The first time I remember playing music, my uncle put bongos on my lap and told me to hit them. After striking the confusing objects in front of me, the pre-school me decided that understanding music would not be a life long passion of mine. I was completely wrong.

The First Notes In Middle School

Where I grew up, kids going from elementary school to middle school had to decide what electives they were going to take before entering the next building. The cool middle school demi-gods would come down from their trendy mountain and try to convince us children to join their class. I thought I would be playing trumpet in the band because I had heard so much salsa music coming through the speakers of my parents stereo systems. Playing the bright brass instrument idea changed when I saw the 1st chair trombone of the state play the airplane trick on trombone. Trumpet would never be as cool as that airplane sound.

My band teacher was a huge influence on me and not just with music. Because we didn’t know what was and wasn’t possible, he made us do things no other middle school were doing. He used social pressure to keep us in line and the cool songs in jazz band as our goals. If you wanted to be a higher chair, you had to prove you were better than the other player by playing better in front of the entire class. He didn’t care which songs we used to be good musicians, what mattered to him is that we were the best musicians we could be.

High School Discoveries

When I moved to Snellville, GA, in 1999, I thought my musical journey would flourish. However, it did in ways that I was not expecting. With the jazz band in middle school, we could take solos. In my brand new fancy high school, the jazz band didn’t take solos. I found this to be an abomination. We were only allowed play what was written and not be able to express any jazz lines we had been inventing. I stopped playing trombone.

I had tried out guitar in middle school. I saw a movie called “Desperado” with Antonio Banderas and Salma Hyek. The movie showed that if I wore black, grew my hair out, and played guitar, then I would be able to date girls like Selma Hyek. Sign me up! My father had bought me a beginner classical guitar and a VHS tape on how to play. Painful would be a nice way of describing the ordeal. I couldn’t move my fingers fast enough and nothing sounded good. The trombone case looked close enough to a guitar case, so I decided to stick with the cool airplane trick.

My new step family had a different musical background from mine. My family listened to salsa and similar styles of Hispanic music. Pop music might hit my ears in the quick trips to the grocery store. My friends all listened to rap and all everybody else was into country. The band teacher introduced me to big band and classical. Imagine my shock when this new family showed me a whole new style of music called... rock.

I thought rock had died back in the 80’s. I was shown Metallica, Bob Dylan, Green Day, Led Zepplin, and this one dude from the 60’s called Jimi Hendrix. My step father showed me a concert called Woodstock, where Jimi Hendrix played “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)”. Just like the airplane trick on the trombone, I had to be able to play that weird sound he did at the beginning of this crazy “rock” song.

We eventually left that family but the rock influence stayed with me. I wasn’t the most obedient high school student in the world, causing frustrations with many of the teachers (of which I stole their teaching strategies) and parents around me. I got grounded, a lot. My family didn’t have a lot of money either. That left me with a lot of time to practice. I would play whatever songs I could get my hands on. If it was too difficult, I would go find out that was in my ability and play that.

The Gigs Begin

By this point I am 16 years old and have been serioulsy playing guitar all of 5 months. That was when I was invited to play with the church youth group. This proved to be extremely important because we never played songs straight through. When many songs are played live, they parts of the songs are always played in a particular order. In our case, the band leader would use hand signals to tell us which part to go to next and he didn’t always play the things in the original song order or play the song twice in the same way. This forced me to pay attention to my surroundings and flow with what was happening around me.

Slowly this youth group became popular in the area and became well known for our music. There was always a huge reaction from the crowd to our playing. We learned how to play with the rest of the band instead of standing out. If the keyboardist is important at a particular part of the songs, I don’t play as loud. If the band leader signals to drop to bass only, I need to be able to come back in without leaning on the drums for counting. This would come in handy with the next part of my musical journey.

Out of the Pan and Into the Fire

I had a choice when I graduated high school; become a lawyer or a musician. I started learning some law in high school but after talking with lawyers, I decided law would not be a good fit for me. Being a lawyer didn’t mean I could do all those cool court scenes in movies. It meant I had to fill out paperwork all day and I hate paperwork.

At the beginning, I was the worst guitar player at the Atlanta Institute of Music (now known as the Atlanta Institute of Music and Media). Everyone there had been playing since they were 10 with a guitar teacher. I had been playing for 2 years by myself. I had to practice just to catch up to where people playing at and then practice more to be able to pass the tests. After 6 months, I started learning the toughest songs in record time and people started asking me questions about music theory. All my teachers were proud of the huge strides I made during my stay there and I’m proud to say that of the thirty people who went in when I started, only two finished the course. Me and the other guy.

The teachers at AIM taught me so much that it’s difficult to describe. I was extremely overwhelmed but they helped me digest massive amounts of information, showed me the correct way of thinking, and demonstrated what were the most important parts of a song to pay attention to. The ideas taught to me became useful in the next part of my life.

Out of the Fire and Into Reality

I started teaching guitar a month after I graduated AIM. I was under the impression that giving lessons meant that people would come in and ask me questions. This proved to be wrong on many levels. A manager sat me down and explained me that the people coming in have no idea how guitar works. Show them how the instrument works and see what happens from there.

This is where I started taking all the ideas from my life and started applying them to my teaching. How can I compact the complication of guitar into thirty minute segments? I try to cut out as much as I possibly can when I’m teaching because we just do not have the time do things the old fashioned way. People don’t need to know the evolution of music to play their favorite songs.

My gigging and recording popularity grew to tremendous heights. I would teach during the weekdays, record randomly, substitute for guitarists who called out randomly, and played at church every Sunday. It took 8 years, but I finally burned out. I decided after all that, I’ll teach my students and let them be the rock stars.