Julian Chown is a Music Producer, keyboard player and Recording Studio owner in London.
Julian has worked with hundreds of recording artists worldwide in styles from pop, rock, hip-hop, soul and more.
He is from a musical family and his Mum is a piano teacher that never insisted on him learning piano. She regularly asked him to sing notes and play the piano and continues to do so to this day. At a young age, he was invited to a gospel church and that was a musical eye-opener for Julian as the music seemed to hypnotise everyone (a controversial topic). The piano and drums were funky whilst the piano was somewhat cheesy and groove-based, whilst everyone danced and hypnotised! When the music became more intense, so too did the people; that got in touch with a “spirit” (a musical spirit perhaps – a Universal one (no doubt)!). This lead on to discovering James Brown, Otis Redding, Marvin Gay and various Motown soul recording artists. The piano was played differently in gospel music and was nothing like classical or English music heard as a youngster. It sounded cool, and people were going nuts over it...
Talking to friends soon lead to paying some serious attention to bands such as Hendrix, Deep Purple, Yes, The Doors, The Who, Small Faces, Rolling Stones, Traffic (Stevie Winwood), Led Zepellin, Billy Joel, Elton John and Herbie Hancock. These all led onto much inspiration over many years to come.
Whilst at school everyone was listening to late 80’s hiphop and acid house, pop and Britfunk. All these styles bought a twist and edge to Julian's sound today. He found a passion for the keys (piano's) and to cut a loong story short, eventually bought some and still uses the same to this day. These include a Fender Rhodes (see the keyboard player page for more details).
This led onto sessioning for many soul and funk bands in the turn of the 90's. These include working with people from Jamiroquai/Brand New Heavies Acid Jazz label, and further sessions in Drum & Bass and BreakBeats including The High Tower Set.
So, you may be wondering, how did all this start?
In the beginning...
In 1988, Julian worked hard to save up for an electric keyboard, Atari 1040STE, sampler, and a new bicycle. That mission began at age 14 - delivering newspapers, stacking shelves in Sainsbury's, washing up in restaurants and doing the odd bike repairs – which all led on to something very special....
It was 1990 and enough funds had finally been saved up to buy a Roland MKB300 controller keyboard! Additionally, this sat in front of a Roland U220 sound module!
A year later, following many jam sessions and discovering 4 track recordings, he enrolled on a Sound Engineering course in London. That landed him various jobs as an assistant sound engineer in various studios in London. The first studio was “Raezor Studios”, in Wandsworth, West London. Inside the live room was a gorgeous piano, and across from there was a Hammond B3 Organ with a Leslie. There was a 48 channel SSL 4000 series mixing console in the control room, in which Julian learnt to mix and root outboard gear. At Raezor, Julian worked alongside many great music producers and engineers and discovered mixing techniques by Chris Potter, Owen Davies, Doug Bennet and Mark Frith, whilst rubbing shoulders with London Records, Universal and others.
Following on from college, further mixing of projects included working at “Bunk Junk and Genius” (Stevie Wonder), “Marc Angelo’s” (The Orb), and “Glentham Film Studios” (Dubbing mixing BBC, ITV and Radio). These gained him vast knowledge in music, dubbing mixing and production in music albums and TV sound.
Julian then continued his studies at Brunel University where he gained a 1st class music degree. This followed on to working at Sony Computer Entertainment, Europe as lead Sound Designer and Music Composer at Team Soho, where he worked on several Playstation titles.
As years commenced, Julian continued to gain the building blocks to run his own successful music production recording studio called Joules Productions. It is from here that he continues to work with mainstream recording-artists and media companies.
... and the rest is history...