daniel stein began studying music at the age of seven with the five free lessons that came with his first piano. fifteen years later, he graduated from the berklee college of music.
dan started his professional career as a studio musician in new york city playing keyboards on records, soundtracks, and jingles. he found himself composing at many of the sessions he was working on and in 1988, he moved to los angeles when he was accepted into usc’s graduate program “composition for film and television”.
since that time, dan has been composing, arranging, and playing music for animation, films, and visual media. as a keyboardist he has worked with musicians including james taylor, jon bon jovi, and joe cocker and currently teaches keyboard performance at musician’s institute college for contemporary music. in the early days of his career, dan worked on the score for films such as ace ventura and mambo kings, produced themes and score for disney and jim henson. he was signed to herb alpert’s publishing company rondor music where he was positioned as a film and television composer among some of the world’s top songwriters.
more recently, dan has been working on “skyline forest”, an exploration of ambient soundscapes inspired by tangerine dream and brian eno, combined with melodic vintage acoustic keyboards.
surrounded by keyboards in his studio, vintage and modern synthesizers, as well as vintage acoustic instruments, dan’s passion for music takes shape in both the acoustic and electronic worlds.
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daniel is also an accomplished photographer, lappc architectural photographer of the year in 2018. see his work here.
still known as danny from his new york days, you can click here to checkout his jazz/fusion album time machine.