Jack H. – Learning Music Production
Click here to listen on your preferred streaming service (i.e., Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud, etc.)
Artist Statement
Hi – my name is Jack Hillyer. Throughout my time at LREI, I have been able to explore my interest in filmmaking and visual storytelling through school assignments and projects with friends. I feel as though most of my peers know me for my interest in film. However, making music has been a dream of mine for as long as I can remember, and I used this opportunity to delve into music production and composition.
Since I will be studying film production in college for at least the next four years, I wanted to utilize this time to learn music production, theory, and composition before I focus primarily on filmmaking. While I will definitely continue to use my knowledge of music for my film projects, I would not have enough time to truly better my understanding of music production and theory, completing an ambitious project like this, if I were attending film school.
For this project, I created a satirical song about the college process that started out as a short loop I made for a project in my Short Film Production class last year. At the end of that class, I made the mistake of deleting the song’s files and, therefore, was unable to complete the song over the summer as I had hoped for. I started out my senior project by recreating what I had originally to the best of my ability, then learning about new production techniques that could help make the short loop sound clearer and more interesting. From then on, the loop turned into the verse. I worked with two mentors to learn about how great choruses and bridges for songs were constructed. After meeting with both of them every week, showing them my new additions to the project, my song had completely changed for the better. I also researched the basics of music distribution, publishing, and promotion in order to put my music on large streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music and start getting a small audience by targeted media buys.
After a while of thinking, I came up with the moniker JH Playback as a musician name – “JH” being the initials of my name, and “playback” meaning “to play media.” The meaning behind the name is extremely simple, yet I thought it sounded unique and would help me stand out.
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