Manu Ignacio

I'm a bassist, composer, and music producer with a classical and jazz foundation built across two major European conservatories. I studied at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional (CRR) de Paris, completing my training there in 2017, and went on to earn my Diplôme Supérieur from the École Normale de Musique de Paris in 2021. This combination of classical composition training and jazz performance practice shapes how I approach both playing and teaching — I think about bass not just as a rhythm instrument, but as the harmonic backbone of a piece.

Professionally, I've spent years as a touring bassist aboard international cruise ships, performing nightly across a wide range of genres and styles — an experience that sharpened my sight-reading, stylistic versatility, and ability to adapt quickly to new material and bandmates. Alongside that, I've stayed active in local scenes wherever I've lived: performing at Jamboree in Barcelona, one of the city's best-known jazz venues, and more recently gigging around Buenos Aires and greater Buenos Aires, including a recent performance at Borges 1975 and a folk collaboration in La Plata. This mix of touring discipline and local scene involvement means I bring both technical rigor and real bandstand experience to my teaching.

On the teaching side, I've worked privately for more that 15 years with advancing jazz students, helping them expand their harmonic and improvisational vocabulary on bass. I also produce music using Ableton Live, working across composition, arrangement, and sound design, which lets me teach bass and production as connected disciplines rather than separate skills.

My teaching centers on giving students a clear sense of direction, not just isolated tips. In our first lesson, I like to lay out a loose roadmap of where we're headed over the next few months, so progress feels concrete and intentional rather than vague. From there, I adapt closely to each student's actual goals — whether that's developing groove and time feel, expanding jazz vocabulary and harmonic understanding, or applying music theory directly on the neck.

Because my own background spans classical composition, jazz performance, and Ableton production, I teach bass and music production as genuinely connected skills. For bass students, this often means building technique and vocabulary while also understanding the harmonic role the bass plays in a piece — inversions, voice leading, and how a bassline shapes the music around it, not just what notes to play. For production students, I bring the same structured approach to Ableton workflow, arrangement, and sound design, always grounding technical tools in the musical decisions they're meant to serve.

Above all, I aim to meet students where they are and give them a clear, achievable sense of what mastery looks like at each stage, so that every lesson builds visibly toward something larger.