The Story

Music was introduced at an early age to Owen, at the age of 5, where 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 and studying privately with modern jazz guitarist, Ben Eunson, while actively producing music content online and performing live.

Owen studied and played violin in local symphony orchestras in San Diego for 9 years. Throughout his 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.

He began his studies in jazz guitar at the age of 20 in his college jazz program, performing and studying in UC Berkeley’s Dann Zinn Advanced Jazz combo, Big Bands, and Nu Jazz Collective, 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, Kevin Wang, 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, with instructors including Ralph Alessi, Andy Milne, Ben Monder, Michael Attias, and Jonathan Kreisberg's 5-day jazz guitar intensive. He enjoys teaching, including instructing 3 semesters of an Intro to Jazz Harmony course at Berkeley, and creating lessons online. He also dabbles in MIDI Synth guitars electronic music, and sound design. After moving from San Francisco, he is currently residing in New York, working at LinkedIn as a Software Engineer while concurrently pursuing his Masters in Jazz Performance part-time at NYU.

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 recently 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. He also enjoyed competing for his university's Triathlon and Cycling teams, once having a love for endurance sports and adventurous cycling trips. Currently, he writes code as a software engineer for LinkedIn, contributing to products that influence 500 million users. Prior teams he has worked on at LinkedIn include the LinkedIn Learning, Content & Publishing, Slideshare, Video, and currently, the Video Ads team.

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.