Biography
Slick received classical piano training, studied at Indiana University and Belmont College and earned a B.A. in Music, in 1981.
In 1981, Slick joined Petra and played on their albums Never Say Die, More Power To Ya, and Not of This World (in this album he even wrote some songs). After leaving the band at the conclusion of the US Not of This World Tour in 1984, he worked in the Nashville music industry, composing musicals, transcribing piano-vocal songbooks, and playing on various recording projects.
Eventually, Slick left the music industry in favor of software engineering. Slick worked five years as a product specialist for New England Digital, the manufacturer of the Synclavier digital recording system. Slick's responsibilities included supporting the technical needs of N.E.D. customers including Miami Sound Machine, CNN, Barbra Streisand, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Frank Zappa, Sting, Paul Simon, Pat Metheny, and many prominent sound studios in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. Slick also spent a month in Miami, Florida, working as a Synclavier specialist on the Miami Sound Machine album, Cuts Both Ways. Slick received an album credit for his "Synclavier chops".
An encounter at the Las Vegas COMDEX trade show led Slick to a software engineering job with Aware, Inc., located in the heart of the M.I.T. engineering community in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He attended graduate courses in computer science at Harvard University and participated in the development of a real-time audio decompression application, "Speed of Sound" reviewed by New Media magazine.
Slick later joined Nortel Networks as a software engineer specializing in multi-platform CD-ROMs for technical product documentation. Slick continues to design and develop software applications in Java and C#. He is presently a senior software engineer and systems architect with Computer Sciences Corporation, working on General Dynamics in-theater military support systems for the U.S. Department of Defense.
Read more about this topic: John Slick
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