Perched in an office chair amid a bank of computer screens, speakers and mixing boards, UW senior Jack Walsh seems absolutely comfortable. As his eyes dart across the screens, his movements are intuitive. He’s in his element. Better known in the music community as a producer by the name of Jack The Ripper — a high-school baseball nickname that stuck — he made a huge leap into Seattle’s exploding hip-hop world seem like a much easier feat than it actually is — especially considering he’s only been active in the scene since he came to college.

Though Walsh has only been producing for less than two years, the Bainbridge-via-Berkeley native made a big impact in a short time. He’s produced songs for some of the finest in Seattle’s underground scene: Brainstorm, Spaceman, Grynch, Khingz and Sol are on the short list.

It started out quietly enough. Armed with crates of vinyl, a hard drive of archived music and an assortment of virtual instrument packs, Walsh put together a collection of beats and burned them on to CDs — “beat tapes” — and began handing them out at local concerts to seek out artists who vibed with what he created. When those discs started falling into the right hands, his career exploded.

“The song ‘Illness’ with Brainstorm and Spaceman and the video we did really blew me up,” he said. “I did a few beat battles and started meeting the right people, and it all just took off. I had been giving my work away for free, but lately people have been approaching me — and paying.”

Though he’s been listening to hip-hop for as long as he can remember, his musical interests first took root in jam bands like Phish, The Grateful Dead and String Cheese Incident, then morphed into a fascination with reggae. Both of those eras in his musical development left lasting marks. His Godin Montreal guitar — and 15 years of experience with it — is the evidence of phase one. The album he helped to produce with fellow UW student Jack Newman and his Unite-One Productions, Evergreen Organics, is proof of the other.

His room in the house on 19th Avenue Northeast he rents with friends is fantastic evidence of Walsh as an artist. With red, yellow and green Rastafarian afghans hanging from the walls, the room is dominated by his workstation: two immense speakers straddling his computer and bordered by a MIDI keyboard.

His upcoming project, an as-of-yet unnamed full-length album due out by December, is the next step in the student-musician’s journey. Combining all his past experience and the connections he’s made within Seattle’s scene, Walsh plans to prove his ability to produce in different styles — an idea that is sure to yield interesting results, though denying the project a unifying theme.

He plans to press 200 copies of the record and sell them for $10 each — not to make money, but to recoup his nearly $3,000 investment. That alone makes it evident that Walsh’s approach to music is more about passion than profit.

“The music business is tough, and it’s hard to make money. But if you do what you love, the pieces will fall into place,” he said. “I know I’m probably going to be working another job. But I’m always going to be making music, no matter what. I’m always going to have this.”

Reach reporter Nick Feldman at weekender@dailyuw.com.