Hello fellow music lovers (and to those who may not be as passionate about music but somehow stumbled on to my site and are reading this anyway). I want to share my background with you and in doing so, I’ll take a stroll down memory lane.
How my love for music began: I grew up in Stamford, Connecticut and got my first record player when I was eight years old. I started buying Elton John albums (Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me and Crocodile Rock were the two songs that drew me in) along with the Beatles Greatest Hits (both the red and the blue covers). Elton was my favorite.
Becoming a musician: I played the trumpet from 4th – 6th grade when it hit me that I wanted to play rock music and the trumpet wasn’t really suited for that, even though I was pretty good for my age and how long I’d been playing. My parents got me a cheap acoustic guitar when I was 11 and I began taking lessons. I think the first song I learned was “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver – not exactly my style but it was a good song and got me into finger picking a bit. Soon after, I learned Crocodile Rock by Elton John and then Yesterday (more finger picking) by the Beatles.
Later that year, I got an electric guitar (Epiphone) and amplifier (can’t remember the brand) for Christmas – I was 12 and a half. The game was on. While I loved and played all sports including baseball, basketball (my favorite sport), football (a close 2nd) and hockey, I knew that my best shot for a career doing something I loved was probably in music. I also reasoned that most sports careers were limited in longevity because as players get older, they slow down and can’t compete at the level they need to so are forced to retire. In music, people can play until they’re at least 287 years old; just look at Keith Richards.
I began writing at the tender age of 12: I started writing what I hoped were the next hit songs but all I had to record them on was a $29 cassette recorder (mono) – this was back in the day before home studios or anything resembling a piece of equipment that might yield a professional sounding recording. I quit taking lessons after a year and a half but continued playing the guitar. I tried figuring out some songs but I didn’t have much in the way of equipment to make my tone sound like the rich, overdriven tones I was hearing on so many of the songs I loved.
Getting (more) serious about my music education: At the University of Utah, I studied sociology and business but I was still very passionate about music. I took a 3-part series of 3-hour classes called Introduction to Jazz guitar. While I had no interest in playing jazz guitar, I knew that jazz musicians were talented and educated. I wanted to get a good understanding of music theory, which I did. I also took private lessons from the man who taught the class (Don Ayers) and learned a lot more about theory and many other things that shaped the way I think about guitar playing. He also turned me on to Eric Johnson.
The birth of my love for recording and producing: During this time, I also got the opportunity to be a sound engineer for a local band who played original music and toured around the region. The leader of the band (Big Idea) built a studio and had one of the first ProTools systems and my love for recording and producing really started to grow. After graduating from college and getting a job, I started buying some music equipment including stuff to help me get the kind of guitar tones I was desperately searching for. Listen to Eric Johnson, Led Zeppelin, Rush and other classic rock bands and you’ll hear the tones I was searching for; you’ll also hear some great classic riffs that have influenced my writing and playing. I needed something that would let me record what I was writing, preferably something that would sound like a finished record. Click on the The Studio tab to see the iterations I went through to get to where I am today.
And so was born my quest to build a great studio that would have the tools I need to record songs that sounded as good as the songs I was hearing on the radio – at least once I learned the basic (and beyond) skills of recording and producing – that’s a never ending process. Thanks for reading and welcome to my dreams and my studio: Sweet Sound Studios, home of Profile Productions.