I Made An Album

So It’s October 2018, and I just released a body of musical work. As a nonmusician this is very exciting.

Here’s how it happened.

Back in February I decided it would be cool to try my hand at making music. Ive had some experience playing in heavy metal/hardcore bands with my friends in high school. But I was never much of a contributor to the musical side of things due to a lack of knowledge. I would just scream words into the microphone. Anyways i’ve always had ideas for songs and i’m always writing lyrics/poems and studying other musicians work. I figured I could give it a shot.

So I went down to my local guitar shop in Salt Lake City, Utah and bought myself a nice new nylon string guitar. I had no idea what I was doing. The guy selling the instruments was telling me all about the differences between all the guitars and which one I should get depending on what type of music I wanted to make. But it all pretty much went over my head. I ended getting the one I got and going home. Even now the model escapes me.

Excited to start my new journey I jumped on YouTube and started looking up how to play. I tried to start with square one and learn basics. I wanted to really learn this instrument and take it seriously. I didn’t want to cut corners. I really wanted to do this right and become something close to a musician. But I just couldn't. Learning scales was just too boring and I wanted to get to the fun stuff I wanted to make an Album! So I put the youtube videos away and went to google. I typed in ‘Guitar Chords’ and found a nice little chart with all the finger shapes I would need in order to sound like I knew what I was doing. I started learning these and putting them together. Just going off what sounded good to my ear. And also what was easiest for my inexperienced fingers to navigate. For instance I stayed completely away from bar chords. I just could never get from one chord to another fast enough when I had to bar. So I just said okay forget bar chords- Who needs them? I’ll just stick to easy transitions like that of the Am shape and the C shape. Where all I would have to do is move one finger. I had some success with this and ended up making something I was pretty proud of with my first song that ended up being called “I Hope You Hear This”. this also ended up being the name of the album.

Anyways this process continued. Messing around with chord shapes, listening to what I liked and didn’t like, making adjustments, and piecing together these songs strum by strum. I wrote about 9 songs. and felt that 7 of them were good enough to put together in an album format. The album sort of tells a story about the last two years of my life and there is sort of a chronological order to it all. I whittled stuff down and figure these seven songs tell the story accurately. and so these will be the ones on the album. I tried recording these songs in a way that most albums are recorded. That is, multiple tracks multiple instruments, all recorded at different times in order to get the best sound quality and best takes. But i’m no producer and or instrumentalist and i’m hardly a singer so this all proved more difficult than I expected. Tons of different attempts to get stuff right ended up sucking the life out of my songs and so I opted to just sit down and recored them live with one microphone. I think hearing these songs fully produced would be awesome and maybe one day that can happen but I just really needed to get this stuff out into the world and out of my head. and the point of the songs wasn’t really to have the best sounding stuff it was to express how I was feeling. And I think this version of the story does that.

Give the album a listen! I hope that somebody some where can relate. Im also sort of sorry if you can.

You can listen on Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/1OeMe9MnOQJRCC15dWgUwF?si=-ql28wYkSyulxkWuIwGkMA

Or Apple Music:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/i-hope-you-hear-this/1440216422