Buford JonesFifty years behind the console

★ About Buford

Behind the console

Buford Jones is a front-of-house engineer and live sound mixer whose career has spanned more than fifty years and taken him to the largest stages in rock and roll. Born in Louisiana and raised in Port Arthur, Texas, he earned a degree in electronics and was repairing stereos, amplifiers, and turntables in Dallas when he was hired on by Showco, one of the first companies in the modern touring sound business. On his very first day, the company handed him the keys to a truck and sent him across the country with Three Dog Night's entire sound system.

Over the decades that followed, Jones mixed front of house for Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Eric Clapton, Prince, ZZ Top, Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Stevie Wonder, George Harrison, the Kinks, Faith Hill, and a great many others. In the early 1970s he was mixing live concerts in stereo when almost nobody was, and he was among the first engineers to mix a tour in quadraphonic sound, which he did for David Bowie. He also mixed the sound for Eric Clapton's landmark MTV Unplugged.

After ten years with Showco, Jones became an independent engineer, working directly for the artists themselves. In the later years of his career he turned to teaching, sharing what he had learned with a new generation of audio engineers at Belmont University in Nashville. He lives in the American South, where, by his own cheerful account, he is never happier than when he is fixing something with his own two hands.

• Parnelli Audio Innovator Award2024
• TEC Award, Sound Reinforcement Engineer1989
• Top Dog Front of House Engineer2004
• NAMM Oral History Program2019
• Belmont UniversityAdvanced Live Sound Mixing
• Meyer SoundGlobal education team