William Hopson

Classical Hip-Hop, Mobile Thinking, and Letting Ideas Lead Every time a new music tool drops, the conversation gets louder. New features appear overnight, workflows shift, and suddenly there’s a sense that if you’re not adopting everything immediately, you’re falling behind. What rarely improves at the same pace is the music itself. This week’s episode of The Backpack Composer  grew out of that tension, and from an unexpected nudge at home. My wife informed me that this weekend was...

There’s a particular anxiety that shows up whenever technology touches art. It isn’t really about the technology itself—it’s about control . Who gets to create? Who gets credit? And who decides what “counts” as real? Artificial intelligence just happens to be the latest mirror we’re holding up to those questions. This week’s vlog looks at gear, workflow, and ethics—but the larger conversation underneath it is simpler and older than AI: Music has never been a fixed object. It’s a moving target...

Last week was about control. Very intentional control. Tone shaping per instrument. Deliberate decisions. Everything dialed in exactly where I wanted it. This week, that plan deleted itself. Not metaphorically — literally. The original idea unraveled, got replaced, unraveled again, and eventually turned into something that didn’t resemble the plan at all. Which, in hindsight, was the most honest direction the week could have taken. I’d been traveling. Some of the recording happened out of...