Todd Horton was born on November 15, 1969 and raised in Ithaca, NY. He began playing the trumpet at age 4 after hearing his father play around the house (he’d been a trumpet player in the U.S. Navy dance band in the 1960’s). At the same time, Todd’s mother was a jazz lover who played records by Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. His lifelong love of music began there.

By the time he was in middle school all he did was play the trumpet and listen to music. Throughout high school he played in concert band, jazz band, marching band, orchestra and sang in the choir, madrigals and vocal jazz ensemble. At age 15 he formed his first jazz group, called Last Exit, who won the NY State jazz combo competition in 1985. He also played with the NY State All-Star big band as well as the All-Eastern Jazz Band. He earned two national awards in high school, the Louis Armstrong Jazz Award and the John Philip Sousa Award.

Todd attended Berklee College of Music for three semesters on a full scholarship, Ithaca College of Music for one year on full scholarship and eventually The New School Jazz Studies program in New York City in 1990. It was there that he met, played and studied with musicians who would help steer the course of his career.

While living in New York City for fourteen years, Todd’s professional career as a trumpet/flugelhorn player and composer flourished. He performed with countless artists and bands in multiple genres (Spin Doctors, Buddy Miles, Aaron Neville, Ani Difranco, Richard Bona…) and recorded as a sideman in some of the more famous recording studios in New York (Electric Ladyland, Avatar, Sear Sound, Looking Glass…), all while maintaining a busy performance schedule with his own popular jazz fusion group D BOP.

Todd’s love for audio and music production began in the mid 1990s while spending time at Looking Glass Studio (owned by famed composer Philip Glass). He ended up producing several albums there, met a lot of brilliant people and soaked up as much as he could from the in-house engineers. It was a pivotal time in his career, which led him to build his first, guerilla-style home studio in Long Island City, Queens at a time when that was still a new thing. After several years of recording and producing other artists, Todd started his own boutique record label called Soulsearch Music, which included the now famed early jazz demos by Norah Jones.

After moving to Philadelphia in 2003, Todd continued to perform, record and produce music. He married in 2007 and had two daughters. With his new focus on family, as well as a series of major health crises, the next ten years saw less of him as a live performer and more of him in his project studio, composing, recording and producing. It was then that his focus shifted to designing and building microphone stands.

In 2012, in his somewhat cramped basement studio, Todd came up with the idea of designing a modular microphone stand, or Mic Tree, as he called it. With limited space for tracking drums, he set out to eliminate as many microphone stands as he could by creating one stand that could hold multiple arms. He taught himself how to use 3D design software, designed and had manufactured several crucial parts, experimented with different materials (including PVC) and eventually discovered lightweight, structural aluminum profiles.

Todd spent the better part of the next ten years, on and off, designing and developing his stand ideas and building prototypes. In the process, he endeavored to try and eliminate as many of the most common, annoying issues with regular microphone stands as he could. This meant designing stands that were better balanced than tripod stands, wouldn’t tip over under the weight of multiple microphones, with arms that wouldn’t droop after placement, were light enough to move around easily and that wouldn’t easily break and need to be replaced. In 2021, satisfied that he had accomplished those challenges, he began building custom stands for other people out of his garage workshop, mostly for engineer and musician friends who wanted a space saving solution for multi-mic’ing drums or pianos. It wasn’t long before the word got out and Base 4 Stands became a legitimate business.