My story: (bad English ahead!)
My first interest in making music awoke in '92. I've been a poor 11 year old boy and my best friend (a girl) got a very cool keyboard from her parents. It got all these cool and trancy saw sound presets I would have died for back then. Thinking every keyboard must be sounding exactly the same I told my parents I'd love to get a keyboard next christmas even if I knew they quite surely can't afford one.
To my complete surprise I really got one next christmas (kudos to my parents!) and damn, it was huge, much bigger than the one my friend got. What I didn't know was that it being much cheaper because it had to be. The sounds were horrible except from one shrieking church organ sound I used to play The Undertaker's theme with in a very simplified way. It had to be simple because that keyboard couldn't handle more than two notes at the same time. No chords were possible and no trancy saw sounds, too. I've been very thankful about that anyway because I knew my parents made their best effort to make it possible and making me a happy boy.
Four to five years later (I think) another very good friend of mine got the "Magix Music Maker" with the Trance and Hardcore Techno expansions. I've been totally blown away by the possibilities this one offered. Absolutely laughable for today's standards but at that time I couldn't really process you can create such music - at home!!! I didn't have a PC at that time (you couldn't call my Commodore +4 a PC) but I've been hooked. It would take another few years until I got free demo of that (it really was a free demo - mono only) and a PC that could handle this.
In the mean time I made a lot of pure MIDI files with the ancient MIDI sounds my sound card provided. They sounded horrible but I've been able to make my own melodies (other than the pre-produced Magix clips... I'll come back to that later).
Around the year 1998/99 I fell in love with Heavy Metal sooo... my next wish for christmas was getting an E-guitar. The financial situation of my family had been a bit better and I got this intrument, too - a Ken Rose including an amp for around 120 bucks. What can I say? Not every guitar setup sounds like Metallica, Iron Maiden and Rammstein automatically and I've been quite disappointed xD
Anyway... I figured out I've got absolutely no talent in playing guitar so this thing collected a lot of dust for a year until a classmate showed me how easy it was to play "Wonderwall" by Oasis. This was enough to take that guitar out of the corner and start playing again. I got an effect device and musically raped riffs from Metallica, Iced Earth etc. and wrote my own stuff, too.
Around 2004 I think I got a... let's say free trial of a program... let's call it "Vegetable spirals 3" from another friend of mine. I still haven't had internet in my life ever yet so I didn't download it. But I used it and still feel bad about it. Every time I loaded a project I had to reload all of the synths and instruments into the channel rack which costed a lot of time. It had been the one and only "free trial" version I've ever had and didn't use it for long because I felt guilty doing this.
In the mean time I got my hands on that official Magix Music Maker Demo Version mentioned above with the Lenny Dee Hardcore Techno expansion my friend owned and it's few pre-produced low-bitrate samples it offered but I think I made the most of them. I cut the samples into tiniest pieces more and more to get the sounds and melodies I wanted and made them my own. When I got internet a few years later (I payed the neighbor 10€ per month for getting his WLAN password) I uploaded a few of my tracks on Youtube. You can listen to them here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/FFDennis
Fun fact: last track I produced this way I made and uploaded just one year ago when I recreated my very second track ever. It had only mono sound back then and I wanted a better sounding stereo version of it for nostalgic reasons
I think two or three years ago I finally bought FL Studio for three reasons: I had sworn myself if I'll ever be able to afford it I will because what I've done with using that "free trial" I mentioned above had been plain theft and I always felt bad about it. It didn't make it any better but it was the only thing I could do to make it a bit right again. Second reason was my good memories of functionality of the program and the third one -I still can't process it- is the lifetime free updates. But I have to say if I hadn't had that "free trial" I maybe never stumbled over FL Studio. Anyway - this isn't the first time I wrote about this in this forum and I'm very thankful not getting sued by Image-Line for confessing this. My honest apologies to the team for this.
Last thing I did was upgrading to Signature Edition and recommending FL Studio to most of my friends over and over again. I don't know any people pirating it but I know a few people who are interested in making music.
And that's mostly about it