Liz: Although I love scoring pieces for an orchestra, I'm equally at home working in the studio with a computer and sampler. Classically trained, I studied harmony with Bernard Lanskey, Assistant Director of Music at the Guildhall School of Music, London. I started my musical professional life as a performer (playing keyboards, violin) writng and playing in musicals, performing in many commercial Theatre shows, as well as performing with artists as varied as the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Boy George!
Gavin: I turned my hobby into a career and played bass guitar as a freelance player. I did tours across the UK & Europe in the 90's with several artists including Grammy nominated Dove Award winner Margaret Becker, Chris Eaton (Janet Jackson, Amy Grant), Brian Kennedy (Van Morrison, Riverdance and lately Eurovision for Ireland), Grammy nominee Jessy Dixon. I started to develop my writing, arranging and engineering skills, producing records for Alliance Records, Small Dog Records and But! Records.
During the 90's we established ourselves as a live 'act', filling in any downtime between other tours and shows. We cut our teeth playing on the infamous Northern Club circuit, and soon graduated to more salubrious (and better paying!) corporate events around the UK. It was while playing our way around the world in the lounge bar of a cruise ship we decided to concentrate on our writing - hence the website name 2inabar.com.
In 1998 we released our first instrumental CD designed for media use, part of the Notepad CD range of Library Music that has now supplied over 1000 Media Production companies. In 2002 we launched a music download website for our music, which won a national E-Commerce Award for it's innovative use of technology, together with a cash prize - very nice! Our music has become widely used on most of the UK's TV networks including the BBC and ITV, and many more television networks and houseold "brand names" worldwide.
We have supplied music to corporate clients large and small including The Prime Minister's Office, Sony, Disney, Coca Cola, IBM, British Telecom, Intel, and Unilever. We've also written music for major music libraries KPM and Musichouse. If you've heard commercial radio across England, you've probably heard us on one of the many advertisements we have written for local and regional stations such as 2CR, Wave, TalkSport, Virgin, Arrow, Capital Gold.
Songwriting has been a pleasurable sideline for us, and in recent years we've had our songs performed by several artists, with chart placings in Canada, USA, UK and other countries. We achieved a #2 hit with our song "Completely", something of a suprise - as the record company said to us: "the good news is that it's reached #2, the bad news is - that's in Thailand!" More recently another of our songs was profiled by i-Tunes USA, resulting in Sophie Milman's debut album going to #1 on the i-tunes USA Jazz chart, also achieving #1 Jazz Album on itunes USA, Canada, Japan and France.