Curations in
Curations out
Who's taking you?
- Curation by: The Matrix via ↴
Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Chris McQueen
- City: Austin, Texas
- Country: United States
Current News
- What's Up? Guitar Note Atlas -- an interactive map of the guitar designed to help players of all levels better visualize the layout of the notes on the fretboard -- designed by Snarky Puppy guitarist Chris McQueen and available for the iPhone and iPad -- is available via the link below...
My Life
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Bio:
Chris McQueen has been playing, writing, and recording music since 1994. He plays guitar in the 3-time Grammy winning band Snarky Puppy, as well as the gritty instrumental quartet Forq, and world music group Bokanté. He has also worked as sideman for Lizz Wright, Banda Magda, Lucy Woodward, Nikka Costa, Myron Butler & Levi, Alejandro Escovedo, and other artists in Texas and New York. He has been featured in several rock musicals over the last decade, most recently David Bowie’s Lazarus at New York Theatre Workshop (featuring Michael C. Hall) and The Rocky Horror Show at The Dallas Theater Center. He also designed and built the Guitar Note Atlas, an app for iPhone and iPad to help guitar and bass students learn the fretboard.
Chris grew up in Austin, TX and started playing guitar and recording songs on a 4-track Tascam around age 10. At 13 he joined RedHeaded Stepchild, a western swing kid band, and started gigging around Austin and learning how to solo from bandmate and guitar prodigy Will Knaak. This interest in improvisation led Chris to jazz; he joined and wrote for his high school jazz band, and later attended the University of North Texas to study with Fred Hamilton. He eventually played in the One O’Clock Lab Band and wrote a piece that was recorded for Lab 2006.
Chris remained in the Dallas area for four years after college, co-leading the regionally popular rock band Oso Closo with singer/songwriter Adrian Hulet, and studying music with Bernard Wright and other members of the Dallas R&B/jazz/Gospel scene. Oso Closo performed on stage in The Who’s Tommy at the Dallas Theater Center and released two albums. After Oso Closo broke up, Chris and fellow band member Danny Garcia joined with singer/songwriter Cade Sadler to form Foe Destroyer, which produced one album, toured for several years, and performed on stage in Dallas and NYC in the musical Fly By Night.
Chris lives in Austin, TX with his wife Erin. Aside from gigging and recording he writes sheet music for Snarky Puppy and others, and he created arrangements and sounds for the new musical Bunkerville. He has also been working on an upcoming solo album, and he plays in an original acoustic guitar duo with fellow Austinite Matt Read that released its debut album Western Theatre last year. He has been producing videos for Guitar Note Atlas, which will be receiving a major update this year and finally coming to Android devices.
Chris projects also include instrumental quartet Forq, indie rock band Foe Destroyer, and West African-inspired band Bokanté. He’s done several rock musicals, including David Bowie’s Lazarus at New York Theatre Workshop, The Rocky Horror Show (Dallas Theater Center), Fly By Night (Playwrights Horizons & DTC), and The Who’s Tommy (DTC).
He developed an iPhone app called Guitar Note Atlas allowing guitarists to quickly see how to finger things on the fretboard, and also for non-guitarists to study scales and modes.
My Media
- Website: http://www.chrismcqueen.com
- Website 2: http://www.guitarnoteatlas.com/
- Twitter: mcqueenerpants
- Instagram: mcqueenerpants
Click to Listen on Spotify
- (album/podcast 1): http://open.spotify.com/album/0JOv5l7cHWPKET8uO6FbF9
Contact Information
- Email: chris(at)chrismcqueen(dot)com
Clips
► Matrix headquarters in Salvador, Bahia. Interview is by David Dye for broadcast on U.S. National Public Radio. Pre Brazil I "rescued" royalties for Aretha Franklin, Barbra Streisand, Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Jim Hall, Ray Barretto, Airto Moreira, Earl Carroll of The Cadillacs, Rob Royer of Bread, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), and others.
► The work was a variation of industrial espionage; record companies didn't play fair so neither did we. Here I work with musicians who don't earn royalties but who are no less amazing for it. The matrix is a means of leveraging a sociological/mathematical phenomenon to make them discoverable and accessible from far from their native ground. But for the system to work for them, it has to work for everybody. And every truly creative artist in it means more valid pathways to the Brazilians, and to everybody else.
► Wikipedia: A small-world network is a type of mathematical graph in which most nodes are not neighbors of one another, but the neighbors of any given node are likely to be neighbors of each other and → most nodes can be reached from every other node by a small number of hops or steps ←
► The Matrix: A small-world network re a type of mathematical graph in which most artists are not curators of one another, but the curators of any given artist are likely to be curators of each other and → most artists can be reached from every other artist by a small number of hops or steps ←
