP while I lived there. Adult. and there album Resuscitation blew me away. For a long time I was also obsessed with the likes of Aphex Twin, Square pusher, Autechre, and Boards of Canada. And of coarse nobody owns breakcore like venitian snares. Lately, I have been into a lot of the stuff on slacker radio’s indie electronica and indie hip hop stations. Some of my favorite recent finds include Kuedo, Machinedrum, Com Truise, Futurecop, M83, Washed Out, Tycho, The Golden Filter, Wisp, Purity Ring, and The Dream. The gaming world of music also interests me. My guilty pleasures are Katy Perry and The Future and anything produced by Lex Luger. 
However, I have memories from early childhood of carrying around dictation tape recorders and recording anything that struck me as worthwhile. Sometimes this included me just talking. Sometimes it included me banging on my casio keyboard. Sometimes it included me recording some daily top ten countdown song I heard on the radio. The process or platform is also inspiring. I can understand how some people are inspired by the hands on process of hardware, but for me its just not affordable. I think renoise is itself inspiring and I have never used another program that allows the level of efficient control over different sound parameters. I think you can get almost any result you want out of any DAW, but it is renoise’s efficiency that attracts me. I can work way faster in it than in anything else I have tried…aka reason, cubase, abelton.
4-5 years old, headphones on, listening to my Mum’s record and cassette collection. I remember being captivated by Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of The Moon, Wish You Were Here; Mike Oldfield’s Crises; Dire Straits’ Love Over Gold and Brothers In Arms; and Black Sabbath’s Master Of Reality. Hearing these made me want to make art at the same high level.
…And of course later on countless other amazing artists and works have influenced me. It’s all weaved into my own style in different ways.
I’m pretty sure it was my original Gameboy which invokes the production streak in me. I remember pluggin in old cartridges just to listen to the music on roadtrips (before i had a pocket player, cassette/cd/mp3/etc). Took me another 15 years to find Renoise, but hey. I’m here. 
It was primarily Infected Mushroom and their songs where they mix Trance and Rock/Metal together, even doing live versions of songs with drums and everything, I was imagining how cool it’d be to make songs like that, I though just imagining the songs and writing them down with some magical software would be enough, and after a few months of “music production” I woke up into a reality… 
Anyway they are still my goal in means of their non-conventional effects usage and how many sounds they can mix together while keeping the sound nice…
I watched some of their “making of” videos and…wow… they use hundreds of channels!! even the smallest of their sounds are somehow layered cleverly, like with shifted vocals. And I’m still trying to figure out how to make these “talking” leads. I wish I could once be so experienced 
oops, ignore…
surprised you didn’t do that already…
Wow 
This is my exact path!!! I’m speechless… even the machine: mine was a 486dx4 clocked at 150Mhz with 8mb Ram. I got Scream Tracker 3 on a diskette with 8 samples. 6 months later Impulse tracker came into my life.
I started making computer music because getting a band together. I used trackers for tracking bass and drums at first, but then i got sucked into loving electronic music because of it… and all the new sounds I could make.
Good old days indeed 
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Martin Virgo, one half of the late 90’s Trip Hop group Mono.
The Trip Hop bug didn’t really infect me, but that CD blew my teenage mind and I really wanted to make that type of music (though instrumental and all from samples). From there, it became DJ Cam, famous Jazzy Hip Hop DJ. I’ve stayed in mostly Hip Hop ever since.
I leaned playing flute in school, later i learned keyboard, also in school.
But what me inspired to make my own music was my big brother. In the early 90’s he got his first Amiga. I learned from my brother how to use it and make some awesome things with it with BASIC programming.
Then, when i was 15, i got my first own Amiga. My brother gave me a disk with a music program called Protracker. I played around with it and did some very noobish things. But i liked it an i wanted to do more and better music.
I went into an Amiga store in my town and found another nice tracker, called Oktalyzer. It was a bit better. It had 8 tracks, 4 more than protracker. Now i did a bit better music with it. But is was not enough for me. I had just a few samples on one or two disks, but i needed more stuff. Again, i went back into the Amiga store and asked about some sample disks. they had none available, but i found this cartridge called Technosound Turbo 2. I bought it and now i was able to make my own sample disks. I recorded and sampled all around me, sampled things from records, CD’s, etc. and made more and now even better music.
But 8 tracks were still not enough for me. Again, back to the store, and got a better tracker called Octamed. It was the one with up to 64 possible tracks. Then i was able to make really good stuff with lots of samples. A bit later i changed from Amiga 500 to Amiga 1200, With a RAM expansion and a better soundinterface. Now i was able to sample things with up to 12 bits, with some tricks even 16 bits. Later, when i was 19 i got an Atari 1040 ST, a new kind of music softwase called Cubase 2.0 and my first synthesizer, a Roland JP-8000. This was an awesome synth. And my beginning of producing trance music. It’s still today my favorite genre i’m producing. And today i’m primarily producing my music still with a tracker, which name you all know. 
But the good new for you, and for me: “In two weeks, nobody is going to remember, we posted this.”
Until someone almost 3 years later posts something. 
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Kind of corny but it was my high school jazz band teacher. Guy was an amazing woodwinds player and did a very good job teaching us the theory behind improv and such. Showed me that music doesn’t have to be intro-verse-chorus-end, it can be organic and open-ended and endlessly morphing like something alive. In recorded music, guys like Coltrane, Miles Davis, Parker – they made some of the most creative, living music so far recorded. Also like and make a lot of much darker stuff myself (goth, industrial, etc) but jazz got me started and is the reason I became a musician.
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