When I was a kid, I took piano lessons (Suzuki method) and got pretty good. Even after I stopped taking lessons, I kept playing and developing my skills for several years, performing in recitals and for friends at school.
In high school and college, I got into electronic music composition and wrote some songs using "tracking" software such as Impulse Tracker on the PC. I joined up with the Trax in Space folks to produce a couple compilation albums of electronic music: "Trax" and "Parallel Dimensions" (which received minor acclaim at an annual industry conference that year).
Around that time (1995-1997), a couple friends got me interested in the band Primus, and my interest in electric bass was born. I bought my first bass, an Ibanez SoundGear SR305 5-string, in 1998, after starting out on an old beat-up bass a friend had let me borrow. I've been essentially self-taught since then, picking up bits and pieces by watching other bassists, reading books, watching instructional videos, and reading various bass-related web sites.
I tried joining up with a couple different bands but I couldn't seem to find the right people to work with. Finally in 2004 I joined The Soul Proprietors, an 11-piece soul/funk cover band with horns and all, and things took off for me. I really grew as a player during my time with that group, since the style of music is very bass-centric and involves a lot of fast, repetitive, rhythmically-groovy patterns. We were gigging regularly at a variety of local bars, weddings, etc, with gigs typically comprised of three or four hour-long sets, so that really built up my playing endurance and forced me to refine my technique so I could play without straining or wearing myself out. But after nearly three years with the soul band, it was time to move on. The gig schedule was getting more intense and had started cutting into my personal life too much, and I was ready to move on to some other music that would be more challenging and appealing to me.
So I left the soul band in late 2006, and I started my own band, The Morans. We're a five-piece band (2 guitars, bass, drums, two singers), and I get to sing backup/harmony vocals for the first time.
You can see videos of me playing my bass up on my YouTube profile page.
Some of my favorite albums of all time: