About daniel

On his mother’s side, sound was inheritance. His grandfather performed with the St. Louis Philharmonic Orchestra and played jazz for the military. His grandmother sang in big bands, taught piano, and treated listening as a way of life. Pianos sat quietly in multiple family homes, his grandparents’, his great-grandparents’, not as symbols of aspiration, but as furniture. Music wasn’t introduced; it was simply there.

He learned piano the same way he learned language: informally, by proximity. An aunt taught him at her house. A piano lived in his own. Jazz clubs were family outings. Records by Dave Brubeck, George Gershwin, and Claude Debussy spun alongside big band standards. When asked how they met, his parents never led with a story, they led with concerts. Music, for them, was memory before it was entertainment.

Listening widened as he grew. Michael Jackson and Led Zeppelin shared space with Elton John, James Taylor, Foreigner, Def Leppard and whatever else felt alive on the radio. In the ’90s, dance music pulsed through the house. What mattered wasn’t genre. It was feel.

The guitar arrived through imagination first. As a child, Turnbaugh filmed himself playing a hockey stick like an instrument, moving in time to bands like Nirvana, Green Day, and Soundgarden. When the real thing finally came (a modest catalog guitar) it wasn’t a beginning so much as a continuation. He learned riffs quickly, then moved on. Punk gave way to metal, metal to groove, groove to songcraft. Each phase replaced the last without erasing it.

By adolescence, music had become a constant translation exercise. He moved between original bands, talent shows, and genre shifts with ease, from heavy music to progressive rock, from funk and soul to acoustic songwriting. At the same time, he played percussion in symphonic ensembles, grounding experimentation in discipline. Sound was never one thing; it was many things happening at once.

Formal study later expanded that relationship. Music theory, ear training, sight singing, choir. Private voice lessons in German and Italian repertoire. Art songs and musical theater. Language entered the body through breath. Music became something spoken as much as played.

Adulthood didn’t narrow the path. It widened it. Turnbaugh spent over a decade performing in corporate and private settings while continuing to write, collaborate, and refine his voice. Teaching emerged not as a pivot, but as an extension, first through music stores and arts studios, then privately. By 2006, education had become a parallel practice, inseparable from making and performing.

What connects it all is not genre, ambition, or output; but attention. Turnbaugh’s work reflects a lifetime spent noticing how rhythm steadies, how harmony clarifies, and how sound becomes meaningful when it’s treated with patience. Music, in this context, isn’t a goal or a career. It’s a place; one returned to again and again, with deeper understanding each time.