MySpace a place for friends

The tunes uploaded here are not necessarily meant to be polished or finished pieces, they're just me trying out ideas or trying to express something that words can't. Most of my tunes are just improvised pieces based on an overall idea for the tune. I really love to listen to jazz and jazz-rock fusion, but it's not what I tend to play most of the time. I have apparently come up with my own blend of elements that comprise my signature sound. I love it when people say "you sound like so and so" - it's rarely the same person twice! That's music to my ears as the last thing I want to be is some musical copycat or an obvious derivative of someone else. Anyhow, the bottom line is that I have made a come back from a 6 year hiatus from doing any kind of recording and "composing" after I got married December 2000 and while my children were young. Now that they are at an age where they are a little more self-sufficient, I feel that I can focus on music more now.

I've been playing guitar for a while now. I started learning guitar in 1988 when I was twenty-one years old and had no previous musical experience or inclinations, but I have always loved music. I have no formal training and I am 100% self-taught - but I just love all the things that you can do with an electric guitar! I am not able to read music, but I have taught myself enough music theory to know more or less what I'm doing, and I have found some formulas that work for me with new ones continuously being added! So, anyway, I have recently decided that I need to make my dream become a reality, that is to do something serious with my stuff. I'm glad that there is a place like MySpace to give me an outlet as I have been a very frustrated musician for many years! Most of my playing "to the public" has been via church music teams, but I just don't seem to fit in most music teams because I am not content being a parrot playing stuff just like it appears on a CD. Most of the time, I like to make it more personal than that, which I guess is a problem for many church music teams. And, hence, some of the frustration for me as a musician. And then there is the side of me that is presented here!

I have a fellow guitar slinger friend named Denny that I used to play with at church who once called me a "closet virtuoso", and so I had originally decided to remain quasi-anonymous to kind of go along with that theme and I initially chose the name "J201" because it is the designation given to a type of transistor that I have used in some of my DIY distortion pedals, and because I like the sound of it (it's like a code name or something). But, now I have come out of the shadows and I am using my real name instead.

I like to experiment with ideas and sounds, but I do work on stuff that may sound like it was quasi-composed, too. While I was growing up, I listened to a wide variety of stuff that was a product of the late 70s - Ashra, Tomita, Kraftwerk, Nektar, Focus, Klaus Schulz and a lot of other types of music. I can still remember the first time that I heard Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" record (around 1973 when I was about 6 years old), it was unlike anything I had ever heard - it was cutting edge and that day is indelibly marked in my memory. As a teenager, I was a punk rocker and into all the heavy metal bands of the 80s. In the 90s and onwards, jazz and jazz-rock fusion became the only music that really truly appealed to me. As a result, I think that I have a very interesting style because I seem to conglomerate all of these different elements into the stuff that I put "on tape". I often tend to feel like a musical weirdo, but I've never felt "normal" anyhow! I live, sleep, eat and breath music, but I still have yet to connect with any other musicians that would really be interested in what I do. I guess it's kind of a "hard sell". For what I have seen, it's never an easy road for an improvising musician who's not satisfied playing cover tunes at a party somewhere. I admire people who do that well, but it's just not for me.

Some people probably also know me from my DIY guitar website, www.DIYguitarist.com. Oh well, I guess I'm not that anonymous after all...

Here's a few more of my tunes at my Improvising Guitarists page. You can hear previous tunes like "Sexton Demo 1" here: