About Me

Me, Abridged

Hello! My name is Robby Hoover. I am currently in my fifth year of college at the University of Cincinnati.

I am a web developer specializing in React development with a long history of software development using a myriad of languages within multiple different realms. In addition to web-based development, I've also been experimenting with Python automation and machine learning as of late.

I am also a musician. I am involved in many musical projects, including a couple of metal bands and a few ambient projects. On my own, I make a wide variety of music; I really enjoy making a bit of everything.

I gravitate heavily toward the arts in general, which is probably why I find myself on the front-end of software development more often than not. In addition to music, I am also fond of sewing, painting, woodworking, photography, bookbinding and a wide variety of other artistic fields. I just really enjoy making stuff.

My Goals

As my college career begins to come to an end, I have been thinking a lot about what I want to do post graduation. At the moment, I think the direction in which I’d prefer to go is looking around for a remote to work web development job. I did remote work during one of my co-op rotations and I really enjoyed that compared to going into the office, so I would prefer to go that route again. There are a couple of companies and organizations I have my eye on within the music industry that have remote work web development jobs within their structure, so I'm going to reach out to them and apply once I graduate.

Looking into the far future, I really want to be involved in Music Education. I think my adroitness in music as well as the skills learned for my MBA will have me well equipped to take on some kind of private music lessons in the future, as well as using my software skills to create new tool sets that address the challenges students face in the modern day while learning how to play and make music!

I took my first steps towards making this happen in the Summer of 2022, when I created my Youtube channel on which I put out a variety of musical content, primarily focusing on educational music content. I have also been giving music lessons to my friends for free in order to hone my teaching skills.

Programming and Computers

Since I was around 14 years old, I decided that I wanted to become a video game developer. When I was in middle school, my mom found some very introductory video game development classes in our area that she signed me up for! It was nothing crazy, just one of those block-based drag-and-drop coding languages to teach the basics of programming. But, it got me quite interested in coding in general!

When I entered high school, I had a class that I really credit as setting me on the course I'm on now: Computer Science 1 with David McKain. I will always look back fondly on that class. I don't think I've ever had a professor in my college career that has lived up to the skill of Mr. McKain as an educator. I learned more in a year of that class than I did in every class of my first two years of college combined, primarily because he had already taught nearly all of that content to me before I graduated high school! He went above and beyond as a teacher, and I will always be grateful for his instruction.

During my last two years of High School, I participated in Tech Olympics, a regional technology summit and competition for high school students. One of those years, my group presented a project called ParkPerfect. We also presented this project at the 2018 UC TI Expo High School Competition, which we won.

During my first year of college, I decided to switch from the Game Development track to the Software Development track. I felt that the Software Development track was a bit more general and offered more for me in terms of my education. I felt like it gave me more options. As time went on my interest in game development waned, but my interest in software programming in general remained.

I started to become more and more interested in Website Development during the Covid 19 pandemic. I also got the opportunity to explore web development at my first co-op, which also helped me get comfortable with it! It seemed like most applications were shifting from dedicated desktop and mobile apps into responsive web applications. That summer, I made a musical instrument website as my summer project. That way I could combine my love of programming and music while also honing my new found web development skills.

Since then, I have decided to dive in and specialize in website development. I have been learning dozens of different libraries, frameworks and tools for website development.

Currently, my go-to stack is NextJS (A React-based framework), TailwindCSS and TinaCMS (if the site requires a CMS).

Music

I was never incredibly “into” music until about the age of seventeen. Up until then, I had a few artists I liked to listen to, but never really thought about creating or playing music. When I was about seventeen my buddy Evan and I were hanging out in his basement, and he was playing around on his guitar, when he offered to show me some of the basics. He showed me how to play a very rudimentary version of ‘Smoke on the Water’ by Deep Purple and I was hooked instantly. Christmas of that year my parents bought me one of those cheap amazon starter guitars. A few months later was my eighteenth birthday, and by that time I’d already started to get a basic idea of how to play single note riffs on the guitar. So, for my eighteenth birthday, they got me a proper guitar, amp, and weekly guitar lessons on top of that. That was perhaps one of the greatest gifts I have ever received.

From there, my musical journey only accelerated. At first, I was just jamming in the basement with a couple of my friends, maybe playing half of a cover here and there. But, once I made it to college and spent a year or two at UC, I met the guys who would become my bandmates. All three of us were huge metal heads and wanted to form a Metal band. So, we did just that. I play guitar and do vocals, Mitch plays bass guitar and Justin plays the drums. We named ourselves ‘Bog’, wrote a few originals, learned a few covers, and played our first show only two months after we formed, at a local house in Clifton. We were well-received as a breath of fresh air to the music scene in Clifton, as most of the bands on the local scene play very similar types of music to each other. While there's nothing wrong with that, it really gave us our leg up in the scene. We filled in a niche for heavier music in the area.

That was about two years ago. Now, Bog is playing a couple house shows a month and we open for nationally and internationally touring bands every few months at various venues around Cincinnati. We’ve opened up for Monochromatic Black, Vitriol, Fury in Few, Laang and Monte Luna just to name a few. We also had the honor of opening for Eyehategod, a group from New Orleans who is credited with the invention of ‘Sludge Metal’. They are the band who made us want to make music in the first place, and we opened for them. It was a bit surreal.

Besides playing in Bog, I have also started learning several different facets of music on my own. I’ve learned how to program synthesizers, how to orchestrate and arrange music, how to use MIDI virtual instruments to play almost any instrument that exists, how to mix and master music, how to play different styles of guitar (such as jazz and classical), how to play a multitude of instruments including keyboard, bass guitar, drum kit and I’ve learned how to sing and how to properly scream/growl without damaging my vocal cords. Fun fact, in order to learn how to scream properly, I learned Kargyraa, a type of Mongolian throat singing, which utilizes the same techniques in your throat. I’ve been learning all about different traditional music from around the world and all the different niche microgenres that are popping up every day. For the past year or so I’ve been studying composition extensively, attempting to learn how to write better melodies, harmonies, rhythms and learn how to use my instrumentation options to their fullest extent. I’ve also been learning a lot about Music Theory and how music works in general. Lately I’ve been reading a lot of fringe topics on music theory such as Ethan Hein’s Loop Theory and Phillip Tagg’s ‘Everyday Tonality’. It’s all just so interesting, and even more rewarding to put into practice.

With all this, I started making a lot of music on my own. About a year and a half ago, I started writing ‘Dungeon Synth’, a style of Ambient Music that combines traditional medieval instruments, symphonic orchestra, and ambient synthesizers to evoke the feeling of dark and high fantasy, under the moniker ‘Lamerak’. I have also started making electronic music under the name ‘OSHA Violation’ that started out as an experimental electronic music project but has since evolved to include elements of Minimal Synth, Ambient Techno, Psybient, general Ambient and IDM. I enjoy making a lot of different styles of music, and anything that doesn’t fit in these three projects, such as Jazz stuff, Shoegaze/rock stuff, Hip-Hop beats, etc. goes on to my SoundCloud. I just really enjoy the challenge of learning the vocabulary of different styles of music and creating with it.

In this past year I’ve started to develop a passion for teaching music too, it’s honestly almost as enjoyable as playing or writing music, just getting to see someone you’re teaching working through understanding something, or how to play something, then seeing their face just light up when it finally clicks is a feeling so rewarding and satisfying. I’ve really only been able to teach to my friends. I’ve been teaching music theory in a guitar context to my friend Brad, and I’ve been teaching my friend Mike how to orchestrate with MIDI. I want to take this a step further and start a YouTube channel this summer. I already have a couple video ideas pertaining to writing dungeonsynth and some synth sound design elements.

I’ve also been able to incorporate music into my software development projects, which is my major. Specifically, I am a website developer. For my coop EEP last summer I decided to make Instrumentation Generation, an online composer tool in which composers can generate random groups of instruments to inspire new compositions, something I’ve found quite useful myself! It also serves a secondary purpose as a place to learn about all kinds of different instruments from around the world, new and old. It’s currently in version Beta 0.8, but it should hopefully be totally completed in the next month! The link to that is here. For my senior design project coming up next year, my team and I are creating an online tool to help both guitar teachers and students alike learn guitar chords in a more fun and proactive manner. No title for that one yet, still in the planning stage!

Looking towards the future, my buddy Mike and I, who I do songwriting with every Friday, have decided that our goal is to open a music studio together. I want to teach all sorts of music lessons and he wants to repair and sell old gear. It might be a long shot, but we’re going to give it our best shot, and I think the academic minor in music will only make this goal an even more realistic one for me. I’ve also been really intrigued by the idea of scoring video games and films lately. So, over this summer my plan is to learn about that, as well as trying to practice it with some movie clips I’ve found that have the sound effects, but have the score taken out. Then, this coming Fall/Spring, if I’m ready, I’m going to reach out to students in CCM doing film and students in CECH doing game development and offer to score their movies and games for free to get some experience

Music has really become my passion. More like my obsession, really. I am pretty proud of myself because of how much I’ve learned and accomplished in only a few years. I used to get pretty down on myself because I felt like I started my musical journey so late in life, but I have learned that that doesn’t matter, what matters is the work you put in.

I want to learn everything interesting there is to learn about music, and I want to use it to create music I can be proud of and teach others the skills and knowledge to do the same.