Nick Garrett-Powell brings individuality, ingenuity to local music scene

Published 10:15 am Wednesday, January 10, 2024

Rogue Valley singer and multi-instrumentalist Nick Garrett-Powell lives for exploration and ingenuity in the world of sound.

Whether he’s mixing tracks as a pro audio engineer, installing a hodgepodge of new sensors and microphones to accompany his guitar, or inventing new methods of learning how to play the six-strings, the local artist’s mad scientist-like approach to music is anything but traditional.

“I don’t want to be a traditionalist, I like the idea of futuristic music,” Garrett-Powell said. “I like the idea of pushing the instrument and the culture of the instrument forward.”

Garrett-Powell is the guitarist and vocalist for Medford-based band The Fret Drifters, plays with local reggae group Alcyon Massive, sings harmonies and plays guitar as a duo with vocalist Shae Celine along with work as a solo artist to attract a base of supporters drawn to his unique, strange style.

“Slowly over the years, I’ve cultivated a crowd that tolerates me being strange and people that like the stranger music gravitate towards me, and now I have a little bit of a culture that surrounds the music I make,” Garrett-Powell said. “I like the spectacle, I like being the spectacle of it.”

The foundation of Garrett-Powell’s sound was laid through his musical family and school choral programs.

“Both of my parents play guitar, piano and they sing; so when I was 7 years old, my grandpa started to teach me to play boogie and jazz on the piano a little bit. That gave me a foundation for always being able to leap ahead with things like piano lessons or academic music,” he said. “The majority of my musical training came from the public school music program’s choir programs, so I learned a lot through choir.”

Music even had a role in potentially saving Garrett-Powell’s ancestry line at one point.

“We have some really interesting family stories about my grandpa being taken off of a plane that was going to the Battle of the Bulge because some foreign dignitaries needed to be entertained, so his entire platoon died and he only survived because music called him out of a plane that’s engines were already going,” he said. “Music saved the bloodline in a strange way.”

Growing up on the cutting riffs of rock legends like Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, The Doors and more, Garrett-Powell found inspiration from many of the technical guitar greats from Steve Vai to Joe Satriani.

Other major influences to his sound include guitarist Stanley Jordan and bassist and songwriter Victor Wooten.

On Wooten, Garrett-Powell said, “his philosophy is that there isn’t a traditional or correct way to play the electric bass, the electric bass is from the 1950s, there’s not enough time elapsed for there to be a tradition around it.”

“I like the concept of innovating past what the instrument is designed to do in general,” he added.

After high school, the artist went on to become a vocal major at Southern Oregon University, studying under regional greats such as Paul French and Kirby Shaw while also dabbling in guitar and piano.

“In the middle of my second year at SOU, I realized I was getting a little older and I wanted to have a definite way to generate income using music,” Garrett-Powell said. “I talked to my parents and decided that I should go to audio engineering college, so I went to Musician’s Institute in Hollywood, did a 6-month program and got certified as a Pro Tools engineer and immediately got a job working as a contractor for Disney and Warner Bros.”

With his audio engineering expertise, Garrett-Powell worked on films including the high-definition, Blu-ray remaster of “Sleeping Beauty” and the Blu-ray version of the John Ford film “Drums Along the Mohawk.”

Garrett-Powell continued his musical passion as a solo artist, joining Andy Casad in 2011 to form The Fret Drifters as well as a multitude of roles with local bands and groups.

Now, the artist aims to spread his love for music through education with the invention of what he calls “The Key.”

“I have an invention that teaches what I call ‘pianistic guitar,’ and it unifies the two instruments into one common thought process,” Garrett-Powell said. “My system unifies everything back to the piano, so at the very least you know if you’re playing a black key or a white key.

Frustrated with the sometimes impractical layout of fret markers, The Key offers an original guitar fretboard design based on the simplistic key structure of the piano with the objective of making music theory accessible and easily understood for many a musician, while also keeping the player, well, in key.

“My ultimate goal is to submit the idea that there’s an alternate way that you can choose to have the guitar labeled instead of just arbitrary benchmarks,” he said.

Garrett-Powell intends to present the invention at the National Association of Music Merchants in late January this year.

“I would like to eventually abandon the intellectual property of The Key into the public school music system so everyone gets to learn on it for free; that’s what I’d like to do,” he said.

Beyond his invention focus, Garrett-Powell plans to release a new record with The Fret Drifters in 2024 while bringing more live performances for audiences throughout the year.

To learn more about the Rogue Valley artist, visit nickgpmusic.com.