#PeopleFirst Friday: Nick Jones

Given the honorific of being the “best guitar player at CSM Production” by Ashlar Sargent (who himself also plays the guitar), Audiovisual Lead Nick Jones always loved music growing up, but it wasn’t until his teenage years when he picked up the guitar seriously for the first time.

“I was 10 or 11 when my parents bought me my first guitar – a cheap Fender guitar, and honestly, I wasn’t really into it,” Jones recalled. “I was buying CDs when I was that age, going down to FYE or Tower Records. I was also an avid skateboarder when I was younger, and kept breaking my arms and getting concussions, to the point where my mom was like ‘You have to stop this.’ That’s when I started picking up the guitar and becoming more serious about it.”

Playing in a few bands in high school, Jones and his bandmates had the opportunity to open for punk bands like Misfits and the Casualties while he was a member of Destroy, a punk band that he notes had a pretty strong local following. But while Jones enjoyed playing guitar, what he found that he enjoyed more was the production aspect of the music his band was playing.

“We went on some small tours in high school, but I was always the person in the band who was obsessed with the tone, and that’s what led me to audio engineering,” Jones said. “I bought some recording equipment when I was in high school, and I was the one recording our band and my friends’ bands. I had never been serious about it, but after I graduated from college, and I was playing gigs, and I started getting paid more to do audio than I was playing guitar.

“At that point in my life I was settling down,” he continued with a laugh. “I got married, and audio engineering felt like a better career path than gigging at bars.”

Audio Engineering has led Jones on quite the worldwide journey, including touring for five years with Town Mountain, a band that specializes in a Bluegrass/Americana-type music, a style that Jones was previously unfamiliar with.

“Getting introduced to that type of American music was awesome,” said Jones, who studied and still regularly plays jazz guitar. “In both jazz and bluegrass, there are these common tunes and chord progressions where everyone can play together in a jam circle, and there’s just a commonality in the musical structure and harmony of the music that’s really cool to see. Town Mountain took me all over the country and I got to meet all these different musicians – it was very interesting.”

Later this year, Jones will return to the road with Town Mountain, who are playing the Telluride Music Festival in Colorado.

“I used to run sound all the time for them, but now they just call me for the bigger shows,” he said. “They give me a ring when they know they’ve got something big.”