Bob Bliss

Bob Bliss is a musician, software engineer, and instrument designer residing near Santa Cruz, CA. Born in Michigan, he was playing guitar in his first band at age 10, and bass guitar and keyboards soon after. He studied the French horn and composition in middle and high schools, and by age 16 was building electronic music synthesizers in his basement. Interleaving college and music, he played bass in two college jazz bands, and by 18 he was playing pop, rock, and funk keyboards nightly as a professional, while still studying electronics technology, computers, piano, and music theory. After a stint playing progressive symphonic rock, he and his band mate and wife-to-be Paula relocated to California. Bob landed a gig as electronics technician at the first music store he walked into in Santa Cruz, where he would later meet Jim Schliestett, soon to be friend and musical collaborator.

After a few years of gigging the Santa Cruz music scene in the eighties, Bob began his long engineering career at E-MU Systems. As a principal software engineer at E-MU, he wrote the operating system, realtime synthesizer, and signal processing code for the Emulator IV series of digital samplers, an instrument used by such music professionals as Tony Banks (Genesis), Trevor Rabin (Yes), and film composers Hans Zimmer and Danny Elfman. Bob played electric guitar and keyboards on hundreds of pop and rock dates in the nineties, occasionally behind such notables as the Drifters, and Peter Noone (Herman’s Hermits). Continuing into the new century, he has played with former members of the Doobie Brothers, Snail, and Little River Band, at times in front of the Santa Cruz Symphony Orchestra, and has recently recorded a CD of original eclectic folk-rock with Paula. His current day gig is Software Architect and partner at Rossum Electro-Music, LLC, purveyors of fine synthesizers.

With 2017 marking the 30-year anniversary of the creation of “Sunrise Sonata”, Jim and Bob are turning their attentions to their creative futures, and are thrilled to be joining the PARMA musical community as Schliestett & Bliss.