Hussein Boon
Principal Lecturer
Songwriter, Musician, Composer, Producer, Music Educator and Programming.
Hussein is a multi instrumentalist, composer and music educator with a diverse range of recording, production and performance experiences as well as education experience spanning pre-school to post graduate here in the UK and abroad. He has taught at a number of institutions including Goldsmiths, City Lit, UOW, CM, IoE and organisations such as Prince's Trust, Rockschool, the music and arts services for Harrow, Hammersmith and Fulham, Ealing and Westminster and special projects for Arts Council of England and Somerset House and Quintin Hogg Trust.
As a session musician he has worked for Beats International, Freak Power, Norman Cook, Karen Ramirez, Billy Ocean, Charles and Eddie, Eusebe, DeLa Soul, Elisha LaVerne, Alex Parks, Alistair McGriffin and many others. He has been a musical director for special events for Princes' Trust. Companies he has worked for include Universal, Polydor, Warners, AVEX, Sanctuary, Sony, BBC TV, CITV, C4 and BFI.
As a writer his material has been featured in films and tv and songs signed to some of the largest publishers including AVEX and Sony. He was also instrumental in establishing the Rockschool format of popular music exams contributing large numbers of pieces performed by guitar, bass and drums students around the world!
He is an independent artist running his own record label, Brown Baby Records and self releases and arranges distribution and sales of his own material releasing a new piece every month. The material varies from Jazz to Electronic to House music and he has been known to complete occasional remixes completed for students.
He is the organiser of the London Ableton Live User Group which meets monthly to discuss the use of Live as a performance, writing and production tool as well as a tool for stretching the boundaries of the creative application of music technology going beyond the traditional norm of what is capable within a traditional DAW based environment. It is within the Live environment where he is able to demonstrate unusual and interesting applications of audio processing to generate and auto-generate complex material.
He is a member of the Harrow Music and Arts Music Hub representing the University and HE sector.
Hussein has been a music course leader for ten years and is one of original teaching team who started the Commercial Music degree at University of Westminster in 1993.
I teach across the range of subject areas including performance, guitar, musicianship, music technology, performance technology, songwriting, production and contextual studies.
I support students in their interests and aid them in their development as rounded musicians. As an instrumentalist I can also be found playing alongside students in the weekly Jazz jams and open mic sessions.
A recent three year funding bid from QHT was accepted and i will be running a music technology project for University and schools addressing the need for more females to be using technology and to be working in the industry in more prominent roles rather than just as 'front people'. The project is the first of its kind and by the conclusion in 2020, should have met the needs of thirty female undergraduate students and 150 14-16 year old female school pupils. The aim and vision are uniquely contemporary and updates the research evidence published by Keith Swanick in 1979 regarding the divide between music studied in school and music experienced in the home and external situations by school pupils.