Re-entry

Fast forward a few years to when I'm in my mid twenties. I got married and my wife was quite the musician. I bought her a Yamaha Clavinova digital piano and it had a MIDI output. I got a copy of Cakewalk and started experimenting with capturing and editing MIDI data! It was really cool, but I wasn't much of a composer and the quality of audio I was capturing through my PC's sound card was pretty awful, so I got bored and dropped it.

Many years later, my 2nd oldest child, Conner, expressed an interest in learning electric guitar. Electric guitars came back into the house! To encourage my kids to practice in between lessons, I would sit down with them and play with them on my wife's acoustic. Before long, I was stealing their lessons when they couldn't make it and playing regularly on my own. At one point, I learned all the riffs to Metallica's black album and was really enjoying the process.

Taking music lessons at Allegro music in Tucson, my daughter, Olivia, was learning a song that only had one guitar part, so I picked up a bass and learned the bass part. I had bought a bass guitar for my oldest son, max, but he didn't take to it too well, so we had it sitting around the house doing nothing. It got moved into my room and became my main instrument.

I moved from Tucson to Denver for work about 6 years ago and fell in with some guys who'd been playing most of their lives. Jim and Chris played keyboards and guitar in the company band and needed a bass player. I had never jammed with anyone really, and I discovered quickly that learning to play songs from tabs is a poor substitute for music theory. Somehow, despite my poor skills and even poorer grasp of theory, they let me continue playing with them. We had a lot of fun over the next several years, competing in the Fortune Magazine corporate battle of the bands, getting to gig at The Mint and the Whiskey in LA and even making it to finals one year in Cleveland at the R&R hall of fame.