Erik Thomas

For those of you who don't know Erik, he is probably best known as the mandolin player and lead singer for Due West, the innovative bluegrass band from northern California. Erik also played for a number of years with the Bluegrass/Vocal Gospel band FaultLine out of northern California. Listen to samples of some of Erik's studio work.

Erik is an experienced software engineer, and is pleased to be a member of the Grow Your Business Team at Intuit, Inc. Read more about Erik's day job.

Erik is also a worship leader at his church (New Day Church) in Boulder Colorado.

Musical background

A California native who moved to the Rocky Mountains near Boulder, Colorado roughly 4 1/2 years ago after working for more than 18 years in Silicon Valley, Erik's mixed musical heritage begins with the genes and influence of his world renowned mom, the famous classical violin soloist Camilla Wicks (check out one of her CDs The Art of Camilla Wicks, and other links about her here), and his trumpet playing dad, Bob Thomas, who worked with Harry James and other famous big bands.

Erik got his first guitar in his early teens and studied classical as well as blues/rock styles off-and-on until being introduced to bluegrass at age 20.

Through the years, Erik has worked with an eclectic mix of well-known artists, including Mickey Gilley, Elvin Bishop, David Grisman, Rob Ickes, Scott Nygaard, Tony Trischka, Megan Lynch, Joe Craven, LeRoy Mack and Darol Anger among others.

An accomplished contest player, Erik has twice won the Western Open Mandolin and Flatpicking Guitar Championships.

Erik's singing can also be heard on the multi-million selling sound track of the computer game sensation The Sims™.

Audio samples

Following are a few mp3 samples of Erik's studio work.

These Boots (Due West)

"Due West is a contemporary bluegrass band of the highest caliber. They combine all the essential ingredients — smooth vocal harmonies, instrumental virtuosity and great tunes, old and new — in refreshingly different ways. Don't pass this one up!"

— David "Dawg" Grisman      

Following are some samples of Erik playing mandolin and singing on Due West's last album These Boots. The members of Due West were Bill Evans, Jim Nunally, Chad Manning, and Cindy Browne.

Mexicali Moonshine - This instrumental was written by Erik.

Sandy Marsh / Fast Ruby (the Slowest Mule) - This instrumental was composed by Chad Manning.

Traveling The Highway Home - Erik first heard this great gospel song on a live radio show recording of Ralph Stanley with the late great Keith Whitley singing lead and just had to sing it on this album.

Does My Ring Burn Your Finger - A great—but very dark—song written by Julie and Buddy Miller (Tinkie Tunes/Martha Road Music admin by Bug, ASCAP), Erik sings lead on this one.

The Heart That You Own - A fine ballad written by Dwight Yoakam (BMI) that Erik has been singing for years, and really wanted to record with Due West.

The Magic Hour (Rick Jamison)

Erik sang and/or played mandolin on every cut of Rick Jamison's latest all-original project The Magic Hour (check out these reviews) which features some great musicians including Megan Lynch, Rob Ickes, Dave Richardson and Cindy Browne. Rick is a talented song writer and terrific guitarist.

Crunch Time - Some pretty fancy pickin' going on.

Time For Goodbye - Erik sang this duet with Megan Lynch, a 6-time national champion fiddler.

In From The Cold - Erik sings lead on this one and gets to do some mando pickin' too.

Due West (self titled)

"What happens when you combine equal parts of 1950s bluesy Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs at their early sixties peak, and the sparkle of the Bakersfield sound — with a dash of great new original bluegrass songs, soulful singing, instrumental chops, crisp arrangements and an immovable groove — laid down by five of California's brightest lights?

You have the future of bluegrass music for this here west coast. A great new group has just formed with some of my favorite musicians. Check out DUE WEST."

— Mike Marshall

Crown Junction Breakdown - Robert really tears up this traditional instrumental!

Rose Colored Glasses (John Conlee/George Baber) - I always loved this song from the first time I heard John Conlee sing it. I did get some of the lyrics wrong though.

Since I Met You (Erik Thomas/Suzanne Reynolds) - One of the first songs I ever wrote, I collaborated with Suzanne who wrote the lyrics.

Borkum's Riff (Bobby Clark) - Cute little instrumental written by the amazing Bobby Clarke who has won both the National and World Mandolin Championships.

Old Gnarly Oak (Chad Manning)

Erik recorded two songs with Chad Manning on his latest CD project Old Gnarly Oak which also features David Grisman, Rob Ickes, Bill Evans, Scott Nygaard, Ivan Rosenberg and Cindy Browne.

Roanoke - At the beginning of the sample, Erik plays harmony to David's lead, and following the banjo solo, David and Erik split the solo. Can you guess who is playing which half of the mandolin solo?

Mouse's Lullaby - Erik plays harmony mandolin to both Chad's and David's solos on this very beautiful instrumental that Chad composed.

Gloria's Waltz

Revenuer's Gun - Erik sings tenor and plays mandolin on this Jim's original barn-burner duet. Due West backs him up so listen for some awesome banjo pickin' by Bill Evans!

Your Tone of the Blues - Erik sings tenor and plays mandolin on this one too. It's another Jim Nunally original recorded with Due West.

Arms Full of Empty - Erik sings tenor and plays mandolin on this fun (but sad) Buck Owens song that Jim also recorded with Due West.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 16 2009

Erik Thomas and Heaven's Key
The 3rd Annual New Day Bluegrass and Gospel Concert

Wow, what a fun weekend we had! Dick, Steve, Charlie, and Charlie's wife Helen stayed at our house while LeRoy and his wife Jan stayed in their coach. Wonderful friends, good food, lots of laughs, great music and awesome audiences made for a weekend to remember.

Check out some concert picks here.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 19 2009

Software development background

Erik has been working for more than 4 years with Intuit, Inc., the leading maker of personal and small business accounting software, including Quicken, QuickBooks, Turbo Tax and a lot more! He is currently working with a team that is designing and creating add-on web applications that leverage QuickBooks data to provide innovative ways to grow your small business.

Two applications Erik has had a key role in creating are Customer Manager Online, and Email Marketing Services.

Erik's current technical skills include proficiency in Adobe Flex, Java, C++, C#, the Windows Presentation Foundation, XML, HTML, and JavaScript.

Erik's background in software engineering begins in 1977 when he took a summer course in BASIC programming on a mainframe computer at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Erik and the class lab instructor collaborated to create what was perhaps the very first Star Wars computer game in the world. The first of the Star Wars movies was released just a month or two before the course began. They modeled the game after the [then] very popular "Star Trek" computer game which was written in BASIC and run on timeshare mainframes. They used 100 Baud teletype machines (remember those in old science fiction movies and Telegram offices in the 60s?) to interface with the game. It was surprisingly fun to play despite such a crude display: just keyboard characters that printed out on the teletype to look vaguely like tie fighters, the death star, the trench, and laser cannon shots.

Shortly after this experience Erik enlisted in the U.S. Army and served 3 years on active duty, spending 2 of those as a computer operator working on the Department of Defense manpower management system. By this time he knew he wanted to make a career in the computer sciences.

At the end of his Army stint, Erik had learned one extremely valuable lesson, and that was the importance of a college degree in our society today if you ever wanted to have some say in what you did for a living. So he came home and enrolled at the University of Nevada at Reno— which had a top-notch business department and a new Computer Information Systems curriculum—and earned a Bachelor of Science degree with Distinction (top 10% of class; 3.82 GPA).

Of course, Erik kept his music career going throughout college, earning most of his spending money by performing.

During the summer following graduation, while looking for an intro level programming job, Erik was romanced by Electronic Data Systems (EDS)—headed by Ross Perot at the time—and because they sought him out and offered a higher salary than other prospects, Erik accepted that job and launched what has now become a 24 year career in application development (well, if you count his first programming contract while a sophomore at UNR, he's been at this game for 26 years now) on platforms ranging from mainframes, mini computers, Unix workstations, and PCs, in languages ranging from Cobol and dBase II and III, to Clipper, FoxPro, C, AWK, C++, Java, C# (.NET), and most recently, Adobe Flex.

Erik has worked for a number of different companies, including Electronic Data Systems (EDS), System Integrators, Inc., Applied Materials, Bertelsmann Industry Services, Scientific Software, Inc., TRAKWare, Inc., Kaiser Permanente, EMC|Documentum, Inc., and most recently, Intuit, Inc.

And of course, Erik never stopped developing his music as a member of various bands, a hobby that has helped him stay sane throughout the years!

PRtrak, a short story

One of the more interesting aspects of Erik's career in software development was when he formed TRAKware, Inc. with his PR Professional sister Angie Jeffrey and her PR Professional husband Mitch Jeffrey, and created an application for measuring Public Relations media coverage. Erik quit his job and worked for nearly 18 months to produce PRtrak by himself, an application that was being used by more than 120 companies by the time the three of them sold the company about 5 years later.

PRtrak, which is currently owned by VMS, Inc. and still going strong today—years later—is one of the leading publicity measurement tools used by the PR industry today! This is a tremendous testimony to the hard work Angie Jeffrey did to single-handedly pioneer add-value equivalency as a respected methodology in an industry that was very unfriendly to the concept. Angie currently works at VMS, continuing to evangelize add-value equivalency to the PR industry as it slowly embraces this means of measuring the value of publicity.

Erik created PRtrak using C++ with the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) and Objective Grid libraries. PRtrak was fully multi-user, supporting both peer-to-peer and client-server topologies with up to 25 simultaneous users. Erik also used MFC internet classes to access a server across the internet that calculated ad value equivalency from a huge database containing all of Nielsen's survey data (TV), Arbitron's survey data (Radio), and ad cost data for nearly all the newspapers and magazines throughout the U.S.

Angie was able to broker exclusive agreements for this data—an unheard of accomplishment for a 3-person company—from Nielsen, Arbitron, SRDS, etc., and Erik wrote programs that read 9-track magnetic tape (yeah, like you see in Time Tunnel and other ancient science fiction programs), and coerced the data into tables for calculating the value of a given PR news story (whether it appeared on TV, Radio, Newspaper, or Magazine) in terms of what it would have cost in advertising based on placement, duration (TV and Radio), or column inches (Newspaper and Magazine). It also provided the means to use several qualitative measurements in the calculations.

Erik also wrote the PRtrak user guide and was the entire technical support department, handling all support calls by himself. He supported approximately 200 users across 120 companies by the time the company was sold. This was quite a testament to the quality of his software since the support call load averaged 1 support incident per day, and the most frequent root cause was company firewall settings that prevented internet access to the data server.

Prologue

Sadly, Erik's code is no longer in use. The acquiring company jumped on the web bandwagon and rewrote it as a web application. But Erik took some pleasure in the knowledge that it took them longer to copy his desktop application than it took Erik to design and implement it from scratch, and they had a much larger team and greater investment capital.

If you are a PR professional, PRtrak is still the market leader for affordably helping PR professionals like you determine the value of your work. If this is you, check out the current version of PRtrak and give Erik's sister a call:

The Leader in Integrated Media Intelligence Solutions

Angela Jeffrey APR Vice President Editorial Research Member, IPR Commission on PR Measurement & Evaluation 1500 Broadway, 6th Floor New York, NY 10036 ajeffrey@vmsinfo.com (212) 329-5257 (212) 329-5292 (fax) www.vmsinfo.com