Wilton was born in San Francisco, California, but his family moved to Seattle, Washington when he was 6 years old. His father took him to concerts from an early age and introduced him to many musical styles, especially jazz, including John McLaughlin, Larry Coryell and Al Di Meola, but also to rock music like Led Zeppelin, The Allman Brothers Band, and Eric Clapton. At age 8, he started practicing on the bass guitar, learning songs by bands from his father\'s collections, such as The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. At age 13, he also got a nylon string acoustic from his aunt and accidentally blew his father\'s speaker. He convinced his father to give him the Fender Bassman and speaker cabinet Wilton inherited from an uncle who died in a motorcycle accident.[citation needed]\n', '

While attending junior high school and Interlake High School, Wilton began to explore the guitar world further by listening to hard rock and heavy metal music such as Judas Priest, UFO, Iron Maiden, Van Halen, and Deep Purple, and he began practicing seriously, for 2 hours per day. He changed his mind about playing bass guitar, and chose to play guitar instead. At age 16, his guitar teacher said, that Wilton "whipped on the guitar", which got him the nickname "Whip". He bought a Les Paul copy and a fuzzbox, and joined some garage bands with his school-mates, such as Joker, which was formed in 1978. In 1979, new sophomore Chris DeGarmo was briefly part of this band. By the end of the 1979–1980 school year, they disbanded.\n', '

After high school, Wilton attended the Cornish Institute of Allied Arts in Seattle (now known as Cornish College of the Arts), where he studied among others music theory, jazz improvisation, gamelan music and classical music (piano and guitar). This was a big step in his life as he began to appreciate more ethnic and improvisational music, which later gave him influences as a progressive rock musician. After studying for 1–5 years, he ran out of money, but by this time, he had met bass guitarist Eddie Jackson and drummer Scott Rockenfield. In 1980, Wilton and Rockenfield had founded a band called Cross+Fire, which DeGarmo and Jackson joined shortly thereafter. The quartet began to play at parties, by which time they called themselves The Mob. In late summer of 1982, Geoff Tate was involved as vocalist to record a four-song demo. The band changed its name to Queensrÿche, and the demo was released in 1983 as the eponymous EP Queensrÿche.\n', '

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