Rich has been involved with the music industry for over 35 years. He started playing in bands within 6 months into his musical journey, and has never stopped.

 

Rich attended Cornell College in Mt Vernon Iowa and completed a music degree focusing on Jazz Performance, Arrangement, Orchestration, and Composition. There he was exposed to many different people from all over the globe and all of their music that they brought from their culture. This was a period that he considers as his “reawakening”.

 

After college, he spent the next 20 years performing, recording, and writing with many projects. Rich also kept an alter ego around working as a professional gardener. Unfortunately, between the hard labor of that work and the grueling hours of a musician, after over 20 years of pushing himself to exhaustion, he sustained a spinal injury 5 years ago that effectively put an end to any professional gardening work and to most performing.

 

Seeing a new life ahead, it as a golden opportunity to dive deep into a part of audio that barely touched until now. Before him was a new opportunity was to explore and expand as an audio engineer (“on the other side of the mic and console”). With time now completely flexible, he spent the next 2 years building and learning over 70 hours a week. Using the internet, generous colleagues, and many sessions of trial and error, he learned quickly and made very nice mixes soon into the journey. Rich discovered the power and opportunities on the internet and started networking with people from every part of the planet. One of the relationships he started is seeing it's funky fruition in the concepts and music of Gist.