Appropriate greeting! I'm a professional musician and guitar instructor in State College, Pennsylvania. We're really close to the center of the state and really far from just about any cultural center. So we try to make our own, with somewhat limited success. . . My musical endeavors began with the trumpet when I was twelve. Within two years I was encouraged to switch to baritone (I think basically because the school band needed baritones and they had one for me to play). Within another two years, the school aquired a Fender Musicmaster Bass and an amp for the jazz band. I picked that up and totally gave up the baritone within months.

I never really played bass with the school jazz band because at the time I didn't think it was cool enough (big mistake!). However the band director still let me screw around with the thing during study halls and after school. Pretty soon, I nagged my folks into buying me a rig of my own. We didn't know anything about what we were buying, but at least we went to a real music store instead of Sears. I wound up with a Micro-Frets(!) bass and an Ace Tone(!!) amp.

The amp was about a 60-watter, with separate head and 2x12" speaker cabinet. I still have the amp, and it still works! My best friend played the drums, and we used to set up in his parents living room, crank up the console stereo and play along with Steppenwolf and Black Sabbath albums.

Anyway, I got my drivers license at about the same time, so it wasn't long before I was in my first band. We went to a small, rural high school, and out of the whole student body we could only scrape up enough musicians for one 4-piece band. We played a lot of Alice Cooper, Rolling Stones, and Humble Pie. This was in the early seventies, right in the middle of the "Classic Rock" period! I have some tapes, and they're just as dreadful as you might expect.

One of the songs we did was a cover of "House of the Rising Sun," as performed by a band called Frijid Pink. It turned out I could play the solos better than the lead guitarist in our band, so we'd swap instruments on this one. This was the beginning of my guitar career and the beginning of the end of my bass career (Big Mistake #2).

During this period, we played mostly house parties with an occasional high school dance thrown in. It only lasted until graduation. Then I started my first (and only) year at Penn State, and my playing got a serious shot in the arm. . .

The drummer from the high school band and I decided we wanted to keep playing, so we ran an ad for additional musicians. We auditioned the usual assortment of posers and wanna-bes (who must have REALLY been bad, given our basis for comparison), but picked up a guitarist by the name of Chuck Altman, who everybody called "Dog." Chuck was from Pittsburgh and introduced me to rock beyond current AM radio (which was still the main "top 40" medium at the time - FM was just starting to become common, and played mostly classical music and "underground " rock). He introduced me to the music of Jimi Hendrix, Duane Allman and Robin Trower, and the concept of tone. Unfortunately, I didn't really get the idea, because my next amp wound up being a Peavey Musician, a 210-watt solid state boat anchor that had built in Fuzz and Distortion, both of which were'nt much good except for putting your teeth on edge. Anyway, I noodled around with it until I found an unorthodox way of getting an acceptable tone out of it (which involved turning all six bands of EQ down to practically "0" and cranking the volume control), and used the amp for an embarrassingly long percentage of my career. (I still have this amp too, and it still works.) We found a couple more acceptable musicians and put a band together that only lasted a few rehearsals. I don't recall exactly what happened, but the band never materialized.

However, Dog had introduced me to a new circle of musicians, and we did manage to put together a few performing bands. And that pretty much set the pattern for my playing for the next 10 years! I played with a number of weekend warrior bands, some of them pretty darned good, some of them . . . well, we got paid! It was during this time that I aquired the Ibanez Rocket Roll Sr. which is pictured in my banners and backgrounds. This was my main guitar for many years (and yes, I still have it!), and is one of the infamous Gibson lawsuit guitars. It is essentially a clone of the original 1958 Gibson Flying V guitar. The most obvious distinction is that Ibanez put the output jack on the inside of the lower body wing, instead of on the front of the wing, a' la Gibson. It's a great playing, great sounding guitar that still sees action on occasion.

Eventually I decided I needed some professional instruction. I had been pretty much self-taught on the guitar, and although I was pretty well-versed on the basic blues-rock pentatonic thing, I realized that there was a lot more that could be done with a guitar. So after playing for 15 years, I took my first lesson.

My primary goal initially was to learn how to be a better sight reader on the guitar. I learned how to read music when I played the trumpet and baritone back in jr. high, but I never applied any of that to the guitar. I could have probably taught myself, but I was basically too lazy to sit down and figure out the notes on the neck by myself. I thought that having some guidance and some external pressure brought to bear by a teacher would make me see it through, and it did! But it had a side benefit that I didn't anticipate.

My first teacher gave me some basic "Mel Bay"-style exercises to teach me the notes on the strings up to the fourth fret, then started using some introductory classical guitar pieces as lessons. At first I just thought "well, this is as good a way as any to learn notes," but I soon realized that this was helping my overall playing as well by forcing me to play stuff outside my usual blues-based riffing. Also at about this time I started playing with my first country band, so I was being influenced by about the two most extreme ends of the guitar-playing spectrum! The biggest challenge of country music was thinking and playing more in the MAJOR pentatonic as opposed to my usual MINOR pentatonic licks. Plus, there's a bigger emphasis on playing cleanly, both in terms of tone and technique, in country music.

After a couple months (about the time I actually started to sound a little bit like a country player) my teacher started me on jazz standards. This really opened my eyes (and ears!) with regard to harmony. I didn't realize how little I knew about chord construction until we started playing this stuff! I started getting turned on by music theory and its application about this time, and after a few more months with this teacher, he suggested another teacher who was more theory-based than my current teacher, so after about 9 months my first set of guitar lessons ended. But during this brief time, the influence of these diverse methods and styles improved my playing more than the previous 10 years of playing. The moral is . . .

TAKE LESSONS!