The Story

Music was introduced at an early age to Owen, at the age of 5, when he began his classical studies on the violin. Currently, he resides in New York City, furthering his studies on the guitar as a Masters student in Jazz Instrumental Performance at New York University, currently studying privately with world renowned jazz musicians including Peter Bernstein, Adam Rogers, Kevin Hays, and Ben Eunson, while actively producing music content online and performing live.

Previously, Owen performed and studied in UC Berkeley’s jazz ensembles, as well as at the California Jazz Conservatory under ensembles led by Steve Erquiaga and Frank Martin, and forming his own fusion funk group, Constant Time. Notable mentors in the past have included Jeff Massanari, Luca Mantovanelli, Dann Zinn, Steve Erquiaga, Bob Ross, Myra Melford, and Ted Moore. He also attended the SIM (School for Improvisational Music) Summer Intensive at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. In 2019, Owen was a semi-finalist for the international Wilson Center Guitar Competition, Jazz category. After moving from San Francisco, he is currently residing in New York, working at LinkedIn as a Senior Software Engineer while concurrently pursuing his Masters in Jazz Performance part-time at NYU, under guidance of some of the modern world renowned key figures in the Jazz scene today.

Owen began music at the age of five, studying and playing violin in local symphony orchestras in San Diego for 9 years. Throughout his early musical progression, he ventured into other instruments, including the flute, percussion & drumline, jazz drumset for his high school jazz-band, and eventually sticking with the guitar. At age 13, he began recording and creating videos on YouTube, attracting over 2,000,000 views and 7,000+ subscribers during his early teenage years producing “one-man-band” style music. Owen was featured in 2009 as a guitar soloist for the San Diego Young Artists Orchestra to play “Canon Rock”, the original tune that inspired him to pick up the guitar.

Apart from music, he is intrigued by the fields of machine learning, artificial intelligence, the cognitive sciences, neuroscience, and the philosophy of the mind. Pursuing this mix of the engineering and liberal arts, Owen has completed his dual Bachelors degrees in Computer Science and Cognitive Science at UC Berkeley, having done research in the field of Computational Cognition, and having industry experience in educational technology in London startup accelerators. Currently, he writes code as a software engineer for LinkedIn, contributing to products that influence 500 million users.

He is now actively producing, creating, and growing his online Instagram community of 20,000+, and hopes to eventually meld the intersection between music, technology, and education to influence the next generation of musicians in the digital age.