Born and raised in Burbank, California, Christopher Paul Bishop began playing music at age 4 when he starting playing the tunes on the radio on his grandparents’ piano. They gave him this 70-year-old yellowed dinosaur of a piano that lasted through elementary school when he realized that the pianos at school were a quarter-step higher in pitch. He played percussion in Junior High and High School and fell in love with the marimba.
Chris was always fond of music. He would listen to CDs to transcribe songs – including Joe Cocker’s “You Are So Beautiful” for fun, and Eddie Van Halen’s “Right Now” for his high school’s percussion program. He continued his studies at Cal State University, Northridge, where at his Senior Recital for his BM, he performed the entire Sonata Pathétique (No. 8 in C Minor) on a 5-octave Yamaha marimba.
He wasn’t always doing music. Chris was also pretty good at math. After programming the Star Trek theme in GW-Basic and stalemating his Calculus professor in a game of Chess, he was given the Mathematics Award at John Burroughs in Burbank, CA (1995). Chris then confessed to writing a program on the TI-85 calculator that faked a blank OS, making it possible to cheat on some of the exams (although Chris swears that he never used it personally). He minored in Computer Science at CSUN and has been creating multimedia and database software ever since.
Also born and raised in Burbank, California, Erin Abbey was destined for greatness. She was smart and talented in many ways, with activities ranging from soccer to academic clubs to music. She was near the top of her class throughout her entire schooling. She also had high ethics – ratting out Chris in class when he lied about throwing rocks at other students.
Her passion for the performing arts began at age 6 on the piano, and continued with performances in show choir in high school and college. She also loves swing dancing and was a DJ for KUCI.
After earning her Masters in Aerospace Engineering, she worked as an engineer and project manager at Northrop Grumman for many years before branching out to become a children’s educator and a Mechanical Engineering lecturer at CSUN.
Erin is now loving raising hers and Chris’s daughter Vienna, and is becoming more actively involved in her education by joining the executive board of the Burbank Parent Education Council.
