As a kid I always loved the sound of the guitar and had vivid memories of the guitars on the Stones albums and the Chess compilation of the Howlin’ Wolf London Sessions album my dad used to always play around the house, but I didn’t pick up the guitar until I was fifteen, when I fell in love with Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York and suddenly the guitar seemed a little more attainable. From there I got into Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and some older blues players like Albert King before a live-in-the-studio performance of Joe Satriani’s “Always With Me, Always With You” absolutely changed my perception of what you could do with a guitar.

I then spent the rest of high school and college woodshedding, getting into more technical players like Steve Vai, John Petrucci, George Lynch, and Tony Macalpine. Eventually I gravitated towards a seven string guitar, partly after tuning my Strat down to B while transcribing and loving how big it sounded at that pitch, and partly because the idea of a “middle” string on a guitar started to appeal to me. During college, I released a couple albums on now-defunct MP3.com, a few tracks of which eventually went on to become part of Zero Mantra, my proper debut. After college, I continued writing, and got more involved with the online guitar community of extended range guitarists, eventually moderating at sevenstring.org before co-founding metalguitarist.org with the original sevenstring admin team after we sold the site.

I eventually finished recording and mixing Zero Mantra in late 2014, and released it in January of 2015. At present I’m writing for a follow-up, and after years of getting into heavier and heavier music, I’m doing a bit of a 180 and so far have been incorporating sorter and more Americana-rooted influences in what I’ve written so far, getting a little closer to my blues/rock roots.

I live in Somerville, Massachusetts, am an avid cyclist and cook, and work for an investment firm in the Boston area, where thankfully a number of my colleagues are music lovers, as well.