Scott Collins earned a Bachelors of Music degree in Music Composition from Berklee College of Music and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Multi-Focus Guitar Performance from California Institute of the Arts.  His playing on fretted and fretless instruments, draws from a wide range of western and non-western music and he specializes in real-time composition.  Currently, he performs with the loosely Afro-beat inspired electric ensemble, Embe Esti and a duo called, I Come From The Mountains that specializes in incorporating Hindustani and Middle Eastern sounds into original, acoustic instrumental music. 

Most recently, Scott can be heard on the 2017 episode of the Cartoon Network animated series The Powerpuff Girls “Electric Buttercup” episode.  He is a featured baglama (Turkish lute) performer on the Sony Playstation, God of War 2 video game and a soloist on the track “Come Alive” from the RedLynx Trials Evolution game.  In addition to numerous live performances, he has toured in the U.S., the U.K, and Germany, performed in the world premier of composer Glenn Branca’s “Hallucination City” and the U.S. premier of composer Tim Brady’s, “Twenty Quarter Inch Jacks”.

He can also be heard on recordings by Daren Burns and has released recordings with multiple acts including Tubtime, The Rough Hewn Trio and KoriSoron.

Other performance highlights include John French (“Drumbo” of Captain Beefheart), Wadada Leo Smith, (Butoh dancer) Don McLeod, Butch Morris, Sahba Motallebi, Ulrich Krieger, Susie Allen, Grammy award winner Mike Reagan, Melissa Kaplan (Universal Hall Pass), Jeff Kaiser, The Bentmen, One of Us, Annette Farrington, Sleep Chamber and many more.

In theater, he was the composer and Musical Director for the Siena College production of “Child Soldier” and co-composed and performed the thematically improvised score for the About Productions stage adaptation of Norman Klein’s “Bleeding Through” with Vinny Golia.

As a presenter, Scott gave a TedX talk entitled Past Forward, which dealt with the intersection of art, commerce and scacity.  He has performed and co-lead workshops on improvisation as part of the Imagniary Borders/Imaginarias Fronteras project at the Centro Nacional de las Artes in Mexicali, Mexico and performed and co-lead a workshop on “Structured Improvisation in Film Accompaniment” as part of the Cha’ak’ab Paaxil Festival at the Edificio de Artes Visuales – Escuela Superior de Artes de Yucatán in Mérida, Mexico.  

Scott specializes in real-time visual scoring has accompanied a number of short silent films and longer films including – Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Broken Blossoms, Faust, The Unholy 3, Phantom of The Opera, and Page of Madness.  In 2009, he and Carmina Escobar accompanied  Solu (Mia Mikela) in a live sound and visual improvisation as part of Solu’s residency at USC’s Visions and Voices series.

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An active guitar teacher and musical performance coach, Scott is the author of The GuitArchitect’s Guide: series which includes:

• The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Modes: Melodic Patterns

• The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Modes: Harmonic Combinatorics

• The GuitArchitect’s Positional Exploration 

• The GuitArchitect’s Guide to Chord Scales and

• The GuitArchitect’s Guide To Symmetrical Twelve-Tone Patterns

Other published titles include,  Scott Collins’ Fretboard Visualization Series – The Minor Pentatonic Scale and two books for the Kindle platform, An Indie Musician Wake up Call and Selling It Versus Selling Out.  

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Scott uses D’Addario strings, Planet Waves accessories, Yamaha guitars and amplifiers, Positive Grid software, ZT Amps,  Scuffham Amps, and Line 6 gear.

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In addition to his posts on GuitArchitecture, he had a mini-lesson published in the 2010 Holiday issue of Guitar Player Magazine, and has also had articles posted on Guitar Salon International,  Live4Guitar , was interviewed for Publishers Weekly and had an musician and builder interview series (and gear reviews) on Guitar-Muse.com.

A current web-version of his CV can be found here in pdf format.