My grandfather gave me a toy guitar when I was 4 years old. I broke it in short order but from then on I always wanted a guitar. When I was 10 my parents bought me a nylon string guitar and I got classical guitar lessons for the next 2 years.  It was a great foundation and I was just happy to be playing a guitar. It did not occur to me I needed an electric until I heard Eddie Van Halen play Eruption on Van Halen’s first album. I knew that my nylon string guitar could not make those fantastic sounds. I immediately demanded an electric and got to work trying learn Van Halen licks….yeah right, that was going to take some time. Fortunately, I read an interview with Eddie and he said he loved Cream, the Bluesbreakers and Eric Clapton. I quickly got into all that amazing music and started learning anything I could by ear. Zeppelin, The Stones, BB King, The Allman Brothers, Jeff Beck, were all part of my musical diet from then on. Around 14 years old I after I heard Carlos Santana say, “everyone needs to know who Wes Montgomery is…”  I discovered jazz guitar. A fascination with jazz giants Wes Montgomery and Joe Pass and a jazz guiar began. I didn’t understand anything they were doing but I realized it took a lot of knowledge and technical skill to play like those guys. That led me down the road to Berklee and studying a ton of jazz, all the while playing in rock and blues bands. Learning jazz was like a great workout out but I still mostly just wanted to rock out. I love all the tricky chords, exotic scales, arpeggios, and complicated tunes found in jazz and I wanted to apply that to my rock playing. 

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I went to Berklee College of music as a Performance major.  After graduating I played in several bands, blues-rock mostly with a little original music thrown in. For the next several years I played over a 100 gigs a year, taught out of my apartment and at a local music store all while still taking lessons with great players around Boston. 

 

 I have been at Berklee as a professor for over twenty years now and have developed classes on Jimmy Page, Joe Satriani, and classic rock guitar. I also authored a course for Berklee’s online school and through that have taught students all around the world.

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To this day I am constantly gigging.  I attribute my busy schedule to being versatile. I play with singer song writers, play in original rock projects, play in acoustic duos, I have played musicals at some of the bigger theaters in Boston, I have a classic rock cover band which has done album shows at some of the more prestigious venues in Boston click here to view on YouTube

 

My biggest passion is writing music, I have released 2 albums of instrumental rock music which can be found on most streaming services click here to listen. I love all of it and I continue to love teaching and passing on all I have learned through my many years of experience.