Rob Hope

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.