How My Sound Went From Rock to Electronic | 15 Years
Fifteen years of my catalogue, from heavy-rock demos in 2011 to synths and electronic percussion over a rock spine by 2021, and what drove every shift.
My music sound evolved across three phases in fifteen years: heavy and alternative rock in the early 2010s, soft rock and rock ballads by the mid-2010s, then electronic percussion and synths layered over a rock foundation from 2020 onward. I have been writing and producing this catalogue since 2013, and it now runs past 50+ tracks. This is the arrangement-level story, not the software story: what changed in the sound itself, why it changed, and what a record from each era actually sounds like.
TL;DR
- Three phases: heavy and alternative rock in the early 2010s, soft rock and rock ballads by the mid-2010s, electronic percussion and synths over a rock foundation from 2020 on.
- The rock spine never left. Dhund (2021) stays acoustic at its core; electronic-led tracks like Deewanapan Hai and Tu still get guitar and piano layered in.
- The vocal mic changed with the sound: a Shure SM58 through the loud years, a Rode NT1-A condenser once the ballads needed intimacy.
- The 2015 Echoes at Taj detour, all piano, sitar, flute, and harmonium, widened the palette years before any synth showed up.
- Taste led, tools followed. The DAW arc is a separate story with its own post.
The early-2010s rock years, loud and mostly unreleased
I came into solo production out of the Delhi rock band circuit I was playing between 2009 and 2013, and the early material carried that room with it. From roughly 2010 to 2014 what I was writing and tracking was pop rock, heavy rock, alternative rock, and metal. Loud, band-shaped, built for a stage more than a pair of headphones. Most of it never became a finished master. That window is mostly rough demos and jam recordings that stayed demos, which is honest history, not a highlight reel.
The gear matched the loudness. My main vocal mic through this whole stretch, 2010 to 2015, was a Shure SM58, and I chose it for a specific reason: Nirvana. Kurt Cobain's vocal sound sat under everything I was chasing, and the SM58 is the stage-tested dynamic that handles a shouted rock vocal without complaint. I tracked into a cheap M-Audio USB interface and mixed on a cheap pair of Sennheiser headphones I picked up around 2012. None of it was precious. It was a rock rig.
The one record from that early window that made it all the way to release is Aaj Bhi, which came out in 2015 but was tracked in the earlier heavy-rock era. It is vocal-forward and guitar-driven, and it is the clearest surviving evidence of what the loud years actually sounded like once a song was finished instead of left as a jam.
How the sound softened into rock ballads by 2016
The shift did not happen overnight. Across 2014 to 2020 the writing drifted, song by song, from that heavier material toward soft rock and rock ballads. Soft rock is described as rock that smoothed over the edges of singer-songwriter and pop-rock writing, leaning on simple, melodic songs with lush production, and that is a fair label for where my arrangements went: an acoustic guitar bed, a doubling guitar, a bass part, a pad, a minimal kit, and a vocal sitting slightly forward of all of it.
Two records mark that ballad era for me: Alvida from 2016 and Main Ab Bhi Hoon Wahin from the same year. Both trade the stage energy for room and restraint.
The vocal mic changed with the sound, and this is the craft detail that matters most. Around 2015 I moved off the SM58 and onto a Rode NT1-A condenser for studio tracking. A dynamic like the SM58 is rugged and picks up less of a live room, which is exactly why it works on a loud stage, but a condenser captures the breath and detail a ballad lives on. Sound on Sound's technical desk makes the same trade explicit: an SM58 gives you a drier, tougher vocal while a capacitor mic gives you the nuance, and you pick per song. My songs had gone quiet enough to need the nuance. A Focusrite Scarlett Solo replaced the old M-Audio box in this mid era, and cleaner capture invited quieter arrangements in a loop.
Echoes at Taj: the 2015 detour that widened the palette
Right in the middle of that softening, in the first half of 2015, I stopped writing Hindi songs for six months and built a new-age album instead. Echoes at Taj is 14 tracks tracked from January to June 2015, and it is the first time non-rock instrumentation came into my hands at scale: piano, sitar, flute, and harmonium session players, ambient beds, plus two Western classical covers reworked in a modern ambient treatment.
That detour matters to the sound arc even though it is not a rock record. It taught me to arrange with color I had never used, orchestral and acoustic texture layered under vocals, and to think of a track as a palette rather than a band. Years before I folded in a single synth, Echoes at Taj had already broken the habit of reaching only for guitars. The instinct to widen the arrangement showed up first as flute and harmonium, then later as electronics.
2020 onward: electronic percussion and synths over a rock spine
From 2020 the arrangements changed again. I started folding electronic percussion and synth pads on top of everything, which puts the recent catalogue squarely in electronic rock territory: a fusion where synthesizers, electronic percussion, and drum programming coexist with electric guitars rather than replace them. That coexistence is the whole point of how I use it.
Here is the through-line I keep coming back to, and I will give it a name so the rest of this makes sense: the rock spine. The rock spine is the guitar-and-song core that runs through every era of my catalogue. What changed after 2020 is which side leads. Sometimes the guitar-and-song core is the whole track: Dhund from 2021 is pure acoustic folk, guitars and voice, with no electronics driving it. Other times the track is electronic-led and that core becomes something I layer back in anyway. Deewanapan Hai and Tu are both electronic-led records from the post-2020 stretch, programmed percussion and synth pads driving the arrangement, and I still layered guitars and piano into them, because leaving them out never feels finished. That is the tell: even when the electronics lead, I cannot help hanging the rock spine on the track.
The synths themselves are not hardware. Every synth and pad in this era is a software instrument played from a MIDI controller: Native Instruments Kontakt and a set of piano libraries I can switch between from a click in the DAW. I started on a small M-Audio MIDI keyboard with no sounds of its own and later moved to bigger controllers, but I have never owned a keyboard with its own internal library. It is always a controller into the DAW, and the electronic percussion sits in that same software-first setup.
What actually drove each shift: room, taste, and life stage
Three things moved the sound, and none of them was a genre plan on a whiteboard.
The room drove it. The mic arc, SM58 to Rode NT1-A, and the interface arc, M-Audio to Scarlett Solo to an Audient EVO 8 since 2022, kept cleaning up what I could actually hear and capture. The guitars moved too, from an early acoustic to a Fender acoustic to electric, widening what the core instrument could do. Cleaner capture pulls you toward quieter, more detailed writing, because now the detail survives the recording. Loud rooms and rugged mics push you the other way. Gear does not choose your genre, but it absolutely nudges your arrangements.
Taste drove it harder. I grew up an audiophile through the 1990s cassette and CD era in India, on Mozart and the Beatles and Mukesh and Ghulam Ali early, then studying Nirvana's Nevermind and Radiohead's OK Computer closely. Nevermind anchored the loud years and the SM58 choice. OK Computer, with its electronic textures wrapped around a rock band, is the record that made synths feel native inside a rock song rather than glued on, which is exactly the move the post-2020 material makes. My affinity for Beethoven and Chopin fed the Echoes at Taj palette. What I was listening to always showed up in what I tracked two or three years later.
Life stage drove it too. Moving off the live band circuit into solo home production changed the target from a stage to a room, and a room rewards intimacy over volume. The tools followed the same curve without leading it. If you want the parallel story of the software, the DAWs and the one switch I regret, that lives in the DAW switch I regret. This post is its companion: that one is about the tools, this one is about the sound, and the honest order is that taste moved first and the tools caught up.
Fifteen years, one rock spine
The arc reads like replacement from a distance, rock to ballads to electronics, but up close it is addition. Every era deposited a new layer, and the rock spine held under all of it, which is why a 2021 track like Dhund still opens on an acoustic guitar, and even an electronic-led track still gets guitar and piano layered back in. That is also why the label matters more than any single genre tag: I did not switch genres three times, I kept the same core and kept widening what sits on top of it. The catalogue is past 50+ tracks now and still growing, and you can walk the whole arc, loud to quiet to layered, across the music catalogue. The spine is the part that never changed.
