Derek Jones has always worked hard and been a self-starter.

Back when he was a high schooler in Hawaii, he worked overnight, driving a forklift in a lumberyard.

He worked in a pizza shop, making dough until 3 a.m.

He got a pass on taking electives like gym for working. He wasn’t really into school – it was a means to an end – but he had other passions, mainly music.

And that’s the passion that has stuck with him over the years, especially now that he’s launched his own event production company and recording business, Lo-note Productions.

His foray into music started at the skatepark, where he hung out with other skaters and listened to them playing music. He wanted to learn how to play the sweet guitar riffs like they could — from Metallica and other metal bands. When he was 14, he got a guitar from Costco, and that’s where it all began. He describes how he learned music from tab books, mostly, and was motivated by a mix of “lonerism and obsessiveness.” Six months after he got that first guitar, he played his first gig.

Then, he found himself playing almost every week at a dingy hole-in-the-wall bar called The Pink Cadillac in Waikiki. The oldest member of the band, who was only 17, booked the shows.

A year after he got his first guitar, he entered the world of recording, with his first digital 8-track recorder.

“You could just plug a guitar into it and press a button and record and that was just mind-blowing to me,” he said.

After finishing high school, Jones’ parents encouraged him to get more education, and he figured learning to be a recording engineer and work in music production would suit his interests and pay the bills. That required a move to the mainland, away from the island where he grew up in a military family.

He enrolled in the Musicians Institute College of Contemporary Music in Hollywood, shipped his car from Hawaii and got on a plane. He showed up with a duffel bag full of a week’s worth of clothes and an air mattress and didn’t look back.

At his first music job in Hollywood, he started as an intern at Central Command Studios, where he was immediately thrown into the deep end of the recording business.

“I showed up and they said, ‘We have tons of bookings. I hope you know what you’re doing,’ ” Jones said.

It was trial by fire, and he learned quickly. He kept driving a forklift down at the loading docks to make ends meet.

He spent 10 years in California, and that time also included working at the well-known Henson Recording Studios in Hollywood, one of the premiere recording studios in the music business.

The Henson studios complex was a happening place, where Jones started as a runner but later worked as a recording engineer, helping artists record and mix demo tapes and lay down tracks for albums. Some of the artists were songwriters for Disney or recording anime music, and others had agreements to rent the studios for longer periods of time to record albums.

These studios were home to famous recording artists, and it wasn’t unusual for Jones to see Prince recording across the hall from Van Halen. Jones helped haul a 600-pound acrylic organ to a recording studio for Daft Punk to use on an album. He worked for Kiss. And he was careful not to shut off the light illuminating the crystal installed in the wall of Studio 2 – it’s believed to house the ghost of Karen Carpenter and employees were instructed to keep the ghost happy by keeping the light on.

He also had chance encounters with celebrities, including the time he helped Joni Mitchell with her car. She told him the wiring was eaten by rats, and he drove her Mercedes coupe to the mechanic for her.

Another time, he woke up Art Garfunkel, who was napping in the lounge.

Sometimes he ran into David Lee Roth, who would bring his dog into the studio.

Jones got to do a little bit of everything there, and valued the experience of seeing sound production and recording from start to finish, at every level.

The 34-year-old Jones moved to Ouray County in 2018, with his wife, Kate, and now they have a 3-year-old daughter, Nina. While he took a brief break from songwriting and music production after moving here, he got back into the business after helping with sound at a Wright Opera House concert in 2019, and now he’s the programming director at the Sherbino Theater. He also writes songs and plays guitar for the local band Smutdolly.

Lo-note prioritizes serving the region with music production, and that means everything from sound for live concerts to recording albums. He can do everything from booking talent to producing concerts, providing lighting, recording and mixing, and he has all the equipment.

While there are other event production companies in neighboring counties, Lo-note is the only business of its kind in Ouray County, and Jones aims to have a local option for music and event production, especially concerts and live music.

“That’s what we do best,” he said.

For more information, call (970) 318-6054 or visit https:// lo-note.xyz/.