Jon Solo (2)

January 1, 2015- It sounds cliched, but music has always been a part of my life. This is mentioned only to clarify that there is no "starting point" when it comes to my music. Some people look to life changing events or a moment that sparked their creativity. And there are many moments...just no starting point. For example, even though my career in recording is more than 20 years old or so, I remember back in the late 1970's as a kid using my dad's two Radio Shack tape recorders to dub piano and percussion (ok me banging on the furniture) back to back until there was what amounted to a multitrack recording. This went on for several years. As a young teen I worked with a four piece jazz ensemble as a keyboardist and backing vocalist. Nothing ground breaking. But it lasted for four years and was a ton of fun. In 1984 I got my first synthesizer (a Korg Poly800) and attempted to set up my first MIDI based studio. In a studio it was easy to create instrumental music and cassette after cassette of works began to flow. Some of those tracks might fall under the labels of EDM, Chill, Trance, Electronica, Dance, IDM, and Trip-Hop. It really never occurred to me that these blended musical styles would later emerge in mainstream so the ideas were shelved and focus was shifted to pop and rock. For the next 10 years I gigged with various bands. Again it was nothing ground breaking but it was a lot of fun. In the meantime I was still recording off and on. By 1998 it felt time to get serious about recording. That is when I started Solosounds (a label of sorts) and my studio mostly in response to a number of local bands and musical acts requesting a respectable musical outlet. The company was expanded immediately to include online resources which seemed to be the direction everything was heading in. As my production skills improved, and more groups came in, my catalog was growing by leaps. One huge result was a number of R&B/Hip-Hop tracks including Ringmaster:Jerry Springer which hit the Billboard Hot Climbers in 1999 with rap artist Marco Polo. This unexpected leap allowed me to expand the studio even more. This lead to some fantastic collaborations, some even over the Internet (pre-2000, wow)! Eventually I would be involved in more than 100 CD releases in a four year span. All of this however enabled me to turn my attention back to my own music. In 2002 I released Solosphere which was my first electronica CD in more than a decade. In October 2013 I made much of my personal recordings available via iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play. And December 31, 2014 marked the release of In a Far Away Place, my 10th personal commercial release (including EPs)! Currently I am working on three projects- a new electronica album, a vocal album of duets, and a retooling of some of Solosounds' tracks from the late 90's. It should be a good year musically!