Charlie Rosen

Charlie Rosen (born July 20, 1990) is an American musician, composer, arranger, orchestrator, musical director, and music producer. He is best known for his work on Broadway, where he has worked on Be More Chill, Prince of Broadway, and American Psycho most recently. He also is the band leader of The 8-Bit Big Band, a video game music cover jazz orchestra, whose videos have over 3 million views on YouTube.

Rosen was born in Los Angeles, California as the son of a bassoonist and organist. He was taught piano by his mother starting from the age of three. At the age of fifteen, he joined the onstage band for the Los Angeles production of 13. He moved to New York at the age of seventeen to make his Broadway debut in 13, where he was a swing.

He later attended Berklee College of Music for four semesters, taking courses he felt would improve his professional development.

Rosen began his professional career as a swing musician for the bass, guitar, and percussion tracks of 13.

Preceding his work on The 8-Bit Big Band, starting from 2012, he was the bandleader of Charlie Rosen's Broadway Big Band, where he arranged classic musical theater numbers into music able to be performed by a jazz orchestra and would feature Broadway performers as the vocalists.

As of April 2019, he primarily features as a guitarist in the Broadway musical Be More Chill.

Instruments

Rosen can play about 70 musical instruments including the "flugelbone", melodica, Fender Rhodes and theremin. Of these he has described the flugelbone as his "orchestrating secret weapon" due to its ability to utilize variety of timbres. However, he considers himself primarily a bassist but uses the range of instruments in his repertoire to improve the quality of the music he is able to create.

Theater

Television