Josh Barron is a composer, arranger, and pianist. He is a member of Materia Collective and founding member of The Travelers VGM.

Josh Barron was born on October 14, 1986 in Monticello, Indiana. Ever since he was young he had an affinity for music. In fact, at the age of five he used to sing church hymns to family members on the porch of his grandma’s house. In his later years as an adolescent, Josh began to play the trumpet in the fifth grade band. With practice and hard work, he managed to become first chair trumpet. He entered in his state Solo and Ensemble competition for five years in a row. Each time he achieved first division ratings, except his final year in which he received a second.

At 10 years old, Josh taught himself to play piano. He started with a Casio keyboard and two years later he got a more professional one for Christmas. This marked the beginning of his arranging career, when Josh began playing Final Fantasy VII. The melodies of Nobuo Uematsu inspired him to start arranging Final Fantasy tunes. Thus, a project was started to honor the composer.

Josh’s first arranging project was an orchestral collection of Final Fantasy VII called Symphony of the Lifestream. The project, when started, went well, but as the months went by it slowly started to fall apart. Most of the arrangers, besides a select few, didn’t write anything. Therefore, the project was discontinued. But Josh wasn’t finished after such a defeat.

After the failure of Symphony of the Lifestream, Josh started another project. This, unlike his previous project was not as ambitious. This featured piano arrangements from Final Fantasy VII. The project was arranged by Josh, later joined by Joel London, and performed by Marc Fossey (a.k.a. GigaShadow). The project became popular, but a most unfortunate turn of events kept the project from completion. About a year after the project’s beginning, Square-Enix announced that they were to produce a piano collection for Final Fantasy VII. This gave Josh no choice but to discontinue the project.

With the hopes of coming up with a suitable project, Josh became inspired by Yoko Shimomura’s music in Kingdom Hearts. Knowing full well that piano arrangements of such music did not exist, he decided to start a project to fix that problem. His first arrangement, “This Is Halloween”, was released in early 2004. This sparked the interest needed for the project. Since then, Barron has completed six piano arrangements for the project.

Things got better, however, when Josh was invited by his friend, Luke Nickel, to join OneUp Studios in their piano-based album Xenogears Light An Arrange Album. Josh arranged one track for piano solo, which later became the third track on the album, but was the first track to feature only the piano. - Kingdom Hearts NET Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.