Jacob Leone, known in the music world as Jack.Lion, is an electronic music producer, guitarist and programmer from West Palm Beach, Florida. His complex and highly calculated sound breaks many foundations and offers a unique lens because of his eccentric use of Max4Live. Jack.Lion's style embraces distinctive and unsettling sound design, pushing the boundaries of electronic music. His innovative approach earned him a notable feature on NOISIA Radio, showcasing his ability to captivate and challenge listeners. Today, we catch up and talk about what he has been up to. 

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Hey Jake, have you always been involved in audio and music? I’m curious, especially with your work in machine learning. I’d love to hear more about your journey — could you share some of your history with music and how it intersects with what you're doing now?

Jake:

Yeah, so my musical life story is, I guess it starts when I picked up guitar. You know, I tried when I was in second grade, but I never really got anywhere with it because I think I was just too young to commit to a practice. And then over time I think having that early experience was good, because the idea of it kind of became stuck in my mind years later when I was moving into my teens, because I started listening to more guitar based music. Whenever I listened to those songs, I would literally picture myself performing them on stage. Whether it would be at a talent show or in front of my friends, that vision brought me a little closer towards manifesting it, because later I started to take lessons again and then took it more seriously. So, that was the foundation of music for me. I had a guitar teacher who in the area was known for being pretty disciplined for a few years, and he taught me a lot of not just guitar stuff, but like, philosophical stuff in terms of what it means to be a musician and to have that mindset to just grind. He introduced me to the concept known as the shed, which is literally what it sounds like. You lock yourself in a shed like a hermit and you just grind on practicing for like a day. Like those long sessions where you focus on your craft and what makes the difference between like a hobbyist and someone who treats it more like a discipline. 

There is so much to explore, we live in a culture now where our attention spans are not getting much better, therefore it's harder than ever to learn something like an instrument and really try to master it. Of course, it's subjective, how far you want to go with something is up to you – but for me, I just can't be satisfied with the most basic result. I have to explore things as much as I feel like I can …

So I got to college, and I transitioned from wanting to record music and be sort of like a Kevin Parker type of recording artist, to essentially exploring all the things you can do with the DAW because once I discovered Ableton Live it was almost like I opened Pandora's Box. And you know, of course in college, like I was introduced to dubstep and electronic music by going out to shows with my friends. So I was kind of getting introduced to a new world of music, and now I had the perfect tool to make experimental music like that. I felt like I didn't have to struggle with understanding scales and everything that makes the learning curve even steeper for most, since I had just spent so much time studying music theory and playing guitar, and this kind of just naturally allowed me to transition into the world of sound design. I went to Tipper & Friends in 2017 and I don't even think I was even 21 yet, but that was formative and definitely showed me  the other side. So pretty rapidly I was introduced to the depths of this genre of bass music, I would say. Essentially, that was sort of an inflection point for me where I was like, “Okay, now I understand. All the past things that I went through musically were leading up to this discovery phase and now I understand how to make what I really like.”