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About Me
Hi There... Thank you for your interest in finding out a little bit more about me!
Short Version:
Years Musically Active - 1979 to present
Instruments I Can Play Well - guitar, drums, percussion, bass, voice
Instruments I Can Fake - piano, keyboards, anything else
Strengths - music composition, arranging and harmony, production, audio mixing, audio engineering
Educational Resume:
Brandeis University (1996) - B.A. - Music (Composition) & Sociology
Lesley College (2003) - M.Ed - Elementary Education (Grades 1-6)
Music Educator - 2000 - present
Recording Enthusiast / Engineer / Producer - from when I was born
General:
I have spent my entire adult life involved in playing, creating and recording music.
Since I was a teenager, I've been playing in original musical combos and bands,
and have played and created nearly every style of modern music including pop, rock, jazz, country, classical, and many variations.
I get a kick out of the fact that I can say that I was a semi-finalist in "Boston's Best Drummer" competition in 1989!
Long Version
I have been a musical person since I was a very young lad. My mother has told stories about me, from when I was four years old, singing and entertaining a whole bus full of people on the long ride between Gypsumville, Manitoba (where we lived at the time) and Winnipeg. It was not long after that when a family friend told me a fabulous tall tale that he had been playing drums in a band. Wow. Really? Upon hearing this, I began having wild dreams about doing just that. For years after, I was obsessed with playing drums. I was banging on EVERYTHING and driving most in my vicinity crazy. As I got to be a bit older, around eight, I became a little more adventurous with my imaginary instruments, and moved onto using pencils as drumsticks on different thicknesses of books that would be aligned on my bed, according to the orientation of a drum set. For cymbals ... well, yes... pot lids would do the trick nicely. Once, I even got to play on a REAL drum set in the back room of my Uncle Tommy's farm house. That closed the deal... Drums were COOL!
Around that same time, there was a particular event that has had a lasting legacy - we were out on a family camping trip, to Algonquin Provincial Park in central Ontario, when my dad noticed that I was spending a good chunk of the time away from the campfire and holed up in the car listening to the radio, and of course, banging away on the dashboard to every tune that came on. After observing this, my dad took some scrap pieces of wood that were lying around the campsite and neatly carved me a set of my very first drumsticks. They were quite impressive, and he did a great job. They looked and felt just like drumsticks! This was a monumental gesture, and a huge seed had been further fertilized. I immediately replaced banging on things with my hands with banging on things with those sticks. Of course, many a household item became scarred and pitted as the result of the of the force of the tips of those sticks hitting things! Sadly, I cannot tell you whatever happened to those sticks that my dad had made (I likely eventually broke them), but I wish that they still existed, as they would be one of my prized possessions, next to my Telstar guitar, which I will mention shortly.
Anyway, for a short spell when I was about 12, my mother schlepped (is that a real word?) me to a music shop in Phoenix, Arizona, when we lived there, to take drum lessons. I didn't own drums at all, but I was psyched for the opportunity. I had a cool teacher with long blonde hair, and a room with a drum set. What could be better? But, my dream soon took a big hit when I was quickly asked to play notes that were plopped down on a music stand in front of me. "What's this?", I wondered. It wasn't notes on a page I wanted to play, it was REAL songs on REAL drums! I couldn't for the life of me understand why I needed to learn things like notes and counting. Go figure. What use could they possibly be? I wanted to JAM! This was not to be, unfortunately, as my instructor would hear a rhythm that I enthusiastically improvised and say, "Well, that's nice, but let's get back to the notes'. Needless to say, the lessons didn't last long and I stopped after just a few months. The air was let out of my balloon. Biggest mistake - to stop taking lessons - but you know about hindsight. It wasn't until years later that I could fully understand the impact of this blunder.
Then, at the ripe old age of 15, for my birthday, my parents bought me a J.C. Penny-acquired "Telstar" electric guitar. It was black with red and yellow sunburst. When I got it, I thought, "What in heck will I do with this, I want DRUMS!". However, it took no time to see what I could do with it, learning to play riffs from Deep Purple, Bachman Turner Overdrive, Thin Lizzy, and eventually... Rush. I spent the next several years playing TONS of guitar. I couldn't stop. That guitar, although quickly altered and repainted, is still an invaluable possession for me today, and holds an important role in an important place in my house - which will remain undisclosed - until you come to my house to discover in person!
It wasn't until I was 18, when I had a real job, that I was able take my first tax refund check down to Jack's Drum Shop on Boylston Street in Boston and buy my first drum set. It was a 5-piece Ludwig black cortex kit, with over-sized drums for $1,100. I don't remember buying any cymbals for it that day, but many, many of those followed in the upcoming months. I threw those drums in the back seat of my '66 Plymouth Fury III, and headed home for the rest of my musical journey to begin! Much of the drum equipment I bought in those months remains the staple of what I still use today (minus the parts that I have broken!).
I began playing in bands shortly thereafter, playing original music, and have continued to play, in one form or another, for the next 30 years! You can check out my Musical Collaborations link for details.
History of a Recording Fanatic
Since I was a child, I have had a fascination with sound, and particularly... recorded sound. I was likely no more than about 5 when someone first described a machine that another friend had that could "save" sound. Save sound? This was interstellar talk. How could that be? I couldn't imagine what this was, and how this could be done. I just didn't believe it. Shortly thereafter, an amazing little device was brought into our house. It was a basic table-top cassette recorder. You know the kind: rectangular, thin, small speaker at one end, and about 5 push-button switches at the other end. The world had indeed changed forever! This little device invoked magic into my fingers, as it allowed me to actually preserve sounds... and music! Who would have thunked it?
For years after that, cassette recorders were the center of my entertainment existence - my musical and aural brain. I recorded all kinds of things on those recorders... music, sounds, my unaware visitors, unsuspecting telephone callers... you name it. I learned to splice tape on those things, with a pair of scissors and Scotch tape! I even learned to do primitive (I mean primitive) punch-ins! It was even cassette recorders that gave me my first glimpse into multi-track recording (well, sort of!). You see, if you recorded something on a cassette recorder, and you took another recorder and started that one recording as you played back the first, then voila, you'd end up with what was somewhat of a multi-track recording! All this fun gave me lots of glimpses into the future.
As I got a little older, and technology improved a bit, my parents got us a really revolutionary device: an endless-loop 8-track tape recorder! Ever seen one of those? Not just a player, but a RECORDER! They didn't catch on much, as the adverse physics of the 8-track tape overcame it's appeal as the "never-ending" king of reproduction media. One way or the other, I was able to record on that thing, and had a blast coming up with silly things to play for friends and family.
Then... the dark years. I became an adult. CDs came out. Tape began to die a slow death. I couldn't afford to buy modern recording equipment. Until... the mid-1980s, when Tascam came out with their first affordable multi-track cassette recorder - the four track Tascam Porta One. It was a slow-moving 1 7/8 i.p.s. deck with DBX noise reduction. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven! My friends and I wore the heads off that thing. We'd record 4 tracks full, bounce those down to another 4-track machine while we were recording more things, and then still have two more tracks on the second tape at our disposal! We could go several generations before we were insulted by the inevitable noise of generation loss. Some of those recordings are still my favorites, although plagued with problems that make them unlikely to surface in front of anyone but ourselves. :)
As those machines eventually broke down, and we were still all poor stiffs, our desire to pay the big bucks for recording equipment slid into nonexistence for awhile. But. the day finally came when I was able to get my hands on a pair of rented and borrowed Tascam DA-88 8-track recorders in 1995. These were big-time machines, and this was the first time I had ever had that kind of recording power in my hands. I recorded two different projects with the band I was in around that time using the DA-88s, and it was at this time that multi-track recording became a very different dimension for me. I learned what better tools could do for creating music, and sound.
Shortly thereafter, the world drastically changed for me when home computers made a grand entrance into our households in the 1990s. I could download music from the internet, and record things into the computer. Geeze. And..., next came Protools. The first time I had ever heard of Protools was probably around 1998, when a band I had just departed began recording into Protools to record their first album. I had felt a little ditched, as they were going on without me... with Protools, no less. Their album came out fairly well, although, I always thought I could have done it much better... (of course!?). Still, I wasn't really sure if this Protools thing was something that felt solid for the future, until I could afford my first Protools outfit: A Digidesign 001 with Protools LE 5.1 software, and a Waves Native Power Pack plug-in bundle. Then I was sure! Much of this equipment I still own and use today, and has been the backbone of my recording set up for more than 10 years.
As of late, I have amassed a collection of high-end outboard audio devices, and modern software. I consulted with a professional studio designer who helped me create a recording space that is tuned for acoustics and audio, and dedicated to music. I have built this production company on the foundations of all of the experiences that I have had over 40 years of playing around with sound! You should try it... It's fun!
End
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