Don't know if it counts as long-time or not, but it's been a long time for my age. I've been playing professionally for 27 years, and I turn 32 tomorrow.

It all started with ice cream buckets and tin pie plates. That was my first drum kit. Worked out well, because my dad loved dessert and I loved banging on the containers the dessert was in. Even then, apparently my dad and sisters were paying attention to the noise I was making, because they entrusted me to be the drummer for the family band at age 5.

My dad had a country Gospel band that toured churches, festivals, county and state fairs, in the dakotas and surrounding states. It was he, my sisters, and a couple local guys. Gradually, it became totally a family band, when my sister learned to do left hand bass, and I started playing drums. I can just about imagine how the studio engineer felt when he booked a family band to come in and record a 10 song album, and what he got was 15 year old keyboard/piano players and a 5 year old drummer.

This is one of the tracks from that album. www.roryhoffman.com/little.mp3

We did on average 1 album a year for the next 5 years. We were weekend warriors as it were, with me and my sisters in school and dad having a ranch to run. Sometimes during the summers we would go out for slightly extended periods.

Over the years I was teaching myself to play other instruments, and as my younger brother started taking up an interest in drums, I moved on to playing lead guitar, banjo, harmonica, sax, some fiddle.

My other influence groing up apart from country and gospel music was old-time polka and waltz music. That was a big deal with my granpa, great uncles and some other friends of my parents.
My dad bought some recording equipment for us to use at home, and I decided I wanted to learn to use it. So, at age 12, I created a tape (for my grandpa) of me playing a bunch of the polkas and waltzes that I always played with him. I did all the instruments, recording, mixing, myself. Grandpa started showing friends, who started wanting copies. Eventually a radio station up in North Dakota which did a Sunday afternoon polka show got wind of it and asked for a copy. At which point a lot of people wanted copies. Then a record store in Dickenson North Dakota asked me if I might want to put a few copies in his store to sell. So at night when I was home doing homework, I was making copies of my old-time cassette to put in the store.

In junior high and High school I started taking up an interest in jazz. Everyone else in my family thought I'd lost it. Jazz chords just made no sense to anybody...except me. I really traced the jazz heritage. At first, I didn't really like anything but old Dixieland music, because it sort of reminded me of sophisticated polkas, what with the horns and banjos. Then I really latched onto the bigband swing stuff, and later kept progressing as my brain wrapped around this whole jazz experience.

In college I studied piano and saxophone. I lasted 2 years. I was set to transfer from a local school in SD to North Texas to get a jazz studies degree, but fate had other plans.
Over the summer of 1999, I attended the Christian Artist in the Rockies Seminar. It's a national event with workshops, clinics, and competitions. I entered the piano competition, the general instrumental competition with guitar, and a Christian rock band I was playing with from college at the time also entered.
The rock band took 4th in the overall band competition, I took second in piano, and grand champion instrumentalist with guitar.
Those accomplishments got me some notice, and I met someone who wanted to help me produce a record in NASHVILLE! WOW!

in 2001 I made my first trip to Nashville to record Blind Faith, a guitar and piano instrumental CD with a lot of Nashville's finest session guys backing me up. I soaked up everything I could absorb..
One of the people who was largely responsible for helping me fund that project decided we should try to build a studio ourselves back in South Dakota.
And Depot Music was formed.
in 2003 I self-produced my second record, "Fishin'", and played a lot of the instruments myself and hired friends and aquaintances from across North and South Dakota to do instruments I couldn't or didn't want to play. That's the thing with the Dakotas, you have to cover a lot of territory to find enough REALLY SKILLED musicians to do a top-shelf project.

I stayed with Depot music until 2008. During that time I won Musician of the Year twice with the Christian Country Music Association, got to perform on the Ryman stage, appeared on GAC tv, toured the country from Cali to New York to Texas. And produced a few records for other clients in our studio.

in 2008 I decided I had to make the move to Nashville once and for all and see how it would work out. Kind of got tired of being the big fish and needed to test my mettle with the best. And that's what I'm doing. I'm not turnig the world upside down, but I'm earning a living, playing with a few swing and country bands, doing the occasional sessionn, and just finding my way. I'm about at my 2 year anniversary here now and I'm loving it tremendously.

So, there it is, as best as I can condense the major points.
Rory