broke okie
January 6th, 2011, 09:20 PM
Hello all. First of all let me introduce myself. My name is Tim and I'm 54 years old. I grew up with a mother that taught piano and accordion for 54 years before she passed in 2000. She never had the patience to teach me piano but I made it through the blue book a couple of times. I took up the trumpet in 5th grade (1965) and played it through my first year in college. I was really good but could have been great if I had stuck with it. Sex and drugs and rock and roll was my demise! Believe it or not, The best paying gig I had started in eight grade in a polka band! We played every Friday and Saturday almost every week and I made about $70.00 - $100.00 bucks a week. Righteous bucks dude!! About my sophomore year in high school I joined a rock band that had 2 singers, 2 guitars, me on trumpet, 2 trombones, bass, and drums. Here in Oklahoma our local TV station had a program called "Ronnie Kay and the Scene", and we were a teen hop band. The program was like American Band Stand but just local. They booked allot of our gigs so we we were always playing some where in OK. Even got on TV a couple of times. We played just about everything that was top ten back then and especially Chicago, Blood Sweat and Tears, Ides of March, and everything else that had brass. The lead guitar player of that band is what made me turn to guitar. He had played guitar since he was five and he was the oldest member of the band. (22 or 23) Man he was awesome. He could hear something and just play it! It turned out that when I went to Wichita state for college he went too and was my room mate. I was a music major but found out real fast that I didn't want to be a teacher and a performance degree on trumpet was too much for me at eighteen. Like I said before "sex and drugs and rock and roll". Any hoo when I dropped out of college I traded in my sister's classical guitar for a 65 SG and things have never been the same. A friend of mine that had played guitar in high school stage band showed me three chords. The E chord, the A chord, and the one you plugged into the amp. The rest has been a life long enjoyment of guitar in bands and here of late just home studio and my 23yr old son who does his own acoustical thing but still likes to challenge me on figuring out the songs he's into. Trumpet wise, about all I ever do any more is play taps for our local cemetery on Memorial Day. I taught my daughter to play and she played until she went to college this year and decided to lay off for a year but the band director at Alva wants her to join next year. My gear is mostly retro old stuff. A 78 Gibson "The Paul" with the original "dirty fingers" pick ups, a Ibanez "Road Star" with EMG passive pick ups, and a Gibson Lab series amp. I started my recording with a Tascam 4-track and then went to Alesis adat 8-tracks and currently am using a Zoom 16-track. Two synths, Korg m-1 and a alesis quadrasynth. I still use my Roland MC-50 sequencer and a Alesis D-4 drummer. I've tried to go computer but I still prefer the stand alone items. I like all of the advantages of computer gadgets but I still like to do it in one take live. My latest toy is a Vox Tonelab LE amp modeler that kicks a$$ with old vintage tube sounds. I'm really looking forward to checking out this forum and I think that I'll learn allot from everyone.
Cheers,
Tim
Cheers,
Tim