My playing started when I was about 6. I played violin for a few months. I got pretty good at "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep", and regularly horrified family members with renditions at get-togethers. Actually, that was more my parents' revenge for having to sit through other relatives' boring ass home videos. Then I tried flute. It wouldn't make any noise. So at 10 my parents rented me an electric guitar for a few months. The rest is history.
I bought a 4 track at 16. As soon as I figured out how it worked, I recorded a great Primus-ripoff, "Shoes for Hector", with a friend. I continued recording, experimenting, and playing. Someday I will catalogue the hundreds of hours of tape in my mom's basement and scare the crap out of you like I did my neighbors back in the day. My high school "band" was called Blue Light Special. We were really bad but I've never quite heard anything like it since. An alternate name for the band was "Cap'n Slime & the Spoiled Sports". I think we played 3 shows.
In college, I played with some good bands. Thieves and First Kiss were highly original and fun projects that played out in Boston pretty often. The Fabulous Carusos was a recording project that ended up with 2 songs (clocking in at 31 minutes of music) mostly influenced by hash and snow days. The People Under the Stairs' 55 minute, one song, debut epic, "God Wants You To Be Happy", well, we're not going to talk about that one. Not here. Either way, it was living with some amazing musicians (Remy Delamora, Graham Richards, Tracy Sampedro, Fred Nahas) that jacked my playing to the next level and changed the way that I LISTENED. All this time, I was recording stuff here and there on the trusty Yamaha MT-4X, but got serious in about 2000 when I started getting into recording classes at Berklee College of Music. There I got to record Particle Zoo (now members of III Kings, really great hip-hop/island/soul outfit in the Northeast), Eric Wainaina (huge Kenyan dissident artist), Remy Delamora (now of Nimh), and more, all on "real" gear in nice studios. College days culminated in the recording of a full-length debut for Remy entitled "Pilot Episode". Done mostly in our attic with ProTools Digi 001 and some tracks done at Berklee, it was my first foray into hard-core production on a long-term project. We ended up with 12 songs that span the gamuts of rock, pop, eastern-influences, country, and more. One song, "Red Sky", was used prominently in an episode of The Real World on MTV, San Diego season. We kicked major ass on Garageband.com, getting #1's and Tracks of the Day and all that crap.
So I moved to LA in 2002 after graduation. I was here for about 12 days before I had a run-in with 5 muggers. THAT cluminated in a surgery, 3 screws in my left hand (did I mention I play guitar?), a move back to the East Coast and 3 months of physical therapy. After the hand healed, I recorded and mixed an EP for my one of my favorite bands, Clones Don't Have Bellybuttons, entitled "The Pride of Men". Another EP, done with a band called Sinapse (now called Moth Meets Machine), was completed in this time and got some decent reviews, got on a Ruckus compilation, and enjoyed radio play in Boston, Philly, and NY. I also got a job in the studio I had interned at called Sanctum Sound, where I worked with Gary Cherone ("More than words, etc etc"), Emergenza finalists Rueben (now Nearing Zero), Heather Bright (you may remember her as the first one kicked off of Missy Elliott's UPN show "So You Wanna Be Star?"), and more. I also did A/V work at conventions and got to see a human head in a bucket. During 2003-2004, my last year in Boston, I was in the best band ever called Two Thumbs Up and a Smile. Led by Jeremy Pilny, it was some weird cicussy shit. We never finished a recording past the basement demo stage, but played out a lot.
Like many good things, however, it came to an end in 2004, so I moved to LA again. Makes sense, right? Since moving here in September of '04, I have taught juvenile delinquents recording and production with SoundArt, worked at Mi Casa Multimedia and Selectracks, and have come into a very interesting day job as a staff engineer at the Record Plant, where I've been for almost 2 1/2 years. I've been lucky enough to find some very talented artists to work with independently, such as mixing for The Broken West, who recently signed to Merge records (I also produced, recorded, mixed, and played on their debut EP, The Dutchman's Gold, while they were still The Brokedown). I am starting a new project with Remy Delamora, and continue to collaborate with the hairy Rob Barbato in the collective AP English. I continue to write, play, record, hang out, and generally enjoy the endless summer. Enjoy and write me if your band is wicked awesome and needs a record.