Hey ok so, sometimes I play piano. That is to say, I sit behind the keys of a piano and attempt to make arrangements. These are sequences that repeat, and then migrate to other patterns. These patterns, honestly, though... I have no idea what I'm playing. I don't know what key I'm in, I don't know what notes are being played. All I know is that I like it, and it sounds good.
There are patterns in music. And I'm not trying to base what I play on what other people are doing. I'm just trying to find patterns that fit and work together, as well as in conjunction with other patterns. These become familiar, and then I start to play those more frequently in the same chronology. Possibly find other ways to make it sound even better. I try to find patterns which sound familiar but that which I can't claim that are from other places, which is why I'm so reluctant to learn cover songs. I like the plausible deniability of not knowing how to play other people's music, so that mine can remain my own. It's a tactic I've used a whole bunch.
I've written a bunch about music, chords and harmonies and some of what I know is based on theory. Right now there are a few piano songs that I've been interested in listening to. There's this one by Beethoven which was also utilized as the background music to the Coleco game "Antarctic Adventure," there's some of the pieces Yann Tierson wrote for the Amelie soundtrack (particularly the one called... I forget, it's in French but it's awesome). And some of these renditions of Lana Del Rey songs that I found entertaining to listen to. I like the piano versions of Old Money, Radio, as well as Ultraviolence, although the ones I found on iTunes are played somewhat robotically.
Before I really understood how to play piano, I was composing on the Reason software. That's something I picked up when I was about 22, because all of my earliest compositions were from 2002. I've saved everything I've ever written in Reason, and there's tons of pointless nonsense in the folders, but they're all arranged by year of the composition in folders that go all the way back to 2002. We're at 2017 and I've taken a sabbatical from composing, and took a detour in 2013 with Space Pirate for a couple of years, but it seems that because of the interest in film work that I've been developing, it's going to go back to classical style compositions as it once was in the early days.
In the beginning, I was writing really complicated pieces simply by clicking the mouse on points, composing with precision in the midi board itself. There were a few odd chord changes here and there, and a lot of it was point / counterpoint. There were a series of "synthonies" (synthetic symphonies) and it compelled me to become interested in the magic of the electromechanical devices known as Band Organs, which were like giant wooden computers that could only do one thing: play music. As I thought in that time how the fundamentals of early logic switches worked, often in those applications as physical switches controlled by electromechanical devices, I began to develop a more profound understanding of what an incredibly magical world we truly live in.