D-Hawk’s Taking Flight

Image credit Jason Ting

“Look into the skies, one day I’ll fly,” reverberates over the top of an electronic keyboard as senior Dave Hock–D-Hawk, a musician and beatboxer, opens the intro to his debut album. Hock has been a part of the music scene for a long time. He initially started getting into production by making parody songs for pleasure. 

“I started using digital software and making beats in 2017 and that was on my iPad using GarageBand,” Hock said. “I would spend my time watching YouTube tutorials on making beats and start copying them step by step, getting a feel for them, and then using that as a baseline.” After mastering the basics, Hock upgraded his computer and equipment and moved to a program called FL Studio which inspired him to begin writing his own music.

“[Moving forward] with my music journey, I started writing in 2019—actually creating my own lyrics and stuff,” said Hock. Hock considers himself to be more of a producer than a rapper, despite the release of his rap album, because of his wide variety of music experiences. He started writing the lyrics in 2019 and released the first song of the album “Uncle Iroh” in 2022.

“I’m doing every part of the process—it takes me a lot longer to release the track from when I start,” said Hock. “That’s why it took me four years to get it done; I had to learn how to adjust the frequency of the voice, add compression and reverb, and learn how the microphone actually works.”

“You can see the evolution of how I learned to make music—record it, mix it and everything like that—that was a big process,” Hock said.

“You can see in the earlier stuff like ‘Uncle Iroh’, that track was when I was first learning how to record and mix,” he said. “As I’ve started to make more and more music, my style has started to evolve and you can see that on later tracks like ‘Taking Flight’ and ‘View from the Atmosphere.’”

Not only did Hock’s album showcase his evolution as a musician and producer, but it also provides meaning behind his artist name D-Hawk. While providing some catchiness, the name also added meaning to the release of the “Taking Flight” album. 

“It’s not a concept album but [you can see the connection] with ‘Taking Flight’ … and the first song is ‘The Egg;’ so I’m coming out of my shell and then ‘Learning How to Fly’, and finally ‘Taking Flight’ that shows that there’s a story being told with D-Hawk,” Hock said.

Hock’s album highlights how far he has come and reminds him of the long journey it took to get here: “I was annoying everyone in my family at first but then I started to get really good at it to the point where I was like: ‘Maybe I’m good enough to compete in beatbox competitions.’”

Hock intends to join different music groups, collaborate with various people, and branch out and work in varying music genres like jazz, rock, beatboxing, and acapella.  

“I’ve got a lot of stuff planned since it’s going to be my last year at Santa Clara. I just want to do as much cool stuff as possible,” Hock said. 

He added: “For the future, I don’t want to be famous but working in the music industry behind the scenes would be sick.”

Hock plans to perform in the Love Jones concert hosted by Igwebuike, the University’s Black student union, come April where he hopes to incorporate his beatboxing talent and looping. Hock plans to experiment with looping, where artists replay sections of songs, often using a device or pedal to control the replays. Looping will allow Hock to add new dimensions to his music.

“I had some TikTok going semi-viral where I was doing looping, so if I could take that into the live performance setting, that would be very cool for me,” Hock said.

Hock plans to release a new song at the end of the month, tentatively titled “Han Solo," and he hopes to release two or three more songs before the end of this year. You can find him on all platforms under the username @D_Hawk.