Les Fradkin

Biography

Les Fradkin is a guitar instrumentalist and one of the original members of the hit Broadway show "Beatlemania". He was a Guitar Synthesizer pioneer of the 1980's, a neoclassical surf guitar trendsetter in the 1990's and is now a 21st Century innovator on the Starr Labs Ztar. A classically trained musician as well as being a rock guitarist, he has found success as a recording artist, composer and producer with MGM Sunflower, ESP-Disk, Bell, Arista, RCA, and Laurie Records. Les has written the wel...

Les Fradkin is a guitar instrumentalist and one of the original members of the hit Broadway show "Beatlemania". He was a Guitar Synthesizer pioneer of the 1980's, a neoclassical surf guitar trendsetter in the 1990's and is now a 21st Century innovator on the Starr Labs Ztar. A classically trained musician as well as being a rock guitarist, he has found success as a recording artist, composer and producer with MGM Sunflower, ESP-Disk, Bell, Arista, RCA, and Laurie Records. Les has written the well known French hit "La Chansons Des Souvenirs" ("Song Of A Thousand Voices") for the famous French songstress Mireille Mathieu and the Latin Pop icon Roberto Jordan ("Donde"). He has played Mellotron, 12 and 6-string Guitar, Bass and Piano on dozens of Top 40 hit records throughout the early 1970's , scoring many US and UK chart placings throughout his career.

In 1976, Les was selected over thousands of other auditioning guitarists to appear in the original cast of the smash hit Broadway musical "Beatlemania" playing lead guitar and the part of "George Harrison" in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago. Running for two and a half years from May 1977 thru October 1979, every show (including over 1200 in New York alone) was sold out and the musicians quickly became celebrities with magazine cover stories ("Newsweek","Time", "People", "Rolling Stone") and many major television show appearances. With his guitar-playing in the international spotlight from the show, Fradkin developed a cult following that has avidly followed his career and made him a celebrity among guitar fans.

In the early 80's, he pioneered the introduction of tapeless MIDI recording with the SynthAxe and Synclavier scoring many national jingles and TV film music and he continues to be one of the foremost virtuosos of MIDI Guitar in the world today.

He has enjoyed chart success on the net as well with his songs reaching mp3.com's 1 position 16 times! New Gandy Dancer Rock Magazine named Les' CD "A Day At The Beach" it's 2004 Album Of The Year. In addition, Les has performed with The Ventures as 2nd Lead Guitarist. Nokie Edwards of The Ventures has performed with Les on several occasions and is a featured guest on his "While My Guitar Only Plays" CD. In fact, Les has been acknowledged as a guitar virtuoso for over 30 years and he has been featured in issues of 20th Century Guitar Magazine, Pipeline and New Gandy Dancer Magazines.

Today, Les has released 20 solo CD's on his RRO Entertainment Indie label and has had over 340,000 downloads bringing him several substantial hits on Apple iTunes and other download sites across the Internet.

His current music is a mixture of various influences and signposts including Progressive, Rock, Electronic and Classical.

He's a MIDI Guitar Virtuoso and now, a 21st Century music innovator on the Starr Labs Ztar. He combines two handed tapping, finger picking and Ableton Live Clip triggering into a startling and innovative new technique which has no equal. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.