When I was a kid, I took piano lessons (Suzuki method) for a couple years, and this introduced me to the world of playing and making music. Even after I stopped taking lessons, I kept playing and developing my skills for several years, performing in recitals, at the piano store in the local mall, and for friends at school. I even played for the wedding of one of the teachers in my high 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 forces with Saurin Shah and the Trax in Space folks to produce a couple compilation albums of electronic music: "Trax" and "Parallel Dimensions".
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 (Ibanez SoundGear SR305 5-string) in 1998 after starting to learn on an old beat-up bass a friend had let me borrow. I've been 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 rock cover band, The Morans. We were a five-piece band (2 guitars, bass, drums, two singers). We only played a few small events over the course of 2 years. One of them was a friend's birthday party at which we played a cover of "Brick House" (by The Commodores) as a special request. We video recorded our set that day and posted it up on YouTube. Many months later, we were contacted by a Hollywood music director working with Universal Studios who had found our video of "Brick House" on YouTube and wanted to use the audio from the recording in a movie. The movie ended up being the 2009 film "Duplicity" starring Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, and our recording of "Brick House" is the first music you hear in the film and can be heard in the background during the entire first scene. We even got a credit at the end for our recording and got a handsome one-time payout from Universal, as well as appearing in a feature article in the local Sammamish, WA newspaper. But sadly, it was not to last... The Morans split up in early 2009 due to some members' increasingly hectic personal lives.
Ever since The Morans split up, I've been trying to assemble another band and/or searching for the right band to join. I've auditioned with many bands and turned down even more, but I still haven't quite found the right project. Meanwhile, I've recorded a lot of stuff on my own or with other people, some of which you can hear below. Please note that all of these recordings are copyrighted by myself and the other musicians involved, so you cannot reuse these recordings without our permission.
January 2010 - me on bass (multi-tracked)
May 21, 2009 - me on bass
May 30, 2010 - me on bass, my brother on guitar
You can also see videos of me playing my bass up on my YouTube profile page.
Some of my favorite albums of all time: