From Berklee to Hermitcraft: The Story of Jono Smithers
There's a pickguard sitting on a bass trap in Jono Smithers' LA studio. It's scratched. It's got cigarette burns on it. It belonged to Frank Zappa.
Specifically, it's from the guitar Zappa played on Freak Out, his debut album recorded in 1966. Jono found it on eBay, from an estate auction, placed a bid, and won. He still seems a little amazed about it.
It's a strange thing to open with, maybe. But it tells you something about Jono worth knowing before anything else: this is a person who pays attention to story. To the idea that objects and art carry something beyond their surface.
That instinct is behind pretty much everything he does.
Cape Town to Berklee
Jono Smithers grew up in South Africa. His dad was in the music business in LA in the 60s and 70s. His mum is a professional violinist. Music was in the house early, and Jono picked up guitar at five. He learned by ear, his dad would put records on and Jono would play along.
He was, by his own admission, a little lazy about it for a while. "When you're spoiled with a good ear, you're lazy," he says. He ended up two years into a statistics degree before the pull of music got too strong to ignore. He started playing jazz at a studio in Cape Town and something clicked.
He decided to go after Berklee. Couldn't sight read. Couldn't do a lot of the things you'd expect an applicant to manage. Auditioned anyway. Walked out with both a songwriting scholarship and a guitar scholarship.
At Berklee he studied under people he considers genuine heroes. One of them was Mick Goodrick, a serious and respected teacher who would make students improvise on jazz standards using only two strings. If you played a wrong note, he'd pull out a pocket knife and tell you to pick a finger. He was making a point: limitation is a superpower. Jono still thinks about that.
He graduated in December 2019.
Landing in Hollywood With Nowhere to Play
Two weeks into COVID, Jono landed in Hollywood with a jazz guitar degree and no shows on the calendar.
Every venue closed. Live music stopped. The infrastructure he'd trained for disappeared, for roughly two years. So he did what made sense: he started writing Minecraft music.
His brother, known online as Rendog, is an active YouTuber and part of Hermitcraft, a long-running collaborative Minecraft SMP with a serious, dedicated following. Jono had already been writing music for Rendog's videos for years. Now, with nowhere to perform and a visa situation that needed sorting, it became his primary focus.
Not because Minecraft was some grand artistic ambition. More because it gave him a community at a time when the music world had gone quiet. A place to build. A reason to create content around the music rather than just release it into nothing.
It turned out to fit him better than expected.
Gamers for Giving
The Hermitcraft connection eventually led to the moment Jono talks about with the most feeling: Gamers for Giving 2025.
Gamers for Giving is a charity event that raises money for Gamers Outreach, an organisation that brings gaming equipment to children in hospitals. Jono was part of the 2025 event alongside other Hermitcraft creators.
They raised $1.8 million in 48 hours. The previous record was $1.7 million.
Through Jono's Twitch channel alone, 75,000 people came through over those two days. His portion of the total raised was around $1.3 million.
He doesn't talk about it like a career achievement. He talks about it like it changed something in how he thinks about what he does. "You don't really realise how powerful your ability is to share your gifts with people," he says. "It's so much bigger than you." He's clear that the community, the people watching, donating, showing up, are the ones who made it happen. He and the other creators were just the ones waving on screen.
Still. 48 hours. $1.8 million. For kids in hospitals.
It's hard not to feel that.
Why Music Struggles on Twitch
Here's something Jono is honest about: most of his audience found him through Minecraft, not music. And for a long time, that created a real tension on Twitch.
He streamed composition sessions for a while. Sat down, opened Cubase, worked on music in front of people. And the problem was that almost nobody came. Not because the music wasn't good, but because there was no reason for a Minecraft audience to sit and watch someone work in a DAW. It's a tough sell even for a dedicated music audience. For people who showed up because they like Hermitcraft, it's nearly impossible.
He thought hard about why. His conclusion was simple: there's no story. No stakes. No reason to care about the outcome beyond the finished piece, which might not even come in that session.
"A lot of music struggles on Twitch because there's no story," he says. "If you have an audience on Twitch, how do you get them actively engaged in what you're doing? How do you get them to have buy-in?"
He points to the difference between just going live and making a beat versus building something with a reason to watch. Audience polls. A timer. A challenge that might fail. The stream where Mumbo, one of the Hermitcraft creators, asked Jono to make a song using a beat machine built inside Minecraft itself. The stake was real: can he actually pull this off with an in-game instrument? People tuned in because they wanted to find out. Some wanted him to succeed. Some probably wanted to watch it fall apart. Either way, there's buy-in.
"Whether you succeed or not is the beauty of the sell at the end," he says. "They're gonna find out."
That's the thing he's trying to bottle. Not just a music stream. A show.
Story Beats Song
The Twitch thinking is part of something bigger Jono has been working out for a while: the idea that in 2026, story is what gets you in the room before the music even plays.
He's been building a viral format on Instagram and YouTube Shorts called Cheese Dreams, where Jono is haunted by cheese and searching for it across a running storyline. He made the first one in about three hours after a comment in his feed inspired it. Within a few weeks, around 5 million views across platforms, from a standing start on Shorts.
The point isn't the cheese. The point is the format. There's an intro, a build, a payoff, a reason to come back next time. It's structured like a show, not a post.
He talks about this a lot, the idea that story gets there before the song does. That people need a reason to care that goes beyond "this sounds good," because there's too much good music already. He brings up Sleep Token as a clear example: a band with lore behind them, puzzles in the song titles, a whole world to buy into. That world, he thinks, is as responsible for their rise as the music itself.
It's a philosophy that shapes everything. Even the Sock Gang is a version of it. It's a fan community that grew out of his Hermitcraft presence, named after a rule he put in place in a college band: everyone had to wear cool socks. No socks below the ankle. Commit to the bit. He quotes Zappa on this: if you stick a banana on a wall, it's just a banana on a wall until you put a frame around it. Now it's art. Art is about how you frame things.
He's building a weekly Twitch show on the same principle. He wants to bring in non-musician creators from the Hermitcraft world and beyond, with the audience voting on the genre, the instruments, and a secret musical twist. Then he and whoever's on have an hour or two to actually make something. The genres won't be easy. If a guest loves metal, pop goes on the list. If someone's never touched a synthesiser, that might be what they're working with.
It's a podcast where music is the challenge and the discomfort is the point. And unlike a standard composition stream, there's a reason to be there. There's something to find out.
The Tools
On the production side, Jono works in Cubase 13. He found the interface genuinely inspiring in a way that Ableton never quite was for him, and he's stayed there.
He's a consistent SSL user, the console emulations are a regular part of his chain. But the JST tool he keeps coming back to is Howard Benson Vocals. He first heard it in a session where someone hit a button, a vocalist stepped into the booth, and it sounded, in his words, "godly." He leaned over and asked what the chain was. Just Howard Benson Vocals.
That immediate quality matters to him for a specific reason. He talks about flow the way some people talk about technique, as the thing that separates a good session from a stalled one. If you're second-guessing your sound, you're out of the moment. If the tools get you there fast, you stay in. For someone who works with artists who sometimes find the studio genuinely intimidating, speed of confidence is not a small thing.
"If somebody comes in here and I stick this on, it's going to sound good immediately," he says.
It goes back to what Goodrick was teaching with the two-string exercise. The temptation is to own everything, keep every option open, never fully commit. Jono's preference is to know a small set of tools well enough that decisions come fast and he can get on with actually making the thing. There's a point where having every compressor under the sun stops helping.
The Zappa pickguard on the bass trap fits somewhere in all of this. He can't fully explain why it matters to him that it's there. But he talks about creating with that energy in the room, and you get the sense he means it literally.
What's Coming
Jono has new music on the way, his first proper release since his debut album Honeybee. He's also scoring a film for a Lionsgate project shooting in South Africa, due in the next couple of months. And he's pushing hard on content, building the short-form channels, developing the Twitch show, working toward an audience big enough that the bigger collaboration opportunities start to open up.
He's 29. He's got a Zappa pickguard on his bass trap. He makes viral cheese content and helped raise $1.8 million for sick kids through a Minecraft community.
There's a story here. He knows it. He's building it deliberately.
