Ray Lynch

Ray Lynch

"Ray" Lynch (aka Raymond Lynch) is a classically trained guitarist and lutenist. He was born in Salt Lake City, Utah to a musical and artistic family. His mother was a classical pianist and watercolor artist. At age 6, Lynch began studying the piano until age 12, where he was inspired by the music of Andres Segovia’s classical recordings and decided to pursue a career in music. He attended both St. Stephen's Episcopal School as well as Austin High School in Austin, Texas, then attended the main campus of University of Texas for one year before moving to Barcelona, Spain where he apprenticed to the classical guitar teacher, Eduardo Sainz de la Maza, for three years. Leaving Spain, Lynch then returned to the University of Texas where he studied music composition. While at college Lynch was invited to New York City to join The Renaissance Quartet where he performed the classical guitar and lute for several years.

In the early days of his musical career, Lynch was an unknown classically trained guitarist and lutenist who began writing instrumental recordings that blended classical and electronic components into melodic soundscapes. His debut album, The Sky of Mind (1983) artfully meshed his early classical music training with spatial melodies, and the album became an underground success. When Lynch released his second album Deep Breakfast (1984), he and his wife Kathleen sold over 50,000 albums out of their small apartment in San Rafael, California before licensing the music to a distributor. Deep Breakfast has sold over 1.4 million copies without the benefits of live performances or videos, and was the first independently released album to be certified Platinum by the R.I.A.A.

Lynch’s third album No Blue Thing (1989) won two Billboard Awards, and in 1993, Lynch followed up with his fourth album, the classical Nothing Above My Shoulders but the Evening featuring members of the San Francisco Symphony. Lynch’s fifth and most recent album, Ray Lynch: Best Of, Volume One (1998) is a retrospective of his work and includes three new music tracks.