About Me

I am a geek/guitar player/husband/songwriter living in State College, PA. I do not have a long list of musical accomplishments to list here. I didn’t grow up listening to the blues, watching people play guitar, or even seeing famous musicians. I grew up singing 4 part harmony in the Mennonite Church in Lancaster County, PA. I played piano for several years as a child (required for the son of a music teacher I guess….) I taught myself how to play drums in junior high school, but stopped playing after a while.

I got my first electric guitar at the age of 18 when I graduated from high school. During my first year at Penn State University, I got infected with the sound of blues guitar, largely due to the “From The Cradle” album by Clapton.

Later that year, I discovered Stevie Ray Vaughan and traded in any hope of a social life for the next several years. I was never a 6 hours a day guy, but there were plenty of days when I think everyone in my dorm wished Ihad taken up an interest in something else. I was bad. Really bad.

But towards the end of that first year, something started to click. I was able to hear things I hadn’t heard before, play things that I could never play before. Maybe because nobody told me it was supposed to take longer.So I kept playing.

Over the next 3-4 years, I learned the majority of what I know on guitar, but it was still pretty raw. The past 9-10 years have largely been spent writing songs, playing in small-time blues/rock bands, and polishing my style. There’s still a lot of work to be done in that area. I tend to play pretty sloppy when I’m out of shape, and I am most of the time these days.

Before running StevieSnacks full-time in August 2009, I spent a decade at a software company, moving from tech-support, to programming, to user-interface design, to website and marketing. My wife and I had our first child (Austin) in January, 2009. She works at Penn State University doing much more important work than I do. She’s Jamaican and from NY, and I’m a farm boy from Lancaster. Somehow we’re a perfect match for each other.

StevieSnacks was born on Oct 21st, 2007 when I uploaded a few videos to YouTube. The rest of the story is told throughout this site.