In this episode, Jared dives deep with Mark Wood, legendary founder of Wood Violins and inventor of the 6 and 7-string electric violin. Mark shares his incredible journey from Juilliard to pioneering the electric string industry, performing with Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and collaborating with icons like Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. Discover his insights on building a successful music business, disrupting the status quo, and inspiring the next generation of musicians. Packed with actionable advice and incredible stories, this is a must-listen for anyone passionate about music and innovation.

"Nonconformity is essential to an artist and an inventor. And I was like, that's it. Non conformity. So what we are dealing with, with musicians and artists, you can be similar to somebody else.."

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What's up, gigging musicians? It's Jared Judge. Welcome to another episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. We have a very special guest on today's podcast.

I am so excited to bring to us the gentleman who's moving his hands around, Mr. Mark Wood, who is the founder of Wood Violins. He's created.

He is actually the inventor of the 6 and 7 string electric violin. He has been. He was the original electric violinist of the Trans Siberian Orchestra.

He brings the music of the people to our school systems, teaching kids how to play rock in orchestra, which is just incredible. I'm just so excited to welcome to our podcast Mark Wood. How's it going, Mark? Awesome, Jared.

It's so great to see you. And I've been following you, too. You're rocking on TikTok and everywhere else, man.

We got to elevate our industry, and what you're doing is definitely supporting that. Oh, thank you so much. Well, I've been following you too, and I'm so inspired.

It's one of my secret desires to actually get one of your vipers one day. So you have to let me know when. When the wait list is short and I'll put my order in.

Anything for you, but the question to you is, how far are you going to go? Into the abyss. Five strings was a, you know, a calamity for string players. And when I got my seventh string, I couldn't get fast enough to play that thing.

So how many strings do you think you can handle? I can handle all of them. Good. Because that, you know, flexibility, Jared, is a really interesting topic for me because I.

We see guitar players jumping from, you know, an electric guitar, solid body to. To an acoustic guitar. We see keyboard players jumping from a harpsichord to a piano to a synthesizer.

Very different feels. We see other instrument drummers and everybody bass players. They could base seven string basses and stuff like that.

These guys are committed to creating and experiencing new things every day. I got a new pedal, I got a new this, I got a new that. Check this out.

Oh, I can now do this. String players are not like that, unfortunately. Well, actually, they weren't like that as much 20, 30 years ago.

Now it's much better because of the work that you're doing. And Tracy, of course, and Matt Bell. So it's slowly changing, but it always amazes me when I work with students and professors.

How do you play more than four strings? I'm like, dude, your four strings like a tricycle next to Ferrari, man. I've got a Ferrari because I can do Much more with my music. So it's always an interesting thing how, I don't know, I'm really scared of playing a five string or something like that, or then of course the frets, which I have.

So really interesting moment that I'm hoping will continue to slowly blossom into a real industry right now. You know, as you've been watching the industry, it's still baby stepping. And you see the guitar industry in the 60s, 50s and 60s, they propel that thing to be incredibly fast.

Within a couple of years it was a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand dollars, maybe a million dollar industry. And it shifted to a billion dollar industry within 10 years because of. Not the.

As much the instrument, but because of Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Zeppelin, the Beatles. Everybody saw this, man. I want that.

So it's an interesting moment for us right now that I'm still alive, Tracy's still alive, you're still alive. We must really move this paradigm into a broader mission statement. Yeah, I love that.

And I got to admit, you are the first guest on this podcast who ever started the interview by asking me a question. So I could tell you've pressed the fun button on, as I heard you say in one of your videos. So for our musicians who listen to this podcast, most of them are actually not bowed string players.

I would say a lot of them are in the rock and cover industry. Would you chat a little bit about your background?

You know, you went to Juilliard, you did the whole classical route, but then you were introduced to music of Jimmy Page and Hendrix, and you worked on your brother's motorcycle, which kind of got you into it. Talk to me about your story and your evolution into, you know, the non classical world of string play.

Yeah, and that was a real adventure for me. But as you know, with anything that we have passion for, nobody is going to tell us that we can't do it. And sometimes when people tell us, oh, you can't do that or you shouldn't do that, that fuels us even more.

So. Yeah, but. But I play classical music every day.

If you see my music stand right here, I've got sevcheck, I've got Bach, I've got all my classical etudes that I do every day. So we don't want to get ever into these saying, well, I don't like, I want to remove classical music from my world. I want to create something new.

We revere our tradition and we revere our classical training. That's critical because when I work with rock musicians, yes, they have incredible talents from Paul McCartney, to Billy Joel. Incredible.

But they're untrained musicians, which has never stopped them from being incredibly successful. But I like to be able to read and write music. I like to be able to sight read music.

So our classical training. And I think, Jared, you're also classically trained, right? Yep, that's right. Yeah.

I mean, I think that some fiddlers and Indian and Celtic string players really don't activate that, that foundation like we did. You know, I was. I grew up.

My mother was a concert pianist and my dad is a famous artist, which meant there was no money, by the way. And my mom had four boys in four years. We're a year apart.

And she was determined to have a string quartet, which of course I'm like, well, oh, sure, okay. And my older brother's a well known violin player, CT, second oldest brother as a cellist, principal cellist of the Syracuse Symphony. And then I played viola.

My younger brother played violin. So we were the first all brothers string quartet. Nice.

And when you have a family unit where we're interacting with, you know, we're beating each other up and we're playing with each other and then we're jumping at each other, you know, it's chaos.

The second music was being played by my mother on the piano. We calmed down and became quiet from birth.

So from birth, music had a very, very powerful influence on me emotionally and spiritually and everything. I mean, we all love music, but when you grow up in an environment where it's nonstop 247 music and art. My father's paintings on the wall would change every week as he would sell them and he put a new painting on every week.

My entire life was like that. My mother would teach piano in the living room. My brother would practice cello in the bathroom.

I would practice my viola in the kitchen. That was my life. And I was so, so lucky.

So music got very deep into me. Was I the greatest viola player in the world? I was pretty good. But I never really practiced because it came naturally for me because I started so young and I was able to pick up classical music fairly quickly, to the point where I got a scholarship to Tanglewood at 15, working with Leonard Bernste, mentioned by him, which was unbelievable.

That really was a change. As much as listening to Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and the Beatles. Leonard Bernstein to me.

And still to this day. And of course that movie is out, which everyone should see. Maestro was the example.

And Jared, I do want to share this with you because this is something that I share with every class and graduating universities and students we are not string players, we are musicians. And when Leonard Bernstein shared with us a story on our tax returns under occupation, right, Lenny was like, he's the greatest conductor in the world. He's not putting conductor.

He's the greatest pianist in the world. He's not putting down pianists, he's the greatest conductor, composer. He put down occupation as musician.

And I was like, that's what I want to be. I want to be a musician. I don't want to be a, you know, a string player.

I want to be a musician. And then of course, the students look at me, well, what does that mean?

I said, well, that's a very deep concept that we have to embrace as humans as the ability to transfer our imagination to somebody else's ears, transferring it and connecting our heart to their heart, connecting us to the audience. Now with classical music, we're all facing the conductor.

The conductor's back is to the audience, which is a big no, no and you know, non classical performance, you don't put your back to the audience.

So that art form, which still must retain its importance now and forever because it's one way of creating brilliant, beautiful music, but as an art form, it's really challenged by that.

In the 21st century, you know, we go to see two hours, we're sitting in the most magnificent music and visually it's a little more stilted for a young person.

Not for me. And for you. I can sit through, you know, a Brahms symphony easily.

Mahler, absolutely. And I can sort of space out, close my eyes, look a little bit. But when Leonard Bernstein was conducting Mahler, man, we were riveted to his gestures.

So it's an interesting thing anyway, so I think that growing up in that household, but remember Jared, my father's side was equally important. My grandfather in 1910 became at the age of 25, Henry Ford's architect. Totally self taught.

And another interesting thing, my grandfather. And back then in the early 1900s, school, you know, people just sort of went and they just dropped out to get work, to find work. And my grandfather and my father and all my uncles never really graduated the 8th grade.

Where they learned was the library. The public library became their school. And they learned to be self taught.

They taught themselves what they loved. My father taught himself how to paint and took a little bit of classes. My grandfather was Henry Ford's architect that moved his entire family of seven children.

It was truly that moment like the Sound of Music where you had seven kids in one car driving from Canada all the way down to Long island parking in Long island and creating a furniture custom furniture company that made furniture for temples and churches, from pews to burning bushes to tapestries to stained glass windows to. All the furniture in the UN Was built by my family, Albert Wood and five sons.

And at the Smithsonian Institute is one of our famous clients, And I think 1940s was Amelia Earhart.

A picture of Amelia Earhart with the furniture at the Smithsonian Institute. Wow, that's amazing. So that's my father's side.

So here are these two elements in my life where my mother was being driven nuts by our beating each other up. And my dad would drag us down, the four of us, to the wood shop where they built all this great stuff on Sunday. No workmen there.

And my dad would just build stuff. And from the age of 12 years old, for some reason, I wanted to build electric violins. No one else was doing that at that time for context, Jared.

And in the 60s and the 70s was Barclays Berry. That was it. And I loved them.

I got to know both of them partners in the 60s and 70s. But they spray painted an acoustic violin red, black or white or blue. And I was like, man, that's not what I want to do.

I want something cool. The guitar players. Jimi Hendrix wasn't playing acoustic guitar painted red.

He was playing a solid body Stratocaster that he lit on fire. I need to do something that radical. And I wasn't even thinking like that.

I'm not really calculating. I'm 12 years old, 13 years old. I'm not thinking like, well, is this something I should be doing? I don't know.

Something was driving me to be meticulous. And by the way, no luthier experience. And still to this day, I've never took a luthier of how to build a violin or how to build an instrument.

I sort of did it on faith. And I got the first one here. Do you want to see it? I'd love to.

Okay. The first one, first Viper ever made was this one. Oh, wow.

So. And this has a barcusberry viola pickup. It's six strings.

It's a mess. And it was the first electric and first violin. I know that frets existed in the Renaissance period with instruments with catgut, believe it or not, across its frets.

But I had to really get involved with the frets. So the dot configurations here I trademarked so that it works with a string player with an instrument tuned and fits so with the frets. And this instrument was self supporting.

This was the first one. That's amazing. And for the people I'm going to just describe it for those who are listening to the audio only version.

But I was looking at a red electric instrument. It looks very much like a guitar. It's got six strings, it's got frets, it's got dots on the fingerboard.

It even has a headstock with what looks like machine screws. Like not your. Not your typical tuning pegs that you would see on a violin or viola.

And it had two knobs as well. Did you. What did you model this after? It was the concept.

And as you know, I have a patent on a floating violin. A self supporting violin. From day one I realized that this.

And you could describe to your hunched up violin look. Yeah, we all did it. I played viola.

Man, my viola was big and my neck was hurting. But this motion did not. Wasn't as sexy as this.

Where I see guitar players and their whole body was involved and they're swinging their instrument. You got Angus Young and AC DC and you've got Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck. All my heroes with the physical relationship with their instrument was very relaxed and very fluid.

And I was like to get rid of this thing. So I worked and worked and I think that. Here's one.

I'll show you this one. All right. So this one has a barrel at the end of it.

Oh, yep. When you do your solos, Jared, you know that you have to shoot bottle rockets out of your violin, right? You have to, otherwise the audience falls asleep. So this is an instrument continuing with the self supporting thing with my parents carpeting on the.

Oh wow, my chin. And this was really right after Juilliard, I built this thing and it was. I was really able to get a lot of attention, as you can imagine.

Yeah. And again, for the listeners who are not watching, I just saw a. Looked like a silver.

Is that the laser gun? Is that the. What you call it on your website? Violaser. Violaser.

So it looked like a laser gun with I think there were six strings on it and then a tube at the end that I think you literally did shoot bottle rockets out of. Yeah, had to do that or fire anything that had an impact. And then one of the instruments.

Well, I got to Juilliard. Full scholarship. Right.

I am 17 years old. I never graduated high school. I left at 11th grade.

They were all like. And back in the 70s they were very loose with school. Mark is going to be a musician.

String player. Don't worry, he's gone. We don't need to graduate him.

And I got to Juilliard and my roommates were Nigel Kennedy and Shlomo Mintz. I don't know if you know those people. I know Nigel Kennedy.

I don't know Shlomo. Iconic. Iconic.

And I was hanging with Nigel Kennedy when he was 15, 16 years old. A tangle. Like, yeah, there's a little bow tie, super short hair.

And he brilliant player. And then he played jazz. And I was like, oh, my God, this guy's incredible.

So my Juilliard experience was wonderful, except my teacher did not like me because I would come in, man. Have you ever heard of Led Sampler, man? I just heard this great band. And he was rushing.

It was like, are you kidding, Mark? That is not music. You are never to listen to that. You know, lecturing me about what I love.

And I was like, wait a second. Isn't this a music school? This is not, you know, some kind of a jail. And by the way, Tracy Silverman was right behind me, or in the same period of time at Juilliard.

So it's really an interesting historical moment, Jared, where Tracy Silverman and Mark Wood crossed paths in the early 1980s, and we both wanted to be Jimi Hendrix. That's amazing. So it was the Juilliard Mutiny.

Little does Juilliard know, they cultivated these two maniacs to where basically, I know Tracy still plays with orchestras, but he has. He's got a custom, beautiful, custom electric violin. And I pretty much left classical music never to play it again.

It really. And I adore classical music. I listen to it all the time.

Mahler, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bella Bartok. I'm a total nerd, and I. I love it all.

But as a performer and as an artist, which we'll talk about the business aspect of it, I really felt that I needed to find out who I was. And Mark. Who's Mark? Oh, he's just a viola player in the New York Philharmonic.

I was like, I don't want to be that. I want to do something that's never been done before. And then I left Juilliard.

My mother was freaking out. What are you going to do with your life, Mark? And I said, I don't know. I think I'm going to play rock and roll.

And my mother fell to the floor in tears. Oh, my goodness. Because she was not into that music at all.

When she saw Robert Plant with his shirt open and Led Zeppelin. You are not listening to that music, are you? Oh, no. And then I'd show her Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire or playing his guitar with his tongue.

I Don't know if you knew that he did that. No, I did not. Oh yeah, Jimi Hendrix was and, and he highly influenced Tracy also.

And then I was completely committed. I lived at my father's art studio while my father painted in the next room. I was building violins and learning how to play because my friend I could play bar talk of Stravinsky.

My sight reading was great, my technique was great. I was highly trained. I could play anything with my hands tied behind my back.

And then I would go into the basement with a 16 year old, snot nosed guitar players who were not trained and they would be jamming all day and they would go, Mark, play something. And I would stay with him on my electric. And I said, what do you want me to play? Play anything.

And I couldn't play. I was like, oh my God, this is a real problem. So I had to relearn music similar to what Joan Ponty did when he came from Paris Conservatory to jazz.

He says that he took him five years to undo or remanipulate that classical training. So I finally figured out a system because I needed to figure out how to improvise. So I devised a whole moving grid system with my frets.

And I figured it out, went back to jamming with these bozos who didn't even know what key they were in. I said, I think that's in D. It sounds like you're in D there.

Is it D major or D minor? Is it D? Phrygian? What's going on here? They didn't know. And most rock musicians, which I really, really am jealous about because I spent time a little bit with Eddie van Halen about 25 years ago and I would sit with him, I said, man, what was that that you just played?

And he would look at me, say, mark, I don't know what it's called. I'm just playing what I'm hearing and I'm feeling.

And I was like, that's the way a musician should be. So the whole classical pedagogy, although important if you're going to be an orchestra musician or if you're going to be a part of that world specifically I.

But I believe that the 21st century, jumping to that topic, 21st century demands that musicians are flexible, they're diverse.

And I mean, I'm not the greatest fiddler in the world or Celtic player or Indian player, my favorite music, but I can noodle around on that style and love it. But to be a master at those, you really have to do that. So I'm Much more of a master of rock, because that's the music I adore.

Adore. I don't know if I can be more brief. In the last 20 years of forming the Trans Siberian Orchestra and.

But before that, I did. I got a record deal during the tiny window of virtuoso metal guitar playing right in the early 80s. Van.

Oh, I think we just got some Internet issues. Are you still here? Mark that. I was raring to go with my spandex pants and my long hair.

It was perfect. Awesome. I had the look, the.

I think you saw the Internet cut out just after you started mentioning Van Halen. Oh, okay. There were musicians like, you know, the virtuoso Steve Weiss, Joe Satriani.

I was right in the middle of that. And I got a record deal. I put out two records and it was just heavy metal violin.

Wow. Perfect, man. I'm home and I'm going to show you the violin that was featured that got me the deal.

Oh, wow. That's the. That's the one with the metal spike strap.

Is that your hand? I think I saw on your website. That's a model of your hand, isn't it? As I carve it with my hand, so. And the knife that goes through.

Because I was like, I gotta figure out something to hold the bridge and the strings. Oh, I know. I'll put a knife.

And of course, it's really Sharp. And about 30 years ago, I fell and it cut my arm, which was really. When I was wearing white satin spandex pants and blood was all over it.

It was quite an experience. But so I was fully into it. Hanging out with Gene Simmons and Kiss, hanging out with Motley Crew and Ozzy Osbourne and Pantera.

I was in heaven. And then within two or three years, Nirvana came out and killed us all because they were there. No guitar solos.

No one wanted their virtuoso. So then I got into film scoring and I had a percussion company that I wrote all the themes to the super bowl to ABC Sports, NBC Sports, CBS Sports. This is way before streaming and ESPN.

I wrote all of that because it was rock sports, rock music. Oh, I could do that, man. I would love it.

So I have great guitar players from Steve Morris to Andy Timmons come over to my studio and do the solos. And I would play on them, and it was great. And then I got the call from Al Petrelli, from.

We're putting together a rock orchestra called Trans Siberian Orchestra. We're doing Christmas music, heavy metal. I said, there's no way anyone's going to be interested in that, but I am totally into it.

And it was incredible for close to 20 years. Building it up from a tiny little band to, you know, 10 million records sold and arenas and then I got into schools and then that was, you know, it's a long trajectory. I don't want to.

I want to keep focused with you. Sorry, Jared. No, it's great.

This history is amazing. Very incredible. You literally hung with some of the best rock musicians in the world.

And it's just so cool to hear this. But, you know, I imagine there is a little more to it than just the idea. Like having the idea in your mind.

Like what steps did you take? I know it's a very broad question, but what steps did you take to actually bring these ideas into the world? And I guess focus a little bit more on the business perspective because it's not just about being a great musician. Right, Right.

It's generating revenue so that you can make a living and you can pay your mortgage and you can have somewhat of a below middle class life.

Right. That's a lease that we could ask for a little tiny apartment and we get to play music all the time. I'm living in that tiny apartment, you know, for 200amonth with no heat.

I'll deal with it. So I was able to do that. But when I first started building electric violins, I wanted to be the only one playing my instruments.

Right. And then immediately when I built my first one, a string player, can you build me one for me? And I was like, oh, okay, I'll give you $2,000 for it. And I'm like, I have no money.

In my 20s, I was like, oh, that sounds cool. I built it for this person and realized that there was a business aspect relationship there. Within five years, I started wood violins.

And we manufacture gosh, every Lindsey sterling and Mark O'Connor and everybody plays our instruments. It's been an incredible. But a lot of it, Jared, is not.

Is going against conformity as an artist and musician. I have a poster right here, a stain that reminds me every day. It says nonconformity is essential to an artist and an inventor.

And I was like, that's it. Non conformity. So what we are dealing with, with musicians and artists, you can be similar to somebody else.

Songwriter, singer, songwriter. Dime a dozen, man, how many Taylor Swift copies are out there? There are millions of people. But when you're coming with string playing, you gotta know what you're doing.

You can't play out of tune, you can't have Sloppy rhythm. So we have to dedicate hours just in our technical facility, which is wonderful because we see Steve Vai, we see virtuosa guitar players. You've been seeing them on TikTok and on the Internet.

Oh my goodness, these kids are ridiculous. They are playing more virtuosity than Paganini ever did. So there's a whole movement right now with non string players using massive technique, but they're using technique to create new music.

Our pedagogy and our universities and our conservatories do not train us to create new music. It trains us to support already music been played. And don't change those notes in Bach.

Do not change one note of the Tchaikovsky Violin concerto where Miles Davis, you know, Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane would play just the melody of the chorus and wouldn't, couldn't wait to get away from that so that they could improvise.

And of course, you know, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, they all virtually improvised. So that technique and of course cadenzas and violin concerts were improvised.

So improvising with classical music was not unheard of. 100 to 200 years ago, something happened where we became overly conservative and overly in a box where we don't have time to deal with the improv stuff. So just keep doing your scales and we're going to train you to specifically harness this niche industry.

And forgive me again, as you know, I love classical music, but when you talk about business, we have customers. Who's your customer? You're a restaurant. Your food is mundane.

You're only making one hot dog or one hamburger for the only meal that you have. How many customers are going to come in? Now I've got a restaurant with a long menu that you can choose from. And guess what, they're going to come back a little bit more, paying you money to do what you love.

Now, music performance and music business model is there's no music industry. There's management. And I've got lawyers and managers and booking agents, but the record industry, I own my own records.

Tracy Silverman is also a good example of being a businessman and a musician. But by the way, Jared, you're also a great businessman. But I do know, and forgive me and correct me if I'm wrong, you are a musician.

First I was. Yes, that's true. You are not was.

You are. Yes, that's true. You are.

You're a great musician. And I think that that's an important point for you to point out is that I'm a musician, I'm not a builder. I'm not, you know, this or that.

I'm. I'm purely a person who adores music. And out of necessity, I had to create my own world because nobody was saying, hey, Mark, play your acoustic guitar and sing me a song.

I was like, I can't sing and I don't have interest in doing this. Well, what are you going to do with your life? I don't know. I'll figure something out.

And then you would start making mistakes, creating relationships and practicing. Practicing a new way of expression. In other words, nobody plays like me.

Nobody plays like Tracy Silverman. And forgive me, when I hear on the radio the Brahms Violin concerto, which I adore. I don't know who that player is, but I can hear when Steven Tyler sings within one note.

Oh, that's Steven Tyler or Hendrix. That one note. That's that person.

With classical music, it's such a different thing. We are there to recognize the composer, of course, but I listen to the player. It could be anybody.

And I can't see anybody debating that reality. The mainstream audience, the mainstream. The.

My next door neighbor, there's no way that they're going to go, oh, that's Joshua Bell, or that's Hilary Hunt. And these are master musicians who I adore. And when you go see them live, you see them physically there playing it.

But are they doing anything different? Are they improvising the cadenza? Oh, God forbid. No, no, no. Joachim composed the Brahms Violin Concerto cadenza.

You have to play every note of that. Oh, shoot. Much easier.

God. Good. I don't have to improvise.

Oh, I hate improvising. I don't know what I'm doing. I feel like such a knucklehead when I do stuff like that.

And I'm thinking to myself, well, how did Jimi Hendrix figure it out without one lesson? He figured it out. Billy Joel, Paul McCartney, Miles Davis, the list. We're not talking a couple of dozen people, Jared, who've mastered the unknown, the spontaneity and the unknown.

When I improvise, when you improvise, who knows what's going to come out and where it's coming from. So it's a very interesting moment for our pedagogy, and it unfortunately frustrates Tracy and I and a lot of other people of the alternate universe. And I've been going to asta.

As you know, I've been on the board of asta. I love, love supporting Astha, but they have the challenge of balancing off a lot of interesting, almost political viewpoints about music. Whatever.

But we are not giving up. Not giving. Anyway, I'm sorry.

That was great. No, that was fantastic. And so many thoughts in my mind.

I'll just relate a very quick story. Back when I was an undergrad, I took a composition class for one semester. And on the first day of this class, the professor drew the five bars of a musical staff.

And he asked, what are these? And we all answer, oh, it's a musical staff. And he's like, don't these remind you of jail cell bars? So that was, that was a great point. And I love that you.

You brought that up with, with your music and music. Boy, that's a very interesting for a teacher to share that. Very interesting.

Very interesting. Well, the composition department at Penn State was definitely let's bring music into the future kind of. Yeah.

Well, you went to Penn State? Yeah, I got my undergrad there. Music education. Music education? Really? Did you ever go to your master's? I got my master's in University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee in orchestra conducting.

No kidding. That's pretty broad. Yeah, no, I love, loved conducting, love playing.

Oh, that's so cool. That's really cool. Yeah.

I did want to point out another observation which has struck me throughout our entire conversation, which is, you know, the overall mindset that I get from you is you are a problem solver. Right. You know, back when you were 16 years old, you wanted to solve your own problem, which was, I love Jimmy Page Hendrix.

I want to. I want to learn how to play like them. And then I also want an instrument that matches me.

So I'm going to solve my own problem and go into my parents workshop and just build my own instrument.

And even going forward, like you wanted to build a rock orchestra to play music that you loved. Now you're in the schools, you want kids to play the music of their time, music they love, so you're solving that problem.

Would you say that problem solving is one of the key identities of successful musicians and people in general? Excellent. And I'm glad that you focus what you're doing in your podcasts and your video zoom stuff. Is that business part? Because, and I'm not going off on a tangent, but I'm obsessed with the data.

What is the data of graduates from conservatories, specifically Juilliard? The New York Times did a big thing about 10 years ago. The percentage of graduates from Juilliard who actually end up having a career in music is less than 22%. Now I'm sending my kid to Juilliard.

$100,000 for four years. Hundreds of Thousands of dollars lessons, the amount of hours that my kid is trying to play the Tchaikovsky violin Concordo, and he's not going to be able to make a living or she's not going to be able to make a living. I don't understand what are you teaching them there? So it's a very interesting.

And by the way, this is not just recent, it's for decades. Conservators really are this beautiful vacuum where you're protected from the world, where you don't have to make choices to reinvent. You don't have to do that, man.

You just show up at the gig, here's the music, you play it and you get out of there. Oh, no, no, no. I need you to play your music.

Oh, well, I don't write music. Well, I want you know, that doesn't happen unfortunately enough in music and string playing because you're playing at a wedding, doing Pachelbel's Cannon every night.

But the fact that our, in my opinion, the universities are missing an opportunity because in the next 10 to 20 years, Jared, we are already witnessing a flood of a tsunami of a younger generation that does not understand about the discipline of getting away from the keyboard of a computer.

And this. And you and I are attached to this. I love this.

And he's pointing to a phone just for our. I love my phone. I'm.

I text. I do a lot of business on it. So I love it.

I do social media. You know, we live on our phone. YouTube, you do it also.

But this future generation is wired so differently with education, where now schools, starting in ninth grade, seventh grade, even in middle school, there are fewer electives available. So the electives that most of them are trained are career development, engineering, technology. Right.

And then there's a little thing called orchestra because hopefully the school district still has an orchestra program. And by the way, here's more data for you. There are 10,860 school districts in the United States, right? 10,000.

Okay, that's a lot. There are millions of students, right. What percentage of those students in a high school do music? Choir, Bandit and orchestra.

Less than 23% of the population of a high school. And that's lowering. That was data of six, seven years ago, almost 10 years ago.

And so of that 23, 13% choir, 11 or 10% band and 2% orchestra. Oh, wow. So.

And the amount of orchestra programs that are in school districts are just disappearing. So we're looking the next five to ten years in string pedagogy. That's becoming less relevant.

To a parent and some 10 year old kid like my kid. I try to get my daughter to play violin. She didn't quite pick it up.

She's now a drummer and she plays with Shania Twain and Gwen Stefani and she's a monster, monster self taught drummer. But for a string player, it's like you're playing that really out of tune, by the way. Oh, what's playing in tune? Well, you need a teacher.

You need a private teacher. So our string world is so confused right now. Which direction do we need to go? And do we need more people to come in? Do we need to have customers? Oh, yeah, you need a kid to walk in your classroom before your program is cut.

Or worse. The orchestra teacher now has to teach choir or band or general music. Yep.

I did that for two years. Right. How long did you last with that? Two years.

I mean, two years. That is purgatory for a musician because the kids are not there to learn music. They're there because they, I don't know, some weird reason they're there.

And you have to teach them. Ukulele in the recorder. Are you? Yay.

So the next five to 10 years, we have to really revamp that. Now you're looking at. There's a new movement happening, Jared, that you're part of that you see at Astel.

There's a new movement that I started and Tracy accelerated too with me, pretty much him. And I accelerated that. But I jumped to the schools 25 years ago because I was like, oh, how many cellos you have? How many? I can work with 200 string players.

Oh, I'm there. All right, kids, check this out. We love classical music.

And tomorrow, next week, you're playing the Beethoven symphony. Don't worry, I'm a disruptor. I will disrupt this.

But this is good. So back to your question about how we deal with our careers. Being a disruptor is what I am proud of.

I have a T shirt I have interviewed saying, mark, you're a disruptor. And so was Steve Jobs and so was Jimi Hendrix. So was all.

And that's. I was like, yeah, I am definitely somebody who comes in and says, you know what, we're going to change this around a little bit. And luckily I've been very fortunate.

We do 80 to 100 schools a year. We did 19,000 students last year. And every one of them understand and have absorbed an experience in a live situation on stage with me or with Tracy or with other our artist mentors.

We have Hayden Vitera. We've got Electric Cello players. And then, of course, I have my camp in the summer, and my nonprofit organization that funds string programs and instruments for schools, I donate one of my violins at every concert I do to the string program.

And we generate thousands of dollars for instruments. So we are really involved with the big picture. But at my camp, Jared, which I would love you to check out.

I'd love to. We have 130 to 150 string players from around the world, from China to South America to Europe to America. And I got three orchestras, and my orchestra has close to 80 string players who are plugged in, and about 80% of them have my instrument.

Nice. How do you think I feel when I walk in and I look out and I see connecting to what I do to the point where they're not only buying my music, buying my CDs, buy my sheet music, buy my arrangement, they're buying my instruments and they're going to my concerts? Bingo. Okay, I got it.

So with social media, I keep them all together. We keep it as a family. And Tracy is really continue to take advantage of that because he and I have gotten closer and closer over the years.

And as we are getting into our latter years of our careers, we really want to see impact done. And you're a tremendous helper to the industry, too, by the way. Really important.

Well, I appreciate that. And you are incredibly articulate. This has been such a joyous interview.

I did want to point out a couple things. I'm not sure if you're even aware of it, but, you know, you are a fantastic storyteller, and the way that you talk is also very effective at marketing and selling things. Yeah, I think that's also an important thing for musicians to realize, too, is like, we.

We are communicators and storytellers, both with our instrument and with our voices. Yes, Jared, I think that you're really good at that, but I learned the hard way when I left Juilliard.

Hey, man, if you're not coming up to me and saying hello to me and knowing who I am, I'm not coming up to you.

So my ego was very displaced until I realized that, as you said, verbal communication, you know, I'm not that gregarious and extroverted. I'm fairly introverted. I like, you know, as musicians, we're alone most of the time.

But realize that if you walk into an interview, if you walk into somebody who's never met you before, in 10 seconds, if you're not impressing that person, you're gone.

And social media really Exposes boring people, they have no followers, you know, and you get these wacky crazy maniacs who do stupid stuff and they have millions of followers because there's some kind of an entertainment. So humans.

If you look at my books, Jared, this is a really important thing. When I'm interviewed and I talk to students, what are the books that you're reading and what are you reading every day?

If you saw all the books, 99% of my books are all about strengthening your ability to create new things. Steve Jobs books, Elon Musk books have books on keeping control of your emotions.

Keeping control that when disaster hits, hold on, it's okay, you can get through it. I have my bible, which is called Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. Ryan Holiday is my man.

Stoicism has changed my life. I'm not a religious person. I'm spiritual and I have faith in humanity.

And music gets us closer to whatever the universe is giving us. But stoicism really helped me control, okay, I can't control this behavior of this person, but I can control how I respond to the person.

Instead of getting uptight about this person who's not saying proper things or not behaving properly, it's not a big deal, you know, or this happens at a gig or this happens at a show or something happens and get really upset.

That was really an important thing that I've gotten the last couple of years that have really focused, keep focused on what is important, which is your self fulfilling prophecies of your life. Because we only got one life and here's only one Jared. There's only one Tracy, and there's only one me and there's only one Joe Denenzone.

We like that. I don't want it. They don't want to be like me and I don't want to be like them.

So it's a full time occupation. I do a journal every day. I get up a 4:00 in the morning.

Every morning I'm up at 4:00. You got to get eight hours of sleep, you got to eat properly, you got to exercise every day. But at 4 o'clock in the morning, I'm down practicing for two hours every day and writing in my journal.

And the journal has nothing to do with music. It has to do with me making sure. Because we're, we're artistic people and creative people, Jared.

We're much more susceptible to emotional outbursts, positive and negative. We have positive emotional outbursts. I got a melody, I got a song.

Oh, I just performed this thing awesome. It was perfect. I nailed it.

That's the emotional strength, but also it can cripple you if you're not able to handle the negativity, which happens every day of our lives. And it never stops. No matter how successful you are, Jared, as you know, every day there's something that comes up that's going to annoy you.

Yep. And it's gonna. Oh, okay.

I'm not gonna deal with this. I'm gonna push this. Oh, no.

You deal with this right now and you get rid of this problem right this second and you handle whatever issue my. You know, I'm juggling so many business relationship with revenue. Is this check come through? Oh, my goodness.

My office now has to call this client. Where's the check? It's. It's past due.

You know, we have bills to bay. I've got over 10 full time employees. Wow.

So when you have employees, it changes everything because you have to take care of them. And during COVID I didn't lay off one of them and not one of them quit. They stuck with me.

We paid them. I didn't get paid for three years. I had zero income because all our concerts are canceled.

And doing it on Zoom was terrible, as you remember. Right. It destroyed our industry.

We lost 30 to 40% of musicians pre Covid who were just about to break through newbies. And then boom, they lost their career and they had to start something new with technology or something like that. Yeah.

Perseverance. But I think, Jared, I think one of the things. Yeah.

You have a great idea for playing the violin with your nose. Awesome, man. You're going to figure it out.

But you're going to figure it out. And if you don't figure it out, then you're constantly talking nonsense. I've always believed that.

Do not talk about what you're thinking until you've completed the mission. And then you can talk about, oh, I can't wait to do A, B and C. Well, sometimes that doesn't work out.

It changes constantly. So I don't verbalize anything. Yeah.

That's amazing. So much in that right there. The obstacle is the way is on my bookshelf.

I'm going to read that in the next month. I appreciate that. I've read it three times.

I'm reading the fourth time. I still don't nail it. Here's a story for you.

You ready, Jared? That's in the book. Thomas Edison, one of our great inventors. Right.

Thomas Edison had the flourishing factory, hundreds of employees in, I think in Pennsylvania and He gets a call at 3:00 in the morning. His factory's burning down. Everybody's panicking.

The factory's burning down. Oh, my God. It's gonna destroy everything.

He decided to have a party. All right, everybody, we're gonna go to him and we're gonna watch it burn down and we're gonna celebrate it because we're gonna come back better and we're gonna reinvent. And his new factory, which took a year to build and it was struggling and it was difficult, so he created new things.

So the obstacles that are brought to us is a welcome mat. Well, bring it on, man, because it makes you think. You know what? I have a better idea dealing with this problem.

I'm going to reapproach this differently. Instead of me getting really uptight about. But this is the only way I know.

I only can think about doing this kind of an email to this kind of person. Let's rethink that. You know what? That person you're about to email is not the right person because that person was not responding the way you need.

Okay, so let's reevaluate our whole scenario of how to strategize every day. You don't strategize once a year because life is too fast every day. What's my list? My to do list is 15 pages that I have to wrestle with at 4 o'clock in the morning.

I look at it going, oh, I gotta deal with this knucklehead and this person and this. And Tomastic is calling me about strings and I gotta meet them at the NAMM show. How am I gonna fit that time? And I don't have time, Mark, you'll figure it out.

Yeah. No one else. But anyway, Jared, I think that you relate to a lot of that.

I do. And I typically wrap up the podcast by asking if you have specific advice for musicians, but I feel like we just got an entire masterclass on it. Is there any last minute pieces of advice you want to give to our listeners? Absolutely.

Well, again, being sensitive, fragile artists, and you are one and I am one. We have to be sensitive to get the music out. And to be creative, we have to be very vulnerable.

And that's a very, very tricky thing. But we can't be vulnerable and, and quiet and demure when life is beating us on the head like a sledgehammer. When we have an hour, turn off your phone.

We can be creative, but you've got to get back on your phone and you've got to be dividing your brain and I'm really into brain development about how music develops and also how our emotions, our fears, our worry, our imaginations can derail us so fast. I can't do this anymore. I'm giving up

Well, what are you going to do? I don't know. I'll figure something out. Two years later, they're miserable.

They're doing something they hate because they didn't take care of it the first time. And sometimes it's too late to reinvent yourself and go back to where you were. So for me, and thank God, because of my parents, they were musicians and artists.

I didn't know any different. I didn't know what. I never had a job, Jared.

I've never had a job. I've never worked for anybody. I've never been on a payroll.

I was the worst employee. Funny. Okay.

I had one job for one week. And down the block where I lived on Long island was a music publisher called Alfred. Alfred, Wow.

I didn't know that. And I was like, music. I would be perfect.

And so I had to file all the publications, Right. And they played Muzak. I don't know if you know what Muzak is.

Elevator music. Oh. So I would sing really out of tune to the elevator music every day because I hated it so much.

And they kept berating me. And the funny thing, 56, 50 years later, they're my publisher of all my music. Alfred.

I love telling him, I used to work for you as a snot. No, 16 year old. And I hate it.

So anyway, if I was not going to work for anybody, I had to figure out a way to get somebody to write out a check with my name on it for thousands of dollars. Here, Mark. Do what you are strong at.

Now. I had to go in the offices of CBS Sports with my hair out, and I was a rock guy. And I had to.

These suit and tie people, they were. They were scared of me. And I said, don't be scared.

I got this. Listen. I press played of the cassette player of the demo of the, like, the US Open theme.

And they're like, oh, we like that. But we want to change this. We want to.

Oh, really? You sure you want to change? All right, I'll make it worth you. And I wouldn't change it ever, by the way. You would think I changed it.

I would maybe change the instrument, bring the same thing, and. Oh, that's it, Mark. You change the whole thing.

So I really learned a way to manipulate people to really recognize value. Yeah. But anyway, it's definitely a challenge.

That's awesome. And even that had a nice lesson about helping people recognize the value that's in front of them. That's, in a way, that's.

That's marketing in a nutshell. Without your instrument, how do you do that? Right. Boy, that's not that easy for musicians.

We're knuckleheads. All of us are knuckleheads. And I'm proud.

I'm a proud knuckleheader. Yeah, that makes two of us. All right, well, this was fantastic.

Mark, where can our listeners learn more about you and any of the programs that you're running in the future? Yeah, we have my woodviolins.com, my instruments. We've got my camp, which is the epicenter for connecting with people for the rest of your life.

Matt Bell is there. Hopefully we can get you there. We've got TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube.

You know, MarkwoodMusic, MarkwoodTV. You know, the important thing is getting this movement that we've created. With you, Jared and Matt Bell and Tracy and Joe Dennison, we've created a slight movement, but we are still minuscule next to the guitar industry.

And I really believe that I just saw 500 string players Friday night. 500. If you saw my social media, you'll see those 500 kids going berserk.

Loving it. So we got 500 kids now. When they go back to the classroom today, you know, they're like, oh, we got.

We're all energized. And then the teachers don't quite know how to implement it, blah, blah, blah. So we're doing teacher training.

So it's a really great moment for us. We will not give up. We will sure that this part of our instrument, Jared, the bow.

This is what links up Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Bar Talk, and Mark O'Connor and hip hop and jazz. It's this thing, and that's where we have it. And we got to keep that in people's eyes.

Yeah. Well, that's fantastic. And, Mark, this was an incredible interview.

I appreciate you coming on so much. Yeah, it's fantastic. I'm sure our listeners got so many gold nuggets out of it.

So that is it for today's episode of The Gigging Musician Podcast. Thanks for tuning in to another episode. And remember, to all of our gigging musicians out there, remember that, "Your music will not market itself!".

Bye, everybody.