From cracked Fruity Loops to my own debut album — this is the story of rediscovering joy through trance, tech, DAWS, AI, and soul
I didn’t plan on returning to music in my 40s. Honestly, I thought that part of my life was long gone and boxed up with the old MP4 player I used to run with and the cracked copy of Fruity Loops I installed on our family computer back in Thunder Bay in the late 90s/2000s.
But sometimes the things we let go of quietly wait for us to come back.
In the late 90s/early 2000s, I was just a teenager with no gear, no training, and no real clue what I was doing. I just had a deep love for trance and free time to spend clicking, arranging, and remixing loops on Fruity Loops (before it rebranded as FL Studio).
I wasn’t trying to “make it.” I was just chasing a feeling. Music was where I went to dream. To escape. To create something bigger than my circumstances. But then life took me into a different direction and lost that magic.
Fast forward to now. I’m 42. After decades of career burnout, spiritual reawakening, building a business, and navigating life’s many phases, I’ve finally come back to the thing I left behind. I missed how it felt to tell a story through sound.
I came back for joy. For expression. For me.
Why I Came Back to Music
In my teens and twenties, trance music meant everything to me.
I was the kind of person who went running through the forest trails of the Cascades in Thunder Bay with headphones on, fully immersed, heart open. The music didn’t just fill the silence — it transformed it. Each step felt like flight. Each beat, like a heartbeat outside of my body.
It wasn’t just music. It was movement, emotion, freedom.
That place, that time, and that sound became part of who I am.
I spent the first 22 years of my life in Thunder Bay before moving to southern Ontario to be with my husband. Life got busier. Creativity took a backseat. I threw myself into a career for survival and then into entrepreneurship to thrive and then I life came full circle. I found music again.
But it never truly disappeared.
Relearning the Craft and Letting It Evolve
Music technology has changed so much these past 20 years! These days, I’m not just creating music. I’m producing, arranging, engineering, and even enhancing my vocals with DAWs and AI.
A DAW, or Digital Audio Workstation, is software used to record, edit, produce, and mix music on a computer.
I’m not going to pretend I’m a natural singer. I’m not. My voice isn’t radio-ready on its own, and I don’t have a studio setup with top-tier mics. But I do have tools. And curiosity. And the willingness to experiment.
My vocals are engineered. It’s not my voice anymore. It started with my real voice, but I evolved it into something new with AI technology and DAWs. I am not going to pretend I am a singer when I am not. I just learned how to use technology to enhance my voice with AI vocal tools. It’s not about tricking anyone. It’s about building a feeling.
I consider myself more of a music engineer and storyteller — not a singer. I build sonic spaces that hold memory, movement, and emotion. That’s always been the goal.
Tools of the Trade: Traditional Meets AI
My current workflow is a hybrid of traditional DAWs (digital audio workstations), audio plugins, and AI-powered tools that help speed up production and inspire new sounds.
Here’s a peek inside some of the tools I mess around with:
DAWs and Hybrid Tools
- FL Studio — Still my go-to. It’s where I started, and I still love how intuitive it feels. Some of the new plugins have built-in AI features now, making it faster to explore creative ideas.
- BandLab — Cloud-based DAW that’s great for sketching on the go. It includes AI tools like auto-mastering and smart instruments.
- Cakewalk — A full-featured DAW that I use for final arrangements and mixing. Its intelligent editing tools help polish everything.
- Audacity — I use this a lot if I am not doing too much editing. It is simple and classic. Great for cleaning raw audio quickly.
- Boom 3D — This one’s for listening. It enhances playback and lets me hear mixes in an immersive way.
AI Tools
- Fadr — Lets me separate stems and isolate vocals or instruments for remixes or sampling.
- Kits.AI and Controlla Voice — Vocal modeling tools that let me shift tone, add texture, or even emulate different vocal qualities.
- SoundID Voice AI — Enhances vocal clarity and presence. Makes my DIY vocals sound much more polished and expressive.
Voice-to-MIDI / Performance Tools
- Vochlea Dubler 2 — One of my favourite tools. I can hum, sing, or beatbox into it and instantly generate MIDI. It bridges emotion and production perfectly.
My Music Releases: From Singles to an Album
Before I committed to a full album, I released three singles that helped me reconnect with my creative self.
🎵 She’s Waiting For You
My debut track. It’s a throwback to early 2000s-style vocal trance — lush, layered, dreamlike. The song is a message from the Earth, the Divine Feminine, Mother Nature herself. A reminder that she is alive, listening, and waiting for us to ground and return to her.
🎵 Breathe In Me
A deeply personal song about love and grief — how they coexist, how we hold onto people we’ve lost, or fear losing those we love most. It’s soft, aching, intimate. A sonic sigh.
🎵 Run Through the Forest
This is the full-circle track. Inspired by my runs through the Cascades as a teen. Euphoric trance. Fast-moving. Joyful. It’s about freedom, nature, and the way music can make you feel weightless.
And then came the album.
Where She Dances: My Debut Album
Where She Dances is a love letter to the parts of myself I once buried. It’s trance, minimal tech house, and melodic house. Some tracks are instrumental. Some have vocals. All of them hold something sacred and personal.
Here’s a glimpse at what’s inside:
- Where She Dances — An instrumental trance track about movement itself. No vocals. Just rhythm and energy.
- Endless Honeymoon — A romantic ode to my husband. My favorite lyric: “to the lake, to the dock with a line in your hand — you’re my hottest fisherman, my forever man.”
- Sandstone — About a childhood lake I can’t return to. It aches with hiraeth, the longing for a place that no longer exists as it once did.
- Soulmate — Simple, clear, direct. A warm track about the person who found me and stayed.
- Pole by the Lake — Inspired by dancing with my freestanding pole by the cottage lake. It’s about sensuality, freedom, and the joy of moving with nature.
- Body Language — High-energy and performance-driven. Celebrating movement, pole dance, and self-expression.
- Spin to This — Designed for rotation and flow. Built to match the feel of a pole dance routine from start to finish.
This album is not about perfection. It’s about presence. It’s me, raw and real, translated into sound.
The Pole Witch Behind the Music
I run a business called Pole Witch, where I offer tarot, astrology, and intuitive readings, along with spiritual and pole dance-based digital content. I’ve been pole dancing for over 17 years and spent nearly a decade teaching. These days, I dance just for myself, but that movement and body connection show up everywhere in my music.
Pole Witch is more than just a brand. It is an expression of who I am. It is the place where the mystical and the physical come together, where soul meets sweat, where pole dance becomes ritual and rhythm becomes spellwork.
So yes, my music is witchy. It is earthy. It is emotional. Feminine. It blends trance, house, and techno with the essence of longing, love, nature, sensuality, and memory.
What’s Next: A Second Album in the Making
I wasn’t sure I’d make another album. For a while, I thought I would just release new singles and see where they landed. But these new tracks feel connected. There’s a thread running through them that I can’t ignore.
So I’ve decided to work on a second album.
This one leans more into tech house, techno, and EDM. It’s darker in places, more percussive, more physical. It’s less about storytelling through lyrics and more about letting the rhythm lead.
It’s still emotional. Still me. But it’s evolving.
I don’t know exactly what it’s going to become or when it will be finished. But it feels alive, and for now, that’s enough.
Why I’m Doing This
I’m making music because it makes me feel alive. Because it helps me access the parts of myself that don’t have words. Because it connects me to something ancient and electric. Because I missed the feeling of creating something that only I could make.
So if you’re listening, thank you. And if you’re just discovering me, welcome.
🎧 Listen to My Music
👉 My Artist Page on Spotify
All tracks are available now.
