Paolo Bio

Paolo started playing guitar at the age of 4, and grew up on a diet of bands such as the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Genesis, The Police and Rush.
He has always had a keen interest in anything musical, and has dabbled in other instruments, including drums, bass and keyboards.

From an early age Paolo was also into electronics, especially anything to do with audio, and was forever modifying radios and tape machines - he even built an electric guitar at one point, but it this was no Brian May story - Paolo recalls that his guitar was awful; "A schoolmate and I built electric guitars as teenagers and had to play them in front of the school at assembly. Things were going well until my guitar gave up the ghost mid-solo and literally went completely out of tune!"

In his early teens Paolo was in a band that were runners up in the Princes trust 'battle of the bands' competition. This was a formative point in his
musical career, as he co-wrote the song that helped get the band to that position, as well as being heavily involved mixing the performance. Often this happened by default, as Paolo was always the one in the band who knew how to work the equipment. This interest developed to the point where he convinced his mother to allow him to use the spare room as a recording studio, and he set about collecting the equipment he needed to write and record.
Often this gear was past it, but then money was tight, so as long as it worked, it would do.

Throughout his late teens Paolo started to get into into paid session work, and gigging with numerous bands. This continued into his mid twenties, where family commitments brought about a change of focus away from live performing and into a more studio based musical existence. This lasted a couple of years until In late 1996, Paolo co-founded a band called Kudos.

This band was bourne out of a love of performing music from the 70's; the idea being to pay tribute to the artists that had inspired them. The band gigged hard and had mixed fortunes, and it's direction had changed from the original idea to a more hardcore tribute band that was becoming quite heavily Progressive, majoring on Genesis and Yes. Paolo departed at the end of 1998 when he decided that he no longer wanted to be tied to the restrictions of a tribute band. The band reformed again at the end of 1999 as a fully fledged Genesis tribute band called G2, covering the Peter Gabriel era, and Paolo subsequently joined as their live sound engineer in the autumn of 2000, although he did gig with them in 2001 as well. This satisfied his desire to work on the other side of the desk, and when G2 decided to put out a live DVD and CD, Paolo recorded the gigs and set about producing the audio for both DVD and CD. At about this time his dream of building a studio was realised, when in October 2003 his studio was moved out of the family home and into a purpose built out-building, affectionately known as the shed. To date Paolo has mixed several albums in there, as well as DVD soundtracks, and the studio is now the engine room of the About Eight writing and recording process.