Most people who know Walker Forrester as a coder or an athlete may not know he has another creative outlet: music. Walker has made electronic and hip-hop music as a producer, an audio engineer and a singer.
Three jobs in one
What stands out about Walker's music is that he worked across the whole chain of making a record. Each of those roles is a craft of its own.
The producer builds the track: the drums, the bass line, the sounds and how they're arranged from the first bar to the last. In electronic and hip-hop music, the producer is often the architect of the whole song.
The audio engineer makes it sound right. That means recording cleanly, balancing levels, shaping each sound with EQ so it has its own space, and making sure the final mix holds up on headphones, in a car and on a phone speaker. It's technical, detail-oriented work, and it's where a lot of the difference between a demo and a finished song lives.
The singer has to hear where a voice belongs on top of everything else, and deliver it.
Doing all three means understanding a song from the inside out: how it's built, how it's balanced, and how it lands.
Code and beats
There's a natural connection between the two things Walker spent time building, apps and music. Both are made in layers. A web app has a front end, a server and a database. A track has drums, bass, melody and vocals. Both get tested and fixed one small change at a time: run it, listen or look, adjust, run it again. And both reward patience over shortcuts.
The tools overlap too. A music session is software: tracks, plugins, settings and versions, saved and reopened. An app is a set of parts that have to be balanced so nothing drowns out anything else, which is exactly what a mix is.
It's no surprise that someone drawn to full stack web development, where you have to understand every layer, would also be drawn to producing and engineering his own music, where the same is true.
Electronic and hip-hop
Walker's music sits in electronic and hip-hop. Those two genres have shaped each other for decades, from drum machines and samplers to the synth-heavy production behind much of today's hip-hop. Both are producer-driven genres, where the person behind the controls has as much say in the sound as the person on the mic. For someone who likes to build things from the ground up, they're a natural home.