Meet Walter Ino

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Walter Ino. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Walter below.

Walter , looking forward to learning from your journey. You’ve got an amazing story and before we dive into that, let’s start with an important building block. Where do you get your work ethic from?
Well I can’t say that I was always a hard worker. When I was a kid, in grade school, I was interested in so many different things. Then when I started learning how to play the piano and the then the saxophone, there were recitals and school concerts. That’s when I started realizing that I didn’t want to be the kid that didn’t know the songs or the parts. So I practiced for hours and hours until I got my parts right. That being said, I was mostly an average student when it came to a majority of my school work. I guess I worked hard at what I was really interested in, but not so much with the other things. Yeah, there were times I knew that I had to buckle down and pull my grades back up, so I did the work, but that’s because I had to. But when it came to things that I became passionate about, it never felt like work. When I finally got a guitar when I was 14 years old, and that became my life. I “worked” on getting better every day.

So to answer the question, where did I get my work ethic from? I guess it was from the desire to accomplish things. I never went to college. I’m mostly self taught when it comes to what I do. After I graduated from high school in Pittsburgh, I joined a few bands there. One in particular had set a goal to build a local following and get signed to a record label. So that’s what we did. We met every day, whether it was writing or rehearsing. Or we got together to come up with a game plan for the week or month, or year. We built a street team to help promote our band, or our upcoming shows. This was in the 90’s, before internet promotion, before social media. So I would make flyers, and mailers to send to people’s actual mailboxes. I made an address labeling database to send thousands of mailers out every month or every other month. So when we started seeing results, it motivated us even more to keep the train running and cross things off the checklists to get to our goals. It was truly pounding the pavement. And that hard work paid off eventually.

When I moved to California in 2011, I knew I wanted to try to find some work. I didn’t really know too many people out here, so I forced myself to socialize and network. Luckily the few people I knew really helped me meet new people who were doing things that I wanted to do. So I took on all of the work that I could, just to get out there and meet new people. There were a bunch of times when I wasn’t sure if I could even pull off sharing the stage with some of these amazing musicians, who I looked up to, or have been a fan of for many years, but I forced myself to not be intimidated by them and kept that voice in my head, telling myself that I belong here. I’ve worked hard to get here.

I still have a bunch of goals that I would love to accomplish, so I continue to work as hard as I can to try to achieve those. We’ll see!!

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
My name is Walter Ino. I grew up in Pittsburgh, PA and moved to California in 2011. Music and performing has been my main interest since I was a little kid. I started playing piano when I was 6 years old, saxophone when I was 8, then guitar when I was 14. My first professional performance was when I was around 8 years old, getting hired to be in the “King and I” with Yul Brynner himself a few years before he died. Being on that stage and learning to sing all of the music consumed me and my family during that time. I knew I had the bug after doing that.

In high school, I played bass guitar in a few bands that would do shows at the local clubs and colleges. That’s when I really learned how to perform with other people. And that’s also when I really knew that I wanted to be a full time musician eventually. So I played at churches, weddings, funerals, and got hired to be part of the entertainment at the local amusement park… all while I was home every night, writing songs or learning new songs on guitar. I spent hours and hours making demos on a four track cassette recorder. I wanted to write, produce and perform my music on stage. I wanted to do anything to be creative.

All of that lead me to where I am now. I moved to California to find out if I can really make a career out of this. And soon after I got here, I knew I could. Luckily, I met some great people who introduced me to other people that would help me get hired to play in a few good touring acts. Joining a grammy award winning band that had a bunch of hits in the 80’s really helped. I quickly got a little reputation as being a guy that can play guitar, keyboards or bass that can also sing and play a few other instruments as well. And then when I set up my first recording studio out here, I got a few jobs where I would produce songwriters and play all of the instruments on their recordings. I love producing other artists. I love being the musical director for other projects as well.

A few years ago, I was asked to play keyboards in a show called “A Night of Symphony Rock” where we would be part of the backing band to some well known singers, but playing their songs along with a full symphony. That was a blast. Eventually, the producer of that show asked if I wanted to make orchestrations for other songs for future shows. So I did! I’ve never done it before, but I forced myself to give it a try and it turned out great. So then, orchestrating one or two songs for a full symphony turned into him trusting me to do a whole show last year, which was a full symphonic Led Zeppelin show. And now, I’m currently scoring two new shows. One of which is a Boy Band symphony show, featuring members of N’Sync, 98 Degrees and O-Town. The first performance of that show will be March 29th of this year with the Grand Rapids Symphony in Grand Rapids, MI.

Not only do I play for these shows (mostly guitar now), but I’m also Musical Director, which is really cool because I get to use my network of amazing musician friends to put bands together. The shows I do are a Fleetwood Mac show, an 80’s themed show, the Symphonic Rock show and now the new Boy Band show. It’s really fun to play these different shows with orchestras from all over the country and also Canada. I never thought that I would be the guy meeting with very schooled conductors. But I love doing that.

Along with doing those shows, I’m still currently touring with other bands. I play keyboards for Asia (featuring John Payne) and a show called the 80’s Rock Tour featuring singers like Lou Gramm (formerly of Foreigner) , Steve Augeri (formerly of Journey), Jason Scheff (formerly of Chicago), Alex Ligertwood (formerly of Santana) and many others. I’ll play keys, guitar and saxophone for some of those artists. I also play keys and guitar for the legendary band The Babys and also for Tommy Decarlo, the current singer of Boston.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
It’s pretty simple really.

1.) “Do your homework” – Don’t show up to a gig/job without doing the work. I go as far as doing as much research as I can about an artist that I’m going to work with. Whether it’s watching hours of Youtube videos of them or trying to find out what they are like personally.

2.) “Know your limitations” – Although I like to try to see if I can do certain jobs, I learned when I should let someone more experienced, or more specialized in something, take those jobs. There isn’t anything wrong with saying no to something that you know you can’t do. Even if I feel qualified, there may be times when I’m spread too thin with all of the other work I may have, so I know that I have to turn a job down, or even better, recommend someone else for it.

3.) “Don’t be an asshole” – this one is pretty self explanatory. As a musician, I’ve encountered too many egos. I’ve seen too many friends and colleagues lose a job because of their attitude. I know that I don’t want to hire or work with anyone with that kind of reputation.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?
I always look forward to working with new people. I like trying things I haven’t done before musically. So sometimes, when I’m not even looking for something new to work on, it just so happens something may be brewing without you even knowing. For example, I’ve recently been hired to help orchestrate and produce a rock type musical that some friends and colleagues have been working on. They’ve been happy with my orchestra arrangements so they then decided it was time to record the full orchestra in a studio at one time. Little did I know that they, and the concert master, insisted that I need to be the conductor for the session… something I’ve never done. I’m so glad that I got the courage to try it and actually loved it. (And btw – conductor batons are like $12.99 on amazon 😛 )

To answer the question, if anyone needs a Filipino guitar, bass, keyboard, sax, harmonica, mandolin, singer, songwriter who produces, engineers, mixes, masters, orchestrates, scores, composes and now conducts, feel free to reach out to me on social media, or hopefully, I’ll finish my website (walterinomusic.com) in the next month or two, or even just straight email to me at [email protected]

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Timm Johnson Tatyana Ah Chu Ron Lyon Marty Rickard Tim Janssens Paul Hebert

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