Dear reader,
We are Scott, Chris, Will and Chauncey. I’ll lead off with Scott’s story as he is the founder of Musicianly. Scott’s early years were a story of a difficult up-bringing in Pittsburgh which led to an early escape into guitar. For Scott, guitar was everything; his portal to happiness, his means of communication, his outlet for emotions, his confidence builder as an admired guitar player. In pursuit of his passion for guitar, Scott skipped graduating high school, lived out of his car, friend’s basements and generally surfed the starving artist wave. Balancing the need to feed his passion with the need to make a dollar, this pretty much provides a picture of Scott’s early years.
The Musicianly project began 15 years ago, when Scott turned his attention to how best to explain to others how he managed the musical feats he did. He was constantly exploring the potential of the guitar in his hands, experimenting heavily with alternate tunings and developing an intuitive knowledge of music theory, something he had never studied. He wanted to capture his “magic” and share it with others – not as a passion project but as a genuine desire to turbocharge music creativity, exploration and fulfillment.
As a bootstrapper, in lean times, Scott even sold some prized guitars, studio equipment and other non-essentials to keep the project alive. He eventually joined up with Chris, who is both a musician and a rock star software engineer (we call him MIT Chris) and generated the engine behind what Musicianly is today. On the back of exploring 1 million tunings for the guitar, they effectively “hacked” the music theory necessary to make sense of those million tunings. This lends itself to any instrument, so our story is no longer just about the guitar but about applied music theory and what that can do for the aspiring musician.
So we have Scott: inventor, founder, passion source; we have Chris, passionate musician with engineering chops to use Scott’s vision and technology to overcome some of the largest hurdles to exploring music. Will is another passionate musician, having dug deep into music theory at Berklee and who, even today, tutors students in music and continues to write songs (he plays multiple instruments but voice is his main instrument). Will is our head of user experience. That leaves me, Chauncey, the least interesting of the team. I met Scott when mentoring startup entrepreneurs and decided to join Scott (one of my mentees) as investor and business guy. My own music background was rich until 8th grade and puts me in that broad swath of previously ambitious musicians who would love a bridge to picking that instrument back up. Enjoy!
Chauncey