email: info@foothillmusictech.com
mailing address: 12345 el monte road, los altos hills, ca. 94022



Now in his 20th year at Foothill, Mark developed the Music Technology Program, wrote most of the curriculum, and is now spearheading our online degree offerings. He teaches Music Business, Music & Media, and Sibelius (digital notation) among other classes. He has performed and recorded with artists such as Jimmy Buffet, Burt Bacharach, The Temptations, Ray Charles, Mel Torme', Arturo Sandoval, Carl Fontana, and many others. He was awarded a California Music Award in 1999 for the World Beat Album of the Year (recorded and produced in Foothill's studio) and "Innovator of the Year" in 1997 for developing the Music Technology Program.

Bruce is our lead instructor and is one of only a handful of people to achieve Pro Tools Expert Level Certification, and is one of the Bay Area's top engineer/producers. He is offering a completely new line of Pro Tools® classes both in person and online that are unique to Foothill's Music Tech Program, like Pro Tools and Plug Ins, Mixing and Mastering with Pro Tools and many others.

Eric Kuehnl has spent over 13 years working as a composer, sound designer, and educator. Previously, Eric was an Audio Training Strategist in the Avid Education Department, and a Senior House Engineer for Sony Computer Entertainment America. He holds a Master's degree from California Institute of the Arts, a Bachelor's degree from Oberlin Conservatory, and studied composition at the Centre Iannis Xenakis in Paris.

For more than 20 years, Ed Goldfarb has been a ubiquitous figure on the Bay Area music scene as a pianist, composer, arranger and producer. Ed was Music Director of San Francisco's legendary Beach Blanket Babylon theatrical review for more than a decade, and he also enjoys a long-standing collaboration with noted film director Francis Ford Coppola, incuding Jack, Tetro and Apocalypse Now Redux.

In the studio, Ed has worked with Gold and Platinum artists such as Plain White Ts, Boyz II Men, Sean Paul and Morcheeba, as well as literally hundreds of independent songwriters, instrumentalists and bands. Ed has also been a Director of Music in the United Methodist Church since he was in high school, and has composed several large-scale works for choir and orchestral ensembles.

Ed currently works out of his home studio, Madcap Labs, where his secret weapons include a wall of analog synthesizers and the Melodyne software program. His latest project is a study of artist development and promotion in the post-record company era, with himself as test subject.

Jim Bruno is a San Francisco Bay Area based singer songwriter. Songs he's written have been recorded and released by Shawn Colvin, Mary Lou Lord, Cliff Eberhardt and Laurie MacAlister. Songs he's co-written have been recorded and released by Chuck Prophet and Thad Cockrell. As a performing songwriter he has performed with artists such as Shawn Colvin, John Gorka, Charlie Musselwhite, Joe Ely, Greg Brown, Mary Lou Lord, Steve Forbert, Bill Morrissey, Big Twist, and Cliff Eberhardt. He's performed at the Greenwich Village Folk Festival, the Udine Folk Festival in Udine, Italy and has toured five times in Europe. He also played bass, guitar and sang in the Shawn Colvin Band for a number of years and often performed with Shawn as a duet. He recently released his own CD of all original songs called 'Alright Alright'.

Our newest Faculty member, Suzanne brings a wealth of real world experience in performing, recording and teaching to her classes. Suzanne holds a B.A. in Music Performance from San Jose State University as well as a Certificate of Achievement in Music Technology. She has had years of advanced training in jazz and flute performance from Stanford University and Cabrillo College and has written her own interactive music theory and composition workbook called "Musicreation". S uzanne has been the recording engineer, producer and performer on 4 of her 5 CDs and has worked 8 years as an assistant on recording and video projects at Highland Studio in Los Gatos, California. Suzanne has also composed and recorded incidental music for theater productions in Saratoga, CA, ambient background music for meditation CDs and most recently back up tracks for GRL Computing commercials and singer/songwriter, Diann Klink.

Guitarist/Composer/Educator, Benett Zussman earned his Masters degree in Improvised Music with an emphasis on Jazz and Flamenco guitar from San Jose State University. His BA is in Classical Guitar performance under the guidance of Maestro Rey de la Torrre. Benett is a native of the Bay Area and has been on the board of the South Bay Guitar Society since 1993 where he has been a featured soloist, clinician and educator through such events as the student outreach program Arts Express, the American Red Cross Katrina Relief Benefit and the yearly arts festival Tapestry and Talent. From 1990-2000 Ben taught at the Community School of Music and Arts in Mountain View CA. Here was the creator and director of the CSMA Rock and Blues ensemble. In 2006 he released his first recording, Roundtrip a collection of new works, arrangements and compositions for solo guitar. Benett teaches classical guitar at Foothill and DeAnza colleges and has an active teaching studio in Los Gatos offering instruction in acoustic, electric and bass guitar.

R.J. Ward comes to Foothill by way of UC Irvine, where he taught Sound Design, Video Production and other digital media courses for 5 years. Since graduating from the UCLA Film School, he has worked in the film industry as a director, screenwriter, sound editor and session guitarist. He wrote the script for "The James Dean Garage Band", a feature film set in the early years of rock 'n roll that will be shot next year in British Columbia with T-Bone Burnett producing the soundtrack. He has recently performed as a member of Running With Scissors, an L.A.-based alt-rock project.

Mike received his BA and MA degrees from San Jose State University and has been an instructor at Foothill since 1981, teaching music courses including Jazz Improvisation, Guitar, MIDI and Music Theory. He has performed throughout the Bay Area for the last 25 years in various groups (or solo) in a variety of styles including Classical, Jazz, Rock and Pop. In addition to being fortunate enough to make a living doing something he loves (playing and teaching music), he has a strong infatuation with computers and related topics such as programming.

Matt Donner has been playing music his whole life. He played throughout college while earning a Bachelor's degree in quantitative Business Analysis but left the and cut his Producer and Engineering chops in NYC. He found himself working for high-profile studios like Sound on Sound (Diddy, Anita Baker) and Greene Street (Run DMC and Public Enemy) right after earning his Masters in Music and Music Technology at NYU. He went on to perform for various TV studios and John Cale (Velvet Underground) that included 3 feature film scores using Pro Tools version 1.0 and a two-day live event to open the Andy Warhol Museum. After signing his band to an indy record deal, his cross-country tour brought him to San Francisco.

Matt quickly found himself in high demand in the studio scene as a rare experienced Pro Tools user and became an award-winning Regional Technical Director for Guitar Center, and the Pro Tools Support Lead for the Cutting Edge Audio Group where he served as studio designer, installer and trainer for the likes of Joe Satriani, Metallica, Benny Reitveld (Santana and the SF Jazz Fest) as well as hundreds of private studios including Wally World (Walter A., N'Sync, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion). A crowning achievement during this period was to install, troubleshoot, deliver and support 50 Pro Tools workstations for the legendary Skywalker Sound during production of Star Wars Episode 1.

In January 2000, he and Greg Gordon began working together exclusively at Pyramind where they began running the hybrid Production/ Training businesses successfully. Matt has served the company as Chief Engineer, Senior Producer/ Composer, Chief Technical Officer, Vice-President and now as Director of Education. He grew the Pyramind Training program from a single 24 hour class to athe highly-touted 920 hour 12-month Digital Sound Producer-Complete (DSP-C). He has trained hundreds of students and mixed/mastered another hundred or so records (including his own released in 2002) as well as publishing several magazine articles. Matt has also written two texts on Pro Tools (Pro Tools Overdrive V 6.9 and V7 for Thomson Press). He is currently working with various Pyramind Staff members and instructors to write nine books based on Pyramind's Core curriculum to be published by Alfred Publishing.

Scott was one of the first students in our music technology program and returns to us after completing his B.A. Scott is an accomplished singer/songwriter and has worked on many recording projects as a vocalist, engineer, producer, writer and arranger. Scott currently teaches songwriting at Foothill and is also the music director at the Orchard Community Church in Campbell. Scott brings a wealth of experience and an unparalleled enthusiasm for music and song to our program and we are very happy to welcome him as one of our newest adjunct faculty member.

Top of page