How the sound
came to be.
EmberAudio wasn't trained on the internet. It was trained on one guitarist, and over two decades of riffs, shreds, and solos.
The obsession
He was eleven when it started, on a cheap Synsonics with acoustic strings on an electric body. The wrong guitar, played the right amount: eight hours a day, sometimes fifteen.
Most kids eventually put the guitar down. He never really did.
The guitars that found him
The story he tells: a stranger stopped him on the street and handed him a late friend's guitar. A minute later a car pulled over and sold him another for five dollars, because the man saw he was already carrying two.
He walked home that day with three guitars and five dollars gone. He'll tell you it felt less like luck and more like being pointed somewhere.
The rooms he played
Rest for the Wicked in his twenties: battle of the bands, real stages, his first fifteen songs. After Rest for the Wicked ended, he joined A Silver Lining just three days later, sharing nights with Trapt, Everclear, and Warrant.
Then Vilyn: him on guitar, producer Sean Aizen Nelson on vocals, twenty-five years and a couple of label deals in (Sean fronted Media Lab back in the 2000s). They met in a Facebook group and wrote "Tomorrow Never Ends" in four days. It made the write-ups.
In 2015 he sent his tracks to Jason Hook of Five Finger Death Punch, not expecting anything back. Hook listened, and wrote back.
You should devote all your time to music, cause you have it, man. I hear it.— Jason Hook, Five Finger Death Punch · May 2015
The first track he sent him was "Insomnia," and others are still up: reverbnation.com/mattmontneyjr ↗
The near-myth
There's a call from Zakk Wylde he never took. He was down in the basement, playing too loud to hear the phone ring. He tells it like a joke, but it tells you everything.
You can't hand someone a lifetime.
A lifetime of playing can't be handed to another person. So he did the only thing left: he taught it to a machine.
Every riff, every bend, every note, distilled into a model so the sound outlasts the hands that made it. And so anyone can make music in it, even people who never had a lifetime to give.
Hear what a lifetime sounds like.
Every track on EmberAudio is grown from this sound.