Keith Barnhart

Keith Lee Barnhart (born October 6, 1962) is an American composer, keyboardist, and audio engineer commonly referred to as "Plex". Although most of his credits are as a session musician on nearly 100 major label albums, most of his career earnings came from composing for: TV & Radio, library music, and popular song.

Barnhart was born and raised in Huntington, West Virginia to adoptive parents. He has one son, Byron (born 1996) from a previous marriage. His parents put a piano in his bedroom at age 5 and by age 7 he was performing Beethoven by ear. By age 8 he was performing in local talent contests. In elementary school, he was part-time accompanist and tuned the guitars and auto-harps for the class. The music teacher, Caroline Gillespie (married to big-band conductor Mel Gillespie) fostered Barnhart's abilities and got him an audition, at the age of 10, to study with Marshall University music professor Paul Jennings who made an exception in taking Barnhart on as a student. For five years Barnhart studied theory, improvisation, electronic music and was exposed to a wide variety of progressive music.

At age 16 Barnhart dropped out of high school to tour with a funk-band, "110 Degrees In The Shade, returning to graduate with his class. He was immediately to be the musical director of a Neil Diamond-Revue in Arlington, TX and at 17 went to Nashville to tour with an Elvis impersonator. 1n 1980 he was accepted to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, to study piano and electronic music. He performed lead in the last theatrical play performed there (Tom Stoppard’s Dirty Linens) and quickly rose in ranks within the school. Plex attended 12 semesters, expanding his studies in different fields, was offered a department chair upon his graduation and returned years later for guest lectures. Among his many performances in the Berklee Performance Center was most noticeably the first-ever ALL electronic concert given in 1983, where his talents were discovered by fellow student Joe Mardin, who brought Barnhart to Manhattan to meet his father, legendary producer and Atlantic Records VP [Arif Mardin], for the purpose of working on a demo for Chaka Khan's upcoming album I Feel For You. The demo tracks were strong enough on their own to be accepted onto the final album mix. In 1985 he traveled to Montréal, Quebec to produce, program, and arrange the debut album for Marie Denise Pelletier, an artist for he also composed. Immediately after this project Barnhart moved to Manhattan where is career quickly took flight. He would remain there for 15 years.

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