I am a musician... No, really!

I'm also something of a musician, at least people seem to think so :D I think I play pretty well, but I don't consider myself overly talented (except in my own style). I started taking lessons around age 7 or 8. At the time, my sister (two years older than I) was taking guitar lessons. I really enjoyed the guitar, but I didn't want to always be worse than my sibling, so I took up my next favorite instrument: piano. I had already been playing with a fun little toy called the "Magical Musical Thing", which was sort of a Thomas Dolby'ish piano/guitar. The first songs I tried to learn were the themes from Tron and E.T., which I played with until I could get the melody down. My folks finally got me taking lessons from a wonderful lady named Crystal Mills (sounds like a brand of coffee, don't it?) . At first, I learned songs she wanted me to learn, but after a year or so she started asking me which music I preferred. I did focus on some classical music, but my sister and I had recently gotten into listening to the new style called "New Age", and I obtained some music books from the band "Mannheim Steamroller" who produced the "Fresh Aire" series (7 albums total as of this writing). This music became one of my biggest influences, and I still use a lot of the same chord patterns and techniques today. I took lessons up until I was about 16 or so, and then got bored with them and decided I would rather work on my own material. Who needed to learn music written by someone else, if you could just buy the album and hear it that way? I started writing music, for fun, after school. Wasn't much else I could do with an early 386, and I had recently discovered MIDI and tried my hand at multi-track recordings. A lot of my current music came from this period (Jazzanna, Contemplation, Reflection, Happenstance, and Jaycatt's Boogie). There are many others that ended up on my CD from this period too, that I need to relearn to be able to play live.

So, now I'm on Secondlife playing music. I played SL for about two months before I was asked to fill in during Frogg Marlowe's breaks. It got to be so much fun that I ended up doing longer and longer sets, until I eventually had an hour worth of my own material. Having the hour lets me do my own shows, which is very cool :D Frogg and I have also started collaborating on duets, which I really have the most fun playing. It's nice when the pressure is off and there's another performer taking up the slack if you hit a wrong chord or don't quite know what to do during a certain part. We now both have our solo CDs for sale (Frogg actually has two, the current one and an earlier one that dedicated fans should ask him about ;)). We're working on a CD containung our duets, but it's hard to find the time to record for it.