About Silzel Performance System™ Creator John Silzel

John Silzel holds four US patents and leads two lives. During the day he is a science professor at Biola University, a job he trained for by earning a doctorate analyzing the air on remote Pacific islands, then “going straight” for 18 years as a corporate R&D scientist. By night (once his kids are in bed) he builds electric violins, pickups, and develops MIDI violin software. Once an honest, decent classical violinist who owned his own tuxedo, Dr. Silzel now plays rock, pop and jazz with blue-jeaned electric guitarists and other unsavory types. His mother is dismayed. Visit http://silzel.com/ to read John's blog and hear his music.

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More About John Silzel and the Development of Silzel Performance System™ ("Silzel")

"I started playing the violin in third grade in the usual school music program. (If you picked a string instrument you could start in third grade, but anything else you had to wait until fourth grade.) My secret plan was to switch to clarinet after a year, but I never got around to quitting the violin. By high school I was studying classical violin with the late Manuel Compinsky, teaching a handful of my own students, and “gigging” around Orange and Los Angeles counties.

All during this time, my ears were drawn to the new sound textures being created by synthesizers, and the music of the fusion movement of the 1970s and 1980s. I was stunned to discover that the violin could (in the hands of players like Jean Luc Ponty, Michal Urbaniak, Eddie Jobson, Alan Sloan, Jerry Goodman, and others) not only “play in this sandbox”, but do some pretty amazing things! But no one could teach me this kind of playing at the time. Like many classically trained players, I had no idea how to begin improvising.

Still, when I found a (disassembled!) electric violin in a pawnshop in 1975, I bought it with high hopes. I took that violin home and (knowing nothing about effects at the time) struggled to sound like the recordings I loved. In college, I tried to interface that violin to control a very temperamental kit-built PAIA synthesizer. I loved the sounds, but the technology I needed just didn’t exist in the early 1980s.

Running alongside my life as a violinist has always been my job as a scientist/engineer. Grad school (and later, my job) cut down on gigging, so by 1994 I was known as an expert in biomedical signal processing, but I had dropped out of the classical music scene. Still, the violin wouldn’t let go of me. I joined a band, learned to improvise and use effects, and by 2001 I was playing electric almost exclusively and building magnetic pickups and electric violins on the weekends.

I’d been longing to have a MIDI violin system but was put off by the cost of the equipment and the need for a special violin—I wanted to use my own “normal” electric violins and not have to pack two “axes” to gigs. Then around 2007, the keyboardist in our band showed up with one laptop that let him do anything from a Steinway to a Moog. Watching him carry in less gear than I had, I was jealous. Could I get really responsive MIDI, plus the effects I use, all from one laptop, one violin? I figured “The output of my electric violin is a signal, and solving signal processing problems is my day job, so why not try?” That was how "Silzel" got started: a crazy idea that wasn’t supposed to be possible. It took a couple of years, but turned out well enough that I had to share it with other players."