2013 has been a long and complicated year for me. I've moved out for the first time, and two more subsequent times. Since before that first initial move out of my parents' house, and in fact almost immediately after I released "Saying Goodbye To Yesterday", I've been working on my next album. I had originally planned to throw it together as a quick EP due to the wildly different musical style, and release it at the end of the same year. Now, almost a year removed from the time I started on it, I'm close to finished. But I've had a ton of problems along the way between my music, this website, and my personal life.

This project officially started with the creation of a demo called "Nightcrawler" that I wrote after a walk with my friend Nick. The track almost sounds like a hard rock track, with a distorted synth that sounds a bit like a crappy guitar, and heavy drum, bass, and string use. Another unfinished song called "Windswept" was written in the same style, around the same time (I think I might have made both of the original demos on the same day, actually). The more I worked on tracks for this, the more different the style became. Lots of tracks were written and dumped. Some because I just couldn't finish them. One because I wrote a song I was physically incapable of performing vocally. Sometimes, I just didn't feel the lyrics anymore. I burned some bridges I probably shouldn't have throughout 2013 and I don't know how or if there's any way I can go about repairing them.

In September, I moved from the Annapolis Valley to Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, to start college. I'm taking Recording Arts and loving every second of it. I'm still working at shitty-old Walmart as an unloader. The same thing that made me realize I didn't want to be stuck in that hole anymore. That prompted me to enter into a field where I was told upon entering the course has an extremely low employment rate. I accepted that challenge, as much as it hurt to hear.

Just before I moved, during the summer, not only did my old computer officially kick the bucket, but so did the external hard drive that the last four years of my work were saved to. This is the second time that an external hard drive has cost me years of work on music. I was used to the feeling by this point, but it still cut deep and made me doubt that I'd finish this project. Using a file recovery program, I was able to get most of the finished tracks back, but the project files for a lot of my work from the last four years are gone forever. There's nothing I can do about that. Shortly before this, I was getting ready to move all of the files to my new computer. At the same time, my 4Shared File Host account got banned for having a remix that I did years ago on it. That's right, they officially banned me and deleted my files because it was the "third strike" against my account for copyrighted material. This was after they un-suspended it the previous year for my own fucking songs somehow violating their copyright policy. So between the hard drive crash and my account being deleted, I've lost the saved copies of those albums as well. On the bright side, my file recovery program did find them all. It's just that I have to sort through thousands of un-named files in order to locate them again, then put them back into a group, fix all of their meta tags, then upload them to another website so that I can provide the downloads here again.

Oh, the house I moved into has like 12 foot ceilings. I'm not sure yet if that's to my benefit or my detriment. The reverb is kick-ass but it makes recording vocals that don't sound like they're in a hall really difficult to do. If they're not relatively low and right up against the mic, then it sounds like I'm in an echo chamber and adds unnecessary background noise to the tracks.

Ironically, "Nightcrawler" was the only track I can't seem to find the instrumental of and as a result, the first track I wrote for the album is stuck with demo vocals and unbalanced instrument levels and actually maxes out the gain to the point of distortion at some point to where I want to cry.. So, I can either try to rebuild an extremely complex instrumental from scratch and re-record it in less than 3 weeks, or I can upload the version I have that I'm not overly proud of. I'm not sure if I can pull off a Kanye West yet. I'll get back to you on that.

At present, I'm working and procrastinating on a ton of things. Work,  repairing and rebuilding my website (You may have noticed the name change on my Facebook post), my classes and their associated projects (of which there are many), WWE2k14 coming out next Tuesday and of course this album. It's called "Music", by the way. I didn't want to complicate things. :P

As of right now, the release date I'm pitching for Music is November 9th, 2013. I hope that if anybody who cares about me or used to care about me sees this, that they might be willing to give it a listen. It's very evolved from my original work, and I've put a ton of time and effort into its making. It features my first guest appearances to date, from the lovely Kaitlin MacDonald (Thanks Kate!), and a wide array of styles that I feel blend together well from beginning to end slowly building up and changing, and incorporating everything I've learned since I first started out making music years ago. Yet, the album begins and ends in a way that's so wildly contrasting that if you were to listen to the first and last tracks, it'd be hard to believe they're from the same album.

The long and short of this update: I'm still making music. It's still different and there probably aren't too many people listening to it now. I've moved a bunch, been through some shit, some of it my fault, and some of it not. I'm learning how to properly record music for the first time and moving a step closer to becoming a producer, which is my first eventual goal. I have Robb Nash or Live on Arrival to thank for planting the idea into my head via Facebook message back when I was working on Through The Cracks.

Love you all, and I promise this site will be of some relevance soon.

- Rob Chapman



 
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Saying Goodbye to Yesterday is live, fully uploaded, and available for download now! Thank you so much to everybody who supported me when I worked on this album! A big thanks goes out to my parents, who're both supportive of and helpful with my musical pursuits, and my good friend Jared Martin, my production assistant for this album.

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This is my first fully original album, using only virtual instruments and no outside-source loops for its creation. The entire thing was done with the incredible Mixcraft 6 Beta; and I will be purchasing the full software by the end of this year. The experience of making this album was just amazing. As with my previous albums, it's stylistically different from what's come before, and it is a very alternative, and mostly quiet album.

I hope you enjoy the album in its entirety, and I hope I never have to stop making music to share with the world.

~ Rob Chapman

 
Almost a year since I last updated this site... wow. I wonder if anybody even reads it anymore? Hopefully it'll get a few more hits... for those who don't know... which I can't see being anybody since I've posted about it on Facebook a lot, I have a new album coming out, hopefully some time in June of this year. The title of the album is "Saying Goodbye To Yesterday" and it's a far departure from the last three albums I've done. One of the reasons is because the album, aside from vocals and possibly one song if I can get help, is done entirely with Virtual Instruments (Midi), which means I didn't have access to gutiars or any such thing. With this album being done this way, the instrumentation throughout is going to be similar to Apologies, which I released almost a year ago. That Truro trip was really the start of this album. The song Apartheid which is on one of the Vlogs is finally going to be released in a finished, re-done form on it. Every single song on this album I composed myself and wrote myself, which is a first since I started doing this and a tremendous feeling. I've been using the free beta of Acoustica Mixcraft 6 for all of the recording and mastering. I have also composed a couple of last minute songs for the album in it. I do have to say, I really want this software when I have income again.

I plan to post one of the recorded songs from the album in a couple of weeks as a preview. Some of the songs on this album, like Apartheid, are remakes of songs I wrote in the past. One as far back as 2007, when I very first started making music. I did this because the album title is more of a self made resolution than anything else. The songs across the album are mostly summaries of past negative emotions that I want to leave behind me, and as such it has a bit of a depressing vibe. There is some upbeat stuff on the album though, and a little bit of storytelling since I really, really enjoyed doing that with Black Sun.

If you're actually here, then thanks for reading. I'll have an update in the next few days. And just to let you know... I have a little bit less than 2 weeks left in my Mixcraft trial, so I will have to have the album fully recorded and mastered in that time. It WILL be out this month. :)

 - Rob 

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