Full Interview
Ella Jenkins earned the title The First Lady of Children's Folk Songs and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award for her dedication to bringing music to children. She began collecting and writing folk songs as a summer camp counselor, which years later tied nicely with her college studies of child...
John Roderick studied percussion at the Hart School of Music, which proved to be a great benefit for his long and successful career in the music products industry. John has worked for several top companies so far in his career including learning first hand from Charlie Kaman at Kaman Music, Jim...
Ted Kornblum has a long legacy in the music industry. His grandfather started St. Louis Street Music and his father started Crate amplifiers and Alvarez guitars. Not content to rest on his laurels, Ted gained experience working both inside and outside his family’s music business before starting on...
Jeanne Stiernberg teams with her husband, John, to run the Stiernberg Consulting Firm. Since the fourth grade, when she began piano lessons, Jeanne has always been active in music. While at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, she conducted research within her field of study of speech and...
Suzanne Ciani played a key role in the early awareness and usage of electronic musical instruments into pop music, film and even the stage. She was experimenting with electronic musical instruments long before many other performers, male or female. When she began composing on the Buchla...
Mary Faith Rhoads Lewis grew up on a farm outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania, where her mother played the piano and encouraged her children to play an instrument. Mary Faith began playing the violin at the age of eight and soon discovered she had a love of folk music. She built her own Mountain...
Peter Hix loves the ukulele. Well, he loves every instrument but does have an extra fondness and appreciation for the ukulele. He was exposed to music from the very beginning, growing up in the music studio his parents established in 1946, right on Benton Street in Aurora, IL. By the age of nine...
Ryo Okumoto began his professional musical career as a keyboardist during the height of the electronic musical instrument boom of the 1970s. The synthesizer was growing nearly every month and new sounds were being created at nearly every NAMM Show, an opportunity Ryo-san took full advantage of as...
Sheldon Sazant began working for Steve's Music in Canada in 1978. What he recalls as his first impression of the store was the very tall, big, red-bearded owner, Steve. Steve was bigger than life and when Sheldon got to know him, he discovered Steve was a teddy bear. Sheldon, like so many...
Kazuo Matsushita is the son of the founder of Audio-Technica, a creative and innovative company that has been an important part of the music industry since the early 1960s. When Kazuo began working full time for the company, he led the teams that focused on the designs and production of...