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I’m primarily a bassist and songwriter—and an occasional guitarist—but I’ve also been found playing the drums, keyboards, producing, arranging, orchestrating, and teaching.

I have been involved with music in some aspect for my entire life. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of my father playing guitar, singing, writing music, and recording it; my mother played the organ, and both my parents ran a piano tuning business. Listening to music was also a very popular activity in our house. Almost every morning I would awake to the sound of music blaring from our living room—The Beatles, The Eagles, ABBA, and very often Crosby, Stills and Nash—and so many others.

I knew from an early age that I wanted music to be a part of my life forever. My music career started at age seven when I joined my first “band” where I played the fake guitar, and on occasion, the fake drums. When I was ten, my band mate and I took our act on the road, in a manner of speaking, when we “preformed” at the school talent show. Later that year, I joined the school band, poorly playing the trombone. On a few occasions over the years, I had attempted to learn to play guitar, but nothing ever came of it.

When I was twelve, my dad borrowed some gear from a family friend (guitar maker Duane Waterman) to record some of the songs he’d written. Among the pile of gear was a blue Charvel (if memory serves) bass guitar. It was the first time I’d ever seen a bass in person, and it was honestly love at first sight for me. Seeing my excitement, my dad offered to teach me to play it, and in a few weeks I had become an okay player. A few months later, while changing for my junior high school gym class, I mentioned to a friend that I was learning bass. He was a trumpet player in the school jazz band, and stated that the band needed a bassist. A few days later I was auditioning, and just a few short days later, I was a band geek.

Throughout the remainder of my school years, I played bass and various percussion instruments in school bands and jazz bands, and when I was fifteen, I started my first actual band. It started when I met a drummer through a friend. However, we couldn’t find a guitarist, so I decided to learn, and it made the most sense to teach myself. I also learned to play the drums, and was almost the band’s drummer, but I finally settled on playing guitar, and signing…badly. And while our band wasn’t very good, it gave me some good experience playing gigs and it was where I first ventured into songwriting.

My life was filled with music even outside of performing. My first job was in music, as a stagehand for a local concert promoter. I later landed a gig as a live sound engineer at a local nightclub (shhhh, I was drinking in the club underage, don’t tell anyone!), which is still one of the best jobs I’ve ever had. In the years that followed, I played various instruments on projects with a variety of great musicians, and in the process found myself in studios often, which led to me getting into the production side of music.

When the late nineties drifted by, I was still playing bass and guitar, but had also gotten into writing techno music, which was fun then, but is now a bit dated. By the end of the decade, I started concentrating on music theory more, and started studying composition and orchestral arranging, and continued to play, write, produce, and record music, and even ventured out for the occasional live performance.

In 2007, I was a part of something that means a lot to me: I helped my father record and produce his first album. It was years in the making—with many of the songs on the album being written in the mid-nineties—it has been something he's wanted to do for many years. Knowing him for as long as I have, it was great to be able to help him reach a lifelong dream of his.

As of December 2008, I've been back in the studio writing and recording new music for my new, currently nameless, band. In March '09, me and a couple of band mates from the above mentioned nameless band formed a side project called Blame Andy. Check back for more on these and other projects in the near future.



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