Renzo Staiano is a music performer, producer, educator, composer, and president and CCO of the music education app “AlphaJams”. At the age of 17, he won first prize in a local guitar competition. The inspiration born of that initial success led Renzo to pursue a BM at Berklee College of Music in Boston, and later, an M.A. in Latin American ethnomusicology at UCSC. Renzo performs on 6 string, 8 string, and Latin American guitars such as the Cuban Tres. His studies have taken him to Los Angeles, Boston, Peru, Spain, Mexico, Argentina and Cuba. As a performer, Renzo's career has taken him all over the world - from New York, New York to Djibouti, Djibouti - appearing as a guitar soloist, with large orchestras, and every type of ensemble in between. He has performed with members of Funkadelic, The Dodos, Peru Negro, Dethklok Metalocalypse, Savoy Brown, The Doobie Brothers, Spearhead, Santana, The Santa Cruz Chamber Orchestra and many more. Renzo has taught guitar performance, music theory, and music history, both privately and as a lecturer at University of California at Santa Cruz. Lately, he has been writing and performing with the S.F. indie pop band Le VICE. He has also worked as a music consultant with composer Bear McCreary, composed and recorded the original soundtracks for the Award winning documentary North Pond, and the video game Shatterpulse. Renzo has licensed his original compositions to a number of international companies such as Levis, Intel, NPR, Urthecast, Jansport, Royal Bank of Scotland, and Dignity Health. He is also the creator of the YouTube channel Now YOU Shred, which to date has almost 100k subscribers. Since the global pandemic, Renzo has shifted focus to tech entrepreneurship, starting Alphajams, a music education software company which will initially be a direct spin-off from Now You Shred, but as any great tech company aspires, has larger designs on the entire realm of internet oriented music education. Renzo currently splits his time between Oakland and Santa Cruz, California.

Click below to view and listen to latest music and video scored by Renzo.