The very first time I played in public, it was with a full orchestra from my school in which I only had a single role. I began to get solos as I grew older and became more adept with the great ivory and ebony beast, but for the most part I was always with other ponies. This was something my friends always considered rather strange – I always had stage fright when out on my own.

I simply could not perform if all the eyes were on me alone. If there were dancers, if there were other musicians – if there was a fool singing along in the audience… I was fine. But stick me under the spotlight in a silent, packed theatre and you would see Frederic Opus Horseshoepin break down into a little ball of terrified pony.

And so in my adult life I never struck out on my own like some enterprising musicians have and made great names for themselves. I have always tried to culture good friends and other talented musicians around me to form groups. I have never gone out on stage with a pony I haven’t known since music school. Until now.

The roar of the crowd was something that chilled me right to my very bone. I’d never performed before a gaggle such as the ponies that Vinyl Scratch led me out to and my eyes threatened to drop right of out my sockets then and there. I could feel my stomach doing uncomfortable flips and my throat tying itself in knots. I just wanted to run away, and forget all about Octavia and Vinyl Scratch and this whole stupid club.

“Wassamatter, Freddy? You getting cold hooves?” I looked about, tearing my eyes from the trendy dance club floor to where Vinyl Scratch was seating herself behind some kind of massive sound system with all number of dials and buttons and switches on, uses of which I couldn’t begin to comprehend. The coffee machine in the place we used for rehearsals was bad enough.

“Yes,” I admitted with a nodding head even as she began to magic across my keyboard for the evening. Compared to what I was used to, it was like a little plastic child’s toy. But I felt small enough to match as I heard the stamping of the crowd. To my surprise, Vinyl looked round, and dipped her shades a notch.

“Whoa. C’mon Freddy, you can do this. You’re a big manly colt,” she said, trotting to my side and giving me a nudge on the shoulder with a hoof. “Trust me. I’ve seen stallions that wouldn’t go a step outside their own damn homes without a bunch of bodyguards and servants,” she said with a curl of her lip.

“You’re big enough for this. C’mon. You got the nerve or you don’t, and you got it, Maestro. Plus, this isn’t like my rave clubs. It’s kinda more dancing,” she said with what I assumed was supposed to be a reassuring grin. It reminded me more of a rictus face on one of those zebra masks I’d seen at the museum.

“Just dance?” I asked, beginning to feel a bit of my wariness fade away. Vinyl grinned wider.

“Well. Dancing, chilling out. These are mostly students out for a night without too much booze. They want some good music and that means some classics everypony knows,” she said. A sheaf of well-worn papers were brought across to the music stand on my keyboard and shuffled nicely for me, even though I turned my nose up a little at a coffee stain on the first page.

“All you need to do is play, Freddy. I’ll take care of everything else,” the unicorn insisted. I looked closer at the pages, and felt my eyes widen as I looked eagerly at the first page. I knew this song. It was one of my guilty pleasures. I flicked through a few more of the pieces of paper and my smile grew. It faded instantly as I heard a magically enhanced voice boom out over the crowd.

“Aaaaalright! How are you Canterlot?” screamed Vinyl Scratch. The answering roar from the crowd made me dive for cover behind the stool I had salvaged for my piano playing. Miss Scratch seemed to enjoy the attention though, relishing in it and whooping right back with them.

“Yeah! That’s what I like to see, peeps. And so many of you here for my special classic nights!” I cracked an eyebrow open at that. This was a regular thing? Had Octavia been dragged into this much as I had? And what about that pony she and the bouncer mentioned before? Blues?

“Now, I know I promised you guys some more jazz tonight, but that lazy bum of a sax hasn’t shown up,” Vinyl boomed out and the response was far from favourable this time. But as I watched, the unicorn seemed to weather the storm of boos from the crowd with expert waves of her hooves, calming them down like she was a conductor of some kind of rowdy, beer-fuelled orchestra.

“Hey hey. I’m as pissed as you guys are. I had some cracking stuff lined up, and he’s decided he’s gonna spend the night with his fillyfriend. Can’t blame him at least,” she said with that shrug of her shoulders so nonchalant. Now the boos were mostly muted, with wolf-whistles and cries of encouragement and assent. I’d seen footage of war leaders with less ability to control a crowd than this DJ.

“But here’s the good news – you don’t get nothing tonight,” she said. I could have sworn someone just poured ice cold liquid right into my belly as a whoop went up from the crowd. “Ziggy found all of you a nice little pianist wandering about who’s going to put on some classics for all of us. Give it up for Freddy!”

I was used to polite applause. Sometimes standing ovations when my group had done exceptionally well. What I had never experienced before was the sheer wave of noise that came up from the pit of partiers, screaming my name. Or at least that horrid abbreviation Vinyl had come up with. I peeked out from behind my stool and keyboard to stare at the heaving mass of ponies and wanted nothing more than to keel over dead right there and then.

“Whoo! That’s it! C’mon Freddy, get yourself up here and say hello to the crowd!” a voice I suddenly never wanted to hear again said, and I felt something grab hold of the back of my collar and yank me out of my hiding place. Like it or not I was standing in front of the entire hall and each and every one was stamping their hooves like somepony had dumped a bucket of spiders on the dance floor.

“See them?” asked Vinyl, pulling close to my ear. “Buck all of them. They don’t care if you get a note wrong or if your collar’s not on straight. They just want to hear good music,” she insisted, and for a sudden moment I felt rather comforted. My mouth stopped being so dry as I looked across to her, and did a double take as I saw the bitterness in her eyes.

“V… Miss Scratch?” I asked. She looked round, and gave a pearly white grin before she shoved me right back onto the piano stool which twirled around in a similar motion to the way my pupils are going.

“Question and answer session is after the show, Maestro. Now lets’ hear some music!” she cried out in her loud voice, and somehow the ponies in the pit below began to let loose an even louder torrent of noise before. Surely now they’d have to quieten down for the music at least.

I stopped the revolutions of the piano stool and cleared my throat a little. The page was already open on the first song, one of my favourites – though I’d never heard a piano version of it. I took a deep breath, and played the first few notes.

Suddenly, I found myself at ease. I wasn’t looking at everypony on the floor, I was looking at the music. My hooves were scampering across the keys one after another, playing out those familiar bars I remembered so well from my records. All of a sudden though I was aware that nopony was actually watching me. I peeked my head away from my music and saw a sight which to this day beggars belief.

I could see the music coming out of my piano into the air, or at least partially. A stream of silvery notes swam from the speakers on my pathetic little keyboard, and seemed to be sucked towards the mass of machinery that Vinyl Scratch was working at. The unicorn’s shades were down, her horn glowing that blood-red to match her eyes as she played with the various switches, dials and buttons  on the incomprehensible device she sat at. What I could see pouring from the speakers though was pure magic.

Great clouds of silvery-black smoke formed of twisting musical notes oozed out in some kind of parody of the cloud factories of the Pegasi. I could see semiquavers knotted into minims as they knitted themselves into their desired form. A great treble clef seemed to bend a bass clef into a semicircular shape and it became a silvery moon. The crowd were edging away from it, but rather than fear there was tension and excitement on their faces.

I continued to play out the music as the moon got brighter and the clouds got thicker. I stared at Vinyl as she seemed to finally be happy with what her machine was doing. Her magic never faded, but she began to levitate across a microphone. I wondered idly what she needed it for considering how loud she’d made her voice earlier when I realised that we were at the entry of the vocals.

“Moon… Mare…” crooned a pitch-perfect replica of the original vocals, though smokier, as if Sapphire Shores had been drinking a little beforehand. “Ooooh… fix me with your… stare…” I simply refused to believe my eyes. The scratchy-voiced unicorn I’d talked to earlier was singing as if she were a multi-million dollar record label, and I knew no amount of recording machines could do that. This was magic in its’ purest sense.

I saw that white-furred face turn to look at me, and a hoof lifted up her violet glasses for just a second, eyes gazing at me with a smile and a wink.

“I…” she said, her mouth seeming to form the words and then that gorgeous tone simply pouring from the speakers into the cloudy, moonlit dance floor. “Met a cold… dark colt…”

I turned away from the mare and focused on the music. There was little hope for me concentrating with such a voice and a stare in those ruby red eyes.

The next two hours passed in a blur of music and song. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had so much fun just belting out some old tunes while Vinyl matched the lyrics word for word and tone by tone beside me. Even the deep dark voices of the stallions in some of them, during which I noticed her magic was glowing particularly strongly.

The last piece had been one that had ruined my hooves even talented as they were. I ached all over as I hauled myself off the stool to all four limbs, glaring at Vinyl as she seemed to leap off as limber as a spring chicken.

“Whoo!” she screamed out, echoed by the roaring noise from the crowd. “Did you all enjoy that?” I took from the wall of sound they meant yes. Scratch didn’t seem to bat an eyelid behind those glasses as she trotted back and wrapped a hoof about my neck.

“Lets’ hear it for Maestro here! You all know I couldn’t do this without him!” she shouted, and I could detect a trace of hoarseness in her voice. I looked out to the crowd of young ponies and waved at them wearily, getting their standard style of applause in response until I lowered my hoof and eased myself away from Vinyl Scratch.

“Head back to my room Maestro… feel free to break out the drinks,” she whispered to me as I turned away. I looked back as I trotted exhaustedly out of the limelight to let Scratch yell and shout back at her fans again. My head was ringing and a good whisky seemed like the perfect antidote to all my problems.

It took a while to find the DJ’s door again, with the help of the bouncer who’d accosted me earlier. I never got his name, but he seemed to clap me on the shoulder and said some encouraging words in what was probably a normal voice but sounded far far too soft from what I’d been used to.

To my hooves’ relief, the floor inside Vinyl Scratch’s room was even thicker red shag-pile than outside, and felt great as I walked across it to a long lounge chair and flopped down on it, completely out of it.

I looked back on tonight with wonder. Somehow my musical talent really had come in useful on this goose chase of trying to find Octavia to my utter disbelief, as long as Scratch honoured her end of the bargain. I didn’t think she was the type to lie of course, but I didn’t intend to leave until the white unicorn had spilled the beans.

I began to wonder about my impromptu performer on stage with me, with nothing else to do in her room but relax it took little time for my head to start working. She knew something of ‘proper’ music as some ponies would put it, that was for sure. Had she gone to the Canterlot Music Academy too? If so, why was she here instead of joining Octavia and I on stage?

I began to wonder if perhaps her talent for music wasn’t quite the same as mine in terms of making it… but refining it. I’d had quite the conversation with some bakers one day, and he stressed the importance of being able to put the ‘finishing touches’ on something. Nopony ever made something perfect on their own, was the argument.

I took an opportunity to look about the room as soon as I felt adventurous enough to look outside my own head. It was a pretty big room, easily the size of most master bedrooms, though rather than the massive double bed that most such rooms are furnished in, this had the walls covered side to side with stereos, broken instruments and little bits of wiring I didn’t even want to imagine were for. I noticed a battered old saxophone, something that looked like a burst set of bagpipes…

And a broken old cello resting against in a corner of the room, distinctly looking like it had been smashed to bits with an angry hoof. My heart stopped as the door opened.

“Heya Freddy,” Vinyl said with a smile as she trotted in, her magic levitating the keyboard I’d used. “I got you a souvenir,” she said, a grin on her face looking very much like some kind of lunatic that just escaped from the madhouse. “I thought I told you to open up the drinks cabinet? Couldn’t find it?”

I swallowed lightly as the keyboard was tossed to the side of the room, clattering noisily but mostly unbroken. The white unicorn opened a big black drinks container that indeed I hadn’t noticed (the ruined guitar over it had attracted my attention more) and brought out a big square bottle of something golden.

“Whassamatter Freddy? You look like you’ve seen a ghost? I know my butt’s big but surely you’ve seen bigger,” she teased, trotting back to where I was laid out, the insides of my ears turning a chalk white.

“What have you done with Octavia?” I demanded.