I was born January 26th, 1988. I don’t remember much of my childhood except for when I started music. At age 10, I was the first one in the band to pick up an instrument. At the time, music was something cool to do in my free time and I had no intentions on making it a life long career. However, the more I played and the more I learned, the more it took over my life.

It all started when my father was playing his old records from the 70’s and 80’s on his turn table. I became captured by the music of that time and it was all I would listen to. I started weekly music lessons, learning the basic 6 strings and musical theory. Practicing an hour each day, I advanced through the Hal Lennard Books fairly quickly. To my surprise, my cousin Mike started learning guitar about 6 months after I started and was taking lessons too. It wasn’t long when my guitar teacher got me playing baroque and classical music, and felt that I was ready for chords.

I needed to practice 2 ½ hours a day to get the chords sounding clear and confident, but if paid off. It was then that I started to try REAL songs that I loved listening to with my dad. The first song I tried, was Hotel California by the Eagles. My brothers didn’t think I could pull it off. I decided that I would challenge myself to learn that song of which my brothers thought I couldn’t learn. While learning this song, I developed other helpful skills such as playing and singing at the same time. It took me a year or constant strain to play the rhythm guitar and solo work from front to back by ear, but it was finally ready to perform.

In the meantime, while I was practicing and learning all I could about the 70’s and 80’s rock and roll, my two brothers Tony and Steve took up the drums and bass. My brothers advanced even faster than I had thought they would and when I was ready to play Hotel California in front of people, they were ready to play it with me. It just so happened that our elementary school hosted a talent show they organized that year. So, just for fun we entered it and performed Hotel California.

Having no idea what we were in for, we got up on stage and felt something we never expected…a rush. Something happened inside us that day. After we were done the song and had the biggest applause anyone can imagine, I knew, that music was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. The connection that the music made with us, without us saying a word, was phenomenal. We never forgot how it felt. With me, my two brothers and my cousin all with musical interests and all the components of a rock band, we decided to form our own band!

The four of us spent years learning hours of cover songs and material to play at barbeques, birthday parties, fundraiser's, opening events, anything we could play at. Of course, with time, we got better at playing cover songs and soon lost the thrill of learning a song. They all started to feel the same and wasn’t any different then the next. We felt that there was more to learning cover songs that makes a musician, so we started making our own music. We took the structure of all the cover songs we knew, figured out what was similar in all (into, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, solo, chorus, outro) then tried to put together some chords and a vocal melody that “sounded good”. Of course we knew that we had some work to do.

However, more time passed, and more gigs here and there made things kind of difficult for a while. It was getting harder and harder to get together and practice for upcoming battle of the bands and regular jam sessions as we got older. We weren’t practicing enough and we almost lost sight of what we really wanted as a band. During this time, we started listening to other styles of music including 50’s and 60’s music, some jazz and Texas blues, and even more intricate bands like Rush and Super-tramp. This gave us the inspiration to start over again and pick up where we left off.

Our own music started to excel and was getting more complex and fun to play. We realized that creating our own music was something you can’t really be finished learning, making it a perfect way to become a better musician. We had a chance to be in the studio at age 16, recorded our own songs, but since we developed musically in such a short time, the CD we made was no longer us.

We took more time to create our own songs as oppose to learning any more songs. We were going to school, working at our jobs, and had more responsibilities than we had before. One thing that I am proud to say, is that we still managed to find the time to stay in touch with our musical roots while creating our own style of music, even as our own musical tastes started to change. To be honest, I have been playing music for 10 years of my life, and nothing is more satisfying. To play our own music to people who never seen us for the first time, yet develop a connection or touch someone with our music is such a reward. Music if my Life, and without it, Life would be pointless to live.

 

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