Hi, I’m Todd Reynolds.

Here is where my bio should be. There are tons of lovely colleagues to cite working with, and wonderful places played, countries toured to, and opportunities I feel so fortunate to have been granted. Feel free to read all about them in my ‘About’ page. But those things don’t tell you all that much about who I am.

Here’s what might be more helpful to know:

I started out on a violin made of a standard elementary school ruler taped onto a Grape Nuts box and grew up playing all the sonatas and concertos that all the other kids did.

I played in church by my father’s side for what seemed like an eternal adolescence, and by some stroke of good fortune, found myself in one of the last classes of the great Jascha Heifetz where he counseled me to sell insurance for the sake of my own happiness on my way out the door.

In college, I became enamored with playing the music of living composers - it got me hooked on non-historic ways of thinking about music, stretching me beyond my planned trajectory in classical music.

But then I accepted a position playing Principal Second Violin in the Rochester Philharmonic. After my third year in a coveted, stable job, I realized it wasn’t going to be enough for me. Since the very moment I quit my job, I’ve reinvented myself four times, at least. First as a Broadway musician, then as a founder of ETHEL, a cutting edge amplified string quartet, then as a ‘solitary composer in the woods’ recording artist, and finally, refocusing as an educator - not that that’s anywhere near the end of things.

I’m what I call a hybrid musician. I play with some of my long time idols - singer/songwriters, Broadway musicians, global musicians, minimalists, electronica artists, rock stars, New Music heroes, Classical Music heroes - I count them all my friends, colleagues and collaborators.

I record, teach, and perform with my studio onstage and off, study Indian music, jazz, music programming, psychology, and mindfulness to varying degrees as disciplines. I’m as much a student as a teacher. That will never change.

In 2016, I felt the industry changing yet again. CDs - gone, Broadway jobs - gone, commercial work - gone. My partner, Isabelle, and I moved to a beautiful place in the country to build a community for teaching and creating, to develop more tools for reinvention and expansion, and to delve ever deeper into what it means to be a holistic musician today.

You see, we musicians, we’re not our instrument, we’re not the music we studied, we are creators through and through, whatever form that expression takes. It is with the questions that we slay the dragon, not with our virtuosity. The Hero’s Journey exists for us as it does for anyone else, and we need only to walk forward with eyes open and a backpack full of good questions (and great gear), and we’ll confront our next dragon.

I’ve created XLab for Amplify This, our online academy, for fellow musicians who feel that same nagging suspicion that ‘the box’ they currently inhabit is too small to contain them, that the times we’re living in are calling them forth to something larger, that they too want to think of themselves as creators, as storytellers, as activists, and agents of change.

There. That’s a bit about who I am. But enough about me. How about you?