Jay Magdaleno

 

Jay Magdaleno’s love for music started early on, listening to anything he could find in his Dad’s heavily laced Classic Rock music collection. He first took an interest in the guitar in junior high when he learned a few of his friends from school had guitars. Around the same time, a classical guitar was given to him by a relative who dabbled with the instrument. Jay began teaching himself melodies by ear, trying to copy what he heard on the radio. But it wasn’t until later in high school, when he got his first electric guitar that he began to take a more serious interest in the instrument, leaning heavily on the recent surge of “Grunge Rock” that had exploded from Seattle. Noticing the Classic Rock influence upon these bands, he began to delve deeper, looking into all the influences of his favorite artists, and their influences as well, inevitably leading him to discover genres within genres being used to cultivate new styles of music. 

 

Following Jimmy Page’s philosophy that guitars are really multifaceted instruments and should be treated as such, Jay began to look for ways to think outside the box, and imitate the sounds of other instruments with the guitar. With a fascination for drums and rhythm, he realized that the acoustic guitar could be used to extract a number of various sounds, timbres, rhythms, and beats, and could also be approached as if it were an electric guitar. Jay loves the idea of the minimal number of musicians creating the maximum amount of sound, and is always exploring ways to effectively arrange and weave challenging songs into the most powerful and convincing performance with the least amount of musicians possible. He believes the combination of the natural sound of the acoustic guitars with unnatural effects, as well as two voices being used harmonically as one instrument, is sufficient to fully capture the entire range of human emotion and experience, and hopes to deliver just that for his audiences. 

 

Influences: Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones (Mick Taylor), Jimi Hendrix, Bert Jansch, Pink Floyd, The Red Hot Chili Peppers (John Frusciante), Otis Redding, Ray Charles, The Who, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton, Fleetwood Mac, James Brown, The Allman Brothers, Neil Young, The Black Crowes, Al Green, Rush, Alice in Chains, CSN, Stephen Stills, Fleetwood Mac, Nirvana, The Foo Fighters, Chuck Berry, Paul Rodgers, The Doors, and many many more.