A look at the people behind the numbers in area business:
GREG KOCH McNALLY SMITH COLLEGE OF MUSIC
Title: Guitar performance faculty member
Age: 48
Accomplished blues guitarist and music educator Greg Koch has a new gig as a guitar performance faculty member at McNally Smith College of Music in St. Paul.
In addition to leading students on a survey of influential guitarists and their styles in his music interpretation course, Koch also exemplifies the entrepreneurial side of a music career.
In addition to touring with his band nationally and internationally, Koch has released 12 studio albums and leads frequent guitar clinics and workshops around the country.
He serves as a product specialist for Fender Musical Instruments, Fishman Transducers and Wildwood Guitars, a specialty retailer in Colorado, where he makes monthly guitar videos that he said have totaled more than 11 million online views. Koch also is the author of more than a dozen Hal Leonard instructional books and DVDs.
"It's a balancing act, but I've done it for years," said Koch, who began playing guitar at 12 and scored his first gig a few months later. "My goal was to have my own band, to do my own music, and that's basically what I do."
Koch, featured at McNally Smith's Lowertown Guitar Festival the past two years, studied jazz guitar at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. His lives in his native Milwaukee with his wife and four children and commutes to St. Paul to teach at McNally Smith. His 19-year-old son, Dylan, is a drummer who is studying music production at the school.
Q: What advantages does music school offer a musician?
A: Someone can do it on their own. But the idea of education is not only are you learning to make a living, but you're also growing up and becoming a better person. That's very important, and I think McNally Smith is an excellent place for both processes to happen.
Q: What do students need to know about the music business?
A: The bottom line is you've got to be entrepreneurial. The days of someone seeing a brilliant talent and giving them a golden parachute to explore their artistic side while someone handles all the business for them are long gone. … Those situations exist, but they're so infrequent as to be akin to being a lottery winner. There seems to be a good grasp of that in the culture at the college.
Q: How would you describe the course you're teaching?
A: I'm teaching a history of guitar, from the late 1800s up to the 1970s. Students can reference faithfully those different genres and then hopefully take it in a new direction themselves.
Todd Nelson
