Here’s my story

I can remember with pristine clarity that day in 1999. I was 10 years old and had spent the night at a neighborhood friend’s house. We were swimming in his above ground pool when my brother joined us. He was so excited to tell me that there was a surprise waiting for me at home. That surprise was a puppy. No, it was a guitar (though we did get the family dog around the same time). it was a blue T-style Yamaha Pacifica with a mother of pearl pick guard and cream trim. While I don’t have it anymore, I’ll keep the lessons I learned on that first guitar will be with me forever.

  My guitar journey continued through my adolescence, where I performed live in front of large audiences at the local rock clubs in town, at church and in the show choir at school. It’s kinda crazy thinking back that I was 15 or 16 when I started playing the clubs in Deep Ellum. Where were my parents!? At the show actually, my dad was on bass.

I played Lead guitar in a really cool band in college made up of my brother, myself, and 3 other friends. it was this cool rock meets soul thing, we had a killer album and we were drawing well at gigs. My plan in school was to study business so I could help manage the band by running the finances and marketing side of things for when we hit the big time and got famous.

We broke up

So I used my finance degree and got a job. A good job that I liked working with really great people. I may or may not have been doing rather well financially too (the money, of course, was all spent on gear). I was still playing and making a pretty decent income from music. I basically cashed in all my vacation days to play gigs and I found myself in this position sitting at my desk clicking around on the computer making sure all the accounting was squared away thinking “I could be practicing and getting better at guitar right now”. I realized, “I can do this if I’ll apply myself and treat it like a career”. I was at a fork in the road and had to ask myself, “in which direction do I want to grow? Do I go for my masters degree in accounting and continue down the corporate office job path or do I quit and pursue a career in music fully?”. So I quit and treated guitar like a full time job giving it 8 hours a day. It was the best decision I’ve ever made. It works, it’s not always clear how but when you bet on yourself it just works. When I began to focus my efforts on music I saw exponential growth.

I grew up in a culture of excellence. Whatever I do, I want make sure it’s done to the highest degree I am able. This motivates me to work hard and study my craft to be constantly improving. With over 20 years of experience playing the guitar, I’ve learned the delicate nuances of what makes the guitar really sing and how to draw the most out the instrument in a musical way that serves the song.