For some unknown reason my brother decided to buy himself an electric guitar for his 15th birthday. This was about a week after I left home for my first year of college. Every time I came home to visit I would mess around with this guitar... by the next summer I decided to buy one for myself. I never was into music much before, but something with the guitar just clicked. This was also around the time I was starting to get into metal...

A couple years later, at the beginning of my senior year, I returned to school to find my roommate (Chris Gates aka Goat) had purchased a new guitar (Jackson Kelly Pro, amazing!), a new power amp, and a Carvin 2x12.. in the next month I bought a new preamp, power amp, and 2 2x12's, and Goat got a second 2x12. We now had the "Wall of Power" in our dorm room, and were having a great time jamming with Steve Bordelon, a drummer friend of ours. After the next winter break another friend of ours, Matt Chang, came back with a nice Jackson bass, a 10" cab and a killer little Gallien-Kruger bass head. Okay, we figured now was the time to start a band. We started jamming once a week (which involved transporting all our equipment.. we need roadies!!).. I played rhythm and did some vocals, Goat was rhythm and lead guitar. We started looking for a lead vocalist to finish up our lineup. It took a while, but we eventually got John, a frosh from CMC, one of the neighboring schools. This was sort of weird because John was not into metal as much as the rest of us, but he liked it enough to sing for us. By this point we were used to playing with each other and had learned a bunch of cover tunes, ranging from Metallica to Stone Temple Pilots. John turned out to be the most experienced songwriter of our bunch, and he got us started writing our first original. The parts John came up with were quite mellow, but very good. John had to leave early that day, and after he left the rest of us came up with a great (and heavy!) ending for the song, giving the song a format a la "One" by Metallica.. our first original: "John's Song!!".

The peak of my band experience occurred on April 1st, 1995. Steve happened to be president of West Dorm and he got us a gig at a huge party thrown by West and North Dorms called Northwest. We were supposed to play at 9:30, just after the party started, which wouldn't have been too great, but some comedian they hired never showed up, so we became the main act. Then a couple alums from another campus band called Lust Puppy happened to be visiting and they wanted to open for us! Our first gig and we got an opening band-- nice! We ended up starting at about 11pm when the party was in full swing. Since the party was in two dorms, one had the normal music/dancing while we occupied the other with live music. We never came up with a real name for the band, but we went by the name Crimson for this gig. I was extremely happy with how well we were received! We had a good mix of metal and hard rock type stuff, and the crowd really got into it, moshpit and all!! A couple times during guitar solos, John jumped off the stage and started moshing too! It was great! I was also really happy about how well our two originals went over. The other original was called Potter's Field and was written in one night by me, Goat, and Matt, with Steve adding in the drums later. It is a great feeling to write a song that you really like and you actually keep hearing it in your head all the time. It was also great to finish our set and have the crowd yelling for more!!

Our set for the gig was: Fade To Black, Metallica Interstate Love Song, Stone Temple Pilots Potter's Field, Us! Treasure Hands, Lucy's Furcoat John's Song, Us! One, Metallica Seek and Destroy, Metallica (encore)The Four Horsemen, Metallica

My setup: Fender Squier w/ Floyd Rose Tremolo/floating bridge ART SGX-2000 Express w/ Midi foot controller Boss Metal Zone Hafler G300 power amp 2 Carvin 2x12's Nady Wireless-1 (new!) Fostex XR-7 (4-Track)

Here is the band playing Treasure Hands by Lucy's Furcoat, a relatively unknown, but really great band from San Diego. (8bit/mono/1.5meg or Sun:16bit/stereo/compressed/8meg) This is about the second time we ever played this song, so it's a bit rusty. I'm doing the vocals here because we didn't have a vocalist yet. If I ever get ahold of the video tape of our gig, I'll put up some more cool stuff.

The short clip you (should have) heard when this page came up is from the first song I have composed on my new 4-Track. I made up the rhythm before I decided to record it. It unfortunately uses my pinky finger too much and I was only able to play it 3 times before my hand was about to fall off, so I switched to strummed chords. This makes for a cool overlap with the bass line which is two alternating riffs. I actually planned about half of the lead guitar part and improvised the rest. At the end I made the lead keep a constant rhythm and let the rest of the instruments go wild. I like this effect and the timing of the random bass note in the outro. This song is pretty rough, but there are a lot of thing in it I didn't think I could repeat, so I left it as is. I hope you like it. (8bit/mono/0.7meg or Sun:16bit/stereo/compressed/3.7meg)

Here is a new demo written by Goat, Steve, and the new bass player. Me and Goat recorded it, and it was my first time playing it, so here it is. (8bit/mono/2meg or Sun:16bit/stereo/compressed/10.8meg)