OCEAN BEACH — Having one career in the entertainment business is hard enough. But having two — in unrelated fields — would seem rather unlikely. Yet that’s the case with guitarist Scott Wilson, who performs with his band The Contradictions at Winston’s on Thursday, Jan. 6. The full-time musician is also an Emmy Award-winning video editor who has worked behind the scenes on such television programs as “American Idol,” “Behind the Music” and “America’s Got Talent.” The Emmy came in 2002 for his work on the documentary/concert film “Sting … All This Time.” Wilson and his current electric rock band rose from the ashes of his previous acoustic-based group The Complications. The name change came about through a happy accident. “We were shooting a video for a song called ‘Divided,’” Wilson said. “And a guy came up who had seen us before and asked us if our name was Scott Wilson and The Contradictions. I liked that so much better than The Complications that, when I formed the electric version, the name stuck.” The band now includes Wilson (vocals, guitar), Don DeOliveira (lead guitar), Jay Lauterwasser (bass) and Brent Corsetto (drums). Wilson arrived in San Diego as a 10-year-old, relocating with his recently divorced mother to the city she grew up in. “We got in a car and headed across the country and ended up in an apartment near 52nd Street and University,” Wilson said. After graduating high school, he moved to Los Angeles to attend the University of California, Los Angeles, majoring in motion picture/TV, a well as studying music. It was on his post-school return to San Diego that he said he got heavily involved in music. “I started going to Wendy’s Open Mike at Java Joe’s in Ocean Beach and met Carlos Olmeda and Gregory Page, who were playing there at the time,” Wilson said. “This was the Java Joe’s at Newport at Bacon, where the Starbucks now is. It used to be a church.” Wilson’s tune “Coffeehouse 101,” celebrated in a video featuring dozens of local performers singing a line from the song, was written for that Open Mike night “because one thing I noticed about San Diego songwriters is that the writing was deeper. So I dug a little deeper for chord changes and topic.” Recently, Wilson has performed primarily solo, although he has played in bands previously. “The first real project that I worked on was The Gandhi Method with Sven-Erik Seaholm and Chuck Schiele, and it took off pretty fast,” Wilson said. Unfortunately, Wilson said, that didn’t last. “The bottom line is that I was a rock guy in a folk band,” Wilson said. “I left the band and was replaced by Cathryn Beeks, who I met at Ocean Beach when she was passing out flyers at the Ocean Beach Street Fair.” Ironically, Wilson would soon play bass for a short spell in Beeks’ own band. Wilson considers The Contradictions, taking in electric and occasional acoustic music, to be the best of both worlds. “I have had situations in the past where the electric players didn’t want to play acoustic and the acoustic players didn’t like all the racket,” Wilson said. “So I’m really glad that now we can have both. It puts off the going-deaf process a little longer.” He said anyone who has seen him in acoustic mode will find his sets with The Contradictions to be a bit different. “The sound is very loud rock,” he said. “It’s a four-piece. Some of the music is more mellow, but we gravitate to the large and bombastic tunes. Right now, we’re trying to pull off a song called “She Don’t Even Know,” which has a slight Jellyfish vibe and a whole bunch of overlapping harmonies. It’s slightly eccentric music that incorporates rock, soul, blues and pop.” While his television work often takes him away from town for weeks at a time, Wilson said he is hoping to change that soon to concentrate more effort on his music locally. “I am looking for a way to do what I do in San Diego since I’ve become incredibly bored with reality shows and the editing techniques of that genre,” Wilson said. “A lot of it is a glorified slide show with terrible flag edits and I consider it really bad technique. I prefer classical film technique as far as editing is concerned, and I don’t want to work on something that someone will be able to tell was cut in 2010.” Scott Wilson & The Contradictions appear at 7 p.m. at Winston’s Beach Club, located at 1921 Bacon St. on Thursday, Jan. 6. The event is free for those 21 and up.