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Ian Ethan Case

Ian Ethan Case in vanguardaudiolabs

Ian Ethan Case

Double-Neck Fingerstyle Guitarist

“such a deep and emotional experience to hear my guitar sounding as big and detailed and natural as it sounds in my head…It feels like now I can record things again, and that is inspiring.”

Acoustic double-neck guitarist and Candyrat recording artist Ian Ethan Case (Boston, USA) is quickly becoming recognized as “one of the most creative and engaging fingerstyle guitarists in the world” (The International Center for Creativity.)

His unmistakable, one-of-a-kind playing style and compositional voice has drawn praise from icons such as guitarist John McLaughlin (Mahavishnu Orchestra), bassist Lee Sklar (James Taylor), Windham Hill Records founder Will Ackermann, and fingerstyle guitar legend Don Ross, who declared his live performance “some of the most massively inventive musicianship I’ve ever heard/seen.”

He has recorded, performed, and/or shared the stage with some of the most noteworthy artists in instrumental non-classical music including Manu Delago (Björk), Victor Wooten, Stanley Jordan, GoGo Penguin, Andy McKee, Jeremy Kittel, Jamey Haddad (Paul Simon, Bokanté), Eugene Friesen (Paul Winter Consort), and Paul McCandless (Bela Fleck & The Flecktones), as well as the Wenatchee Valley Symphony and members of the Hartford Symphony and the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra.

In the United States, his music has been featured on nationwide public radio programs including NPR’s “Here & Now” and PRI’s “Echoes”, while numerous viral videos have reached at least 14 million listeners around the world.

Growing up in a rural area with few musicians to play with, Case was forced to develop creative ways of extending his reach as a solo musician, using a combination of technology, unusual instruments, and inventive techniques in order to achieve the multi-layered music he was hearing in his head.

He later studied at Berklee College of Music and gleaned further insights from summer music camps, clinics, and private lessons with top jazz musicians such as John Pattitucci, Antonio Sanchez (Pat Metheny), Aaron Goldberg (Joshua Redman, Kurt Rosenwinkel), Mike Mainieri (Steps Ahead), Adam Rogers (Michael Brecker, Chris Potter), and master percussionists Giovanni Hidalgo and Glen Velez.

Since then, he has crafted and refined his unique voice over the course of many hundreds of concerts throughout the US and Canada, and has also played in Norway, Sweden, Estonia, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, and Italy.
His latest album, “Earth Suite,” features a dozen musicians from all over the globe. While the studio album features a large group and dense orchestration, Case brings much of that expansive sound to his concert performances by making expert use of modern digital technologies to enable seemingly infinite layers of sound and sophisticated on-the-spot orchestration that extends well beyond the reach of most looping performers.
Expanding even further, a national tour in 2018 saw the debut of his innovative “Photon Symphony”, a lifelike virtual ensemble comprised of multiple synchronized projections which allow a large cast of musicians to join him on stage in a unique blend of virtual reality and live performance. As one first-time listener in California exclaimed, “Ian’s music is phenomenal – watching him play is not ‘listening to music’; it’s a full mind experience. Transporting.”