John Hancock likes a surprising chord change. Give him eight bars, and he will probably want to put something unexpected in the ninth. So when he first encountered the patient repetition of deep house, he had some questions.
Electronic music wasn’t his first love. Forged from bands, string arrangements, and a fondness for Peter Gabriel and Radiohead, a two-bar groove that continued for five minutes challenged him to listen differently. It took getting out to shows and working alongside people who understood the music’s subtleties for the appeal to become clear.
That willingness to reconsider what he knows has taken John from local Utah recording sessions to records with Kaskade, touring with Late Night Alumni, and a longstanding film collaboration with composer Mark Orton. Spectrasonics Omnisphere has accompanied much of that work, supplying everything from a quiet layer beneath a scene to the sound that spawns an entire composition.
John wants enough direction to understand the project, then enough freedom to find something he did not expect.
John Hancock in his studio
John’s early attempts at working with Kaskade did not immediately connect. When the producer first called him about collaborating, John was still finding his way into dance music. The relationship developed later through Finn Bjarnson, Kaskade’s musical partner, who brought John in to add strings and keyboards on some of their tracks.
As those contributions gradually grew, John would suggest changing the chords in a bridge or introduce an arrangement idea, bringing his own musical skill and instincts into a form he was learning to appreciate.
Going to shows made a difference. He began hearing how the arrival of a kick drum changed the room’s energy, how it interacted with the bass, and how much could happen within a seemingly simple pattern. Finn’s restraint offered another lesson: an arrangement did not need every idea John could fit into it.
“I was so used to just throwing the kitchen sink at every arrangement I wanted to do, because I could and that was fun,” John says.
Working with fewer elements made him listen more closely to each one. He compares it to learning to love the blues. What initially sounds like the same progression becomes a study in tone, attitude, and small variations.
Late Night Alumni began as a recording project that grew out of those relationships. John initially thought of himself as an additional arranger on the project, but after the first record found an audience, his collaborators began treating it as a band. More records and live performances followed.
His role still draws on the instincts he brought into those early sessions. When a project calls for something intimate or emotionally direct, he might find room for an unexpected chord or a pedal steel part, for example.
“They’re usually going to come to me for the more emotional things,” he says.
John Hancock in the studio with Finn Bjarnson and Becky Jean Williams
Long before those records, a much younger John was sitting beside a record player waiting for the dramatic orchestral passages.
His parents were music educators, and the household soundtrack leaned toward classical music and Broadway. Then came Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. John Williams supplied the excitement other children might have found in rock records, and writing music for movies became an early ambition.
John played piano, wrote songs, and learned violin in his school orchestra. At fourteen, he bought a Roland Juno-106 with money earned helping his father paint houses. Connecting the synth to a drum machine and discovering MIDI revealed another way to make music. He still has the Juno.
Composition developed through listening and experimentation. When his parents asked him to arrange music from Les Misérables, he worked through the recording, identifying chords, structures, and instrumental parts by ear. Sequencing let him test an idea, move a note, and hear what changed.
“You just start doing it and you just don’t let anybody tell you you’re not qualified,” John says.
His professional education was equally practical. Teaming up with guitarist Rich Dixon led to local commercials, jingles, and karaoke tracks. Reconstructing songs meant paying attention to music he might otherwise have dismissed, from country bass lines to the arrangement of a Disney song.
The work grew into a commercial studio and a career producing local artists. Film remained harder to reach. John could practice songwriting and record production every day, but finding a way into scoring required a different opening.
Ryan Raddon (Kaskade), Haley Gibby, John Hancock
After several years of applying, John was accepted into the Sundance Film Composers Lab in 2010.
Participants scored scenes and discussed their choices with visiting composers. For John, it was a chance to concentrate on the craft he had wanted to pursue since childhood. It was also where he met Mark Orton, whose work with Tin Hat Trio he already admired.
Their friendship became a working partnership. By John’s estimate at the time of our interview, they had collaborated on at least fifty projects, with that work accounting for most of his schedule.
John works from his studio in the hills of Salt Lake City; Mark is based in Portland. They exchange sessions and files, review picture with clients remotely, and bring orchestral recording projects to Utah, where John values the local players.
For years, John had assumed moving to Los Angeles would eventually be necessary. Instead, his relationships and the tools for working remotely developed together, allowing him to build a film career in the community where his other work had begun. “It’s a good time to live wherever you want,” John says.
Their daily exchange extends to individual sounds. Both composers use Omnisphere, and patches without custom audio can travel between them in a text message.
John Hancock performing live with Late Night Alumni
John’s relationship with Spectrasonics reaches back to one of their first virtual instruments, Atmosphere. Its appeal was immediate: playable textures that previously would have required much more preparation with samples, hardware, and effects.
He had spent years collecting sounds, including early sample CDs from ILIO. Having a broad selection of textures ready at the keyboard changed how quickly he could follow an idea.
That remains his main use for Omnisphere. Sometimes he starts with a sustained chord texture and writes more intricate material above it. Sometimes a piece is already taking shape, and he needs a layer that fills out the sound. On documentary projects, small looping patterns offer another useful starting point.
Most of the time, John begins with a preset and adjusts it to fit. His process is straightforward: find a promising sound, make a handful of changes, save it, and keep working.
He also creates patches from his own source material. Some favorites begin with recordings of Mark playing guitar, which John imports into Omnisphere and transforms with effects. The results bring something from their own collaboration into the instrument’s palette.
To keep those discoveries accessible, he saves patches in folders named after the film or project. When he remembers a sound from a documentary, he can return to that project’s folder and find it again.
John Hancock performs at Das Energi
For someone who regularly adapts presets to a cue, the distance between finding a sound and shaping it matters.
Omnisphere 3’s Adaptive Global Controls bring adjustments for tone, ambience, filtering, envelopes, vibrato, and unison into a readily accessible set of controls. They analyze the loaded patch and adapt to its configuration, letting the player shape its overall character without first working through its individual layers.
For John, immediate access to filter and envelope settings addresses the adjustments he makes most often. The envelope shapes how a sound begins and develops; the filter helps determine how bright or subdued it feels. Those changes can help a promising preset find its place in an arrangement.
“First thing you’re going to do is either change the attack or decay, and then open or close the filter,” he says. The Global Controls bring those elements and other key parameters to Omnisphere 3’s main page.
The convenience made a strong impression. Having those familiar adjustments up front was, in his words, “enough to make it a cool upgrade.”
It fits the way he already works: hear something useful, make it respond to the music, and continue writing.
Learn more about Global Controls.
Omnisphere 3’s Patch Mutations offer another way to develop a sound. The feature generates variations of an existing patch, with results ranging from subtle changes to more substantial transformations. Each mutation is automatically saved, so a useful discovery can be revisited later.
For a composer, that creates an opportunity to hear alternatives to a sound already under consideration. A variation might preserve enough of the original idea to fit the cue, or suggest a different direction altogether.
John is still exploring the feature. He is accustomed to making adjustments himself, but the unpredictable results suit his approach.
“It’ll sometimes go off the rails,” he says. “And honestly, that’s usually when the cool stuff happens.”
That openness extends beyond synthesizers. John is willing to pick up an instrument he does not know how to play because unfamiliarity might lead him somewhere interesting. His confidence lies in his ability to listen and decide what is worth keeping.
“Something cool is going to happen, and really my job is to just recognize it and make a good choice,” he says.
New presets offer another starting point. Euphoria, the latest of many ILIO Patch Libraries for Omnisphere, is a collection of dance music sounds for Spectrasonics Omnisphere 3 designed by Michael “MIDIhead” Babbitt. It includes basses, leads, pads, bells, effects, and rhythmic patches, drawing on both familiar electronic music sounds and more experimental textures.
Among those sounds are tempo-synced arpeggios and pulsers: repeating note patterns and rhythmic textures that establish movement as the player holds notes or chords. For John, their usefulness extends into documentary scoring.
Asked about Euphoria and the broader ILIO Patch Libraries for Omnisphere, he singles out the value of patterns that give him room to develop an idea.
“Sometimes you just need a 16th pattern with a little variation, and then work from there,” he says.
An elaborate arpeggio can arrive with a strong musical identity already in place. John often appreciates a simpler sixteenth-note pulse, which he can reshape by removing notes, introducing a triplet, or adjusting the pattern around a scene.
He recalls thanking Mike (MIDIhead) for including simpler patches. Omnisphere’s arpeggiator gives him plenty of ways to complicate them himself; what he values is a solid starting point with a little movement.
The connection to his earlier lessons in dance music is clear. Fewer elements leave more room to hear what each one contributes, and more space for John to make the arrangement his own.
John Hancock performs live with Kaskade, Becky Jean Williams, Finn Bjarnson at Kaskade's Christmas Concerts
John has welcomed new technology throughout his career, but generative AI raises a different question for him: which part of the work is it taking over?
Writing a string arrangement is something he enjoys. Having a tool do it for him can mean handing away the reason he wanted to make music in the first place.
He has found narrower uses. For one trailer demo, he generated background vocals to help present an idea, then replaced them with real singers after the direction was approved. He remains interested in learning what the tools can do while deciding where they fit.
His advice to younger musicians returns to individuality. Develop the unusual thing you do. Keep performing, see other artists, and spend time outside the studio.
John still makes a point of hearing music beyond his usual tastes. A friend has introduced him to jam bands, and even when a show is outside his preferred world, there may be a musical turn or a moment of interaction worth taking home.
That is familiar territory for someone who once struggled to understand the appeal of a repeating house groove.
The relationships matter just as much. Local musicians helped him begin a career. Friends brought him into records and touring. A connection at Sundance became years of film work.
“Everything good I’ve done has been some collaborative effort,” John says.
For John, the next idea might come from a collaborator, a concert, or a sound he has never played before. The work begins by staying open enough to hear it.
Explore Spectrasonics Omnisphere 3, Euphoria, and ILIO Patch Libraries for Omnisphere at ILIO.