Archive
Documenting My Creative Process
For a while I’ve been considering documenting my experience creating my own music in my loft at my house. As evidenced by my overwhelming social media silence over the past 8 years, I don’t always do a lot of self-promotion, and I’m not trying to do that here either.
What I hope to accomplish with this section of my content is to maybe inspire someone else to do the same thing.
I acknowledge that I am not the greatest musician. I first picked up the guitar when I was 14, and was told to not bother because I didn’t have the look necessary to succeed. So I put it down. I picked up the bass when I was 17, and it’s only through the lucky fact that my aunt had a band that needed a bass player that I got into professional playing at all. Even with that, my goal was never to be the most technically proficient player, but instead to be a competent band member, and use music as an outlet.
Some of the songs on my current recordings are things I’ve had written and recorded in some fashion for forever. But it wasn’t until technology reached the point where digital music creation was a reality that I realized I could actually record them with some quality. At the same time, the amount of content teaching people music theory and how to play exploded, at a level I can only wish we had when I started.
So, with that, I applied the same tenacity, logic, analysis, and creativity I often bring to my engineering work back to music. My projects are meticulously planned. They take months to finish, sometimes years, but at the end I can point to them and say “I created that.”
That is the essence of art and expression. And I believe anyone should be able to express themselves in the fashion they choose.
I’ve documented each of my releases, and the process by which I created them. This is for anyone who would like to record something, and has no idea how to do it, or maybe even why to do it. Because if I can do it with my minimal musical talents, so can you.
Servings Of Sadness
Upon the conclusion of Numericoncerto, I could not decide what to do next. I was toying around with the idea of writing a symphony, but couldn’t really pull anything concrete together thematically. I had also toyed with the idea of two smaller projects, one focused on melodic songs, one focused on rock songs. That would have allowed me to release quicker.
Instead, I found I needed an outlet for some of the negative experiences of the last year, in our country and our society and our professional and personal relationships as a whole. And I found myself back in the 18 song album mode, but this time, I stripped away all the orchestral ornamentation, focusing on keyboard instruments, acoustic and electric guitars, and improving my piano composition.
Taking my research into extended chord voicings into account, I challenged myself to expand my harmonic vocabulary and Servings of Sadness is the result. The title comes from an iconic quote from a colleague of mine, “That’s two servings of sadness!” and adequately encompasses the tone I was striving for.
That said, I like how this turned out for the most part. Some of my strongest writing for piano is here, and there are some nuanced variations in the harmonies and chord structures as well as I leveraged what I learned online, sometimes taking specific chord transitions as inspirations, sometimes building whole songs on a single idea such as the use of 6th chords. It seems I always work better when I have at least one fixed conceptual target to drive for.
You can learn more about this album here.
Available on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and Amazon Music.
Numericoncerto
If you like classical music, in particular using strings and harpsichords, you might want to check out my Numericoncerto. I wrote this over the course of a year from late 2023 to late 2024. I challenged myself to step out of my symphonic rock comfort zone as a composer and try to write a serviceable piece of classical music.
As my writing progressed, I settled on 4 different elements. One, a sonata, a three part classical piece using strings. Second, a counterpoint quartet, exploring the musical idea of counterpoint, also using strings. Third, I brought in a harpsichord as an additional instrument, and wrote a quintet centered on feelings brought about by relationships. And last, I wrote a sextet, taking inspiration from a video I watched outlining Baroque chord structures, and then melding that with my interest in science fiction and fantasy movies, such as Star Trek or the Avengers.
With those in progress, I was also experimenting with fugues and other shorter pieces, and decided I wanted to bring in transition pieces, which I called “Vignettes”, to bridge between each of the main pieces. I was actually very happy with the result, keeping track length to a minimum while not sacrificing the integrity of the piece.
Other experimentations included a track written in quartal harmony, and a variety of alternate time signatures and key changes.
You can learn more about the overall release here.
Available on Spotify, YouTube, and Amazon Music.
Be welcome and true.
Rob Hope 