Don Ross is a veteran guitarist and musician with a career spanning more than 35 years.
And his earlier work reveals an interesting approach to fingerstyle guitar playing that new listeners may find reminiscent of a genre that has been in the spotlight recently.
Math rock is a subgenre that emerged from the rock scene in the early 1990s. Consisting mostly of guitar, bass and drums. The sound it projects is complex, made of intricate arpeggios and an irregular playing style, mixed with intricate time signatures.
Instead of following the traditional 4/4 measure of western music, the genre leans more heavily on the 5/4 signature, creating a sound that is crisp, yet disorienting.
The known pioneer of this genre is Slint with their 1991 release Spiderland laying the groundwork for later groups in the early 2000s like American Football, TTNG and others who brought the sound to a wider audience.
But when we asked Don whether that genre had any place in his influences, the answer was surprising.
“There’s a tune of mine that I actually wrote when I was very young, like when I was in my early 20s,” Don said. “This tuning is now known as the math rock tuning — I’m afraid to claim that I invented it, but I wrote that piece in 1983.”
Don’s song “The First Ride” was written in the tuning of F-A-C-G-C-E. The exact same tuning used on records from years later like American Football’s self-titled LP1 and others.
Over the years, His process has evolved, but not entirely. Don still writes the way he always has, just with newer tools in his bag.
“When I was songwriting, it was mostly pretty intuitive,” he said. “When I ended up studying music, I found out that the intuitive things I was doing were heavily influenced by the tradition of songwriting from Western Europe — Bach, Beethoven, all those dudes.”
These days, Don said his writing has changed a lot — he does a lot more of it using keyboards and in front of a computer. He’s not always writing on the guitar.
That expanded toolkit was on full display in the making of Songs That Found Me. Don discovered a box of old tape reels from a 1981 Toronto recording session and used AI-powered software to separate the original stereo recording into its component parts. “The guitars, the keyboards, the bass — those are all from 1981, which is just ridiculous,” he said.
Don’s latest release steps further away from the fingerstyle playing that defined his early catalog, placing him instead into a soft, warm tone that evokes a calm atmosphere. It’s a shift Don traces back to his newfound creative freedom.
“Earlier in my career I was always signed to a label, and they didn’t want me to do too many covers,” he explained. “Now, since I don’t have a publishing deal lighting a fire under me to write 10 new songs, I find myself allowing myself to interpret other people’s music.”
Songs That Found Me serves as a deeply personal sketch of Don’s life.
“There’s songs that have been swimming around in my consciousness since I was a teenager, and everything in between,” he said.
“It was almost like a little biographical sketch as an album — songs that had a strong effect on me.”
Don will be performing in Canada at the Aurora Cultural Centre on May 23, 2026.
