COMPOSING • SOUND DESIGN • DOLBY ATMOS FACILITY • AUDIO POST • CUSTOMIZED LIBRARY MUSIC • MPSE MEMBER

Gregory Ives started playing music and experimenting with sounds at a very young age while growing up in the islands of Hawaii. He used to walk through the cane fields to the Kilauea Volcano Crater, which was near his home.

His father was in the Navy Seals and he also learned at an early age to freedive with his brother in the Pacific Ocean and love communication with the life and sounds in it. After not deciding to go into Oceanography, his pianist mother started him on the piano after moving back to Oregon. He also found an interest in trumpet, which became his main instrument.

Gregory experimented with tape machines at a young age recording organic sounds like his brother eating apples, then playing it back at a slower pace to make it sound like moon people eating bones!

This would later help him explore and create the type of music sound design for his compositions.

 He moved to Los Angeles to continue study and hone his skills. He studied composition and orchestration with Frank Campo and Cal State Northridge. He then studied with Mel Powell and Mort Subotnik in composition and electronic music and received a BFA¬ degree as a trumpet major from the California Institute of the Arts in 1984.  

While in LA he was developing a way in electronic music to create a path for acoustic musicians to trigger electronic instruments with a trumpet and other instruments.  He joined forces with the late tenor saxophone player from the Johnny Carson Show, Bill Perkins, and soon developed a prototype built by Jim Cooper Electronics called the Perk-A-Phone.

He spent the next 4 years demonstrating it for industry greats and programming it for projects with Miles Davis, (first getting to play with Miles in his hotel residence for a day in NYC); he went on to demo it for Miles’s friends, Herb Alpert, Quincy Jones, and Mark Isham. He was also reviewed in Keyboard Magazine and Music Technology about the prototype. After being credited with Mark Isham on two albums, Mark’s wife/agent of that time started to represent Gregory as well.    

She soon started to get him meetings with directors and producers for work in the film industry, which started to give him a direction and new focus away from the marketing of a midi trumpet.  He then went to NYC for a time, living in Manhattan and working at a studio there, scoring commercials, television and recording projects.

He then had an offer to work on ad agency work with creatives at the famed Wieden & Kennedy in Portland Oregon on Nike and other accounts.  He also continued pursuing film work and has scored over 25 Native American documentaries as well as feature films in the Indie realm. Gregory Ives has composed films that received honors at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Munich International Film Festival along with many others. He has performed and worked with legendary musicians including Henry Mancini, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and Michel Legrand.

He has been a sought-after studio musician, producer and sound designer.  An Emmy-nominated composer, while living in Los Angeles, he was a composer/arranger in the recording industry and film as well as a studio trumpet player. He is now commuting via the Internet and airports from his home in Portland Oregon were he lives with his wife Jocelyn.  He is also very active in the Indie Film scene, doing projects he is passionate about.