Steve DiGiorgio born in 7th November 1967, in Waukegan, Illinois, although he has lived in California for most of his life. He grew up in a rather musical environment, and quickly developed a love of expressing himself in the low end of musical compositions. He learned to play the bass clarinet, tuba, bass trombone and of course the string bass (upright, or double bass -- it wasn't until later he picked up the electric bass). Jazz and classical music played some part in his musical upbringing, although later in his life, he found his taste developing into the realms of heavy metal. In 1984, he founded a high school band named Sadus along with his friends Jon Allen, Darren Travis and Rob Moore, unknowing that their little high school project would eventually become one of the thrash metal legends of its day -- incidentally, it was Steve's fretless bass lines that were the band's main claim to fame; the fretless bass was all but unknown in metal at that point.
He is an american musician, famous for his personal way of playing the bass and widely renowned for his technical skills, and he is one of the very few bass players in the metal scene who plays a fretless bass.
Since he was a child he had a ampia veduta musicale, listening all kind of musica, from Jazz to Heavy Metal and his heroes were (and are) Jaco Pastorius, Billy Sheehan and Steve Harris.He gave one of his most famous contributions to Death. Individual Thought Patterns, that Di Giorgio recorded with Chuck Schuldiner's band, is an album that has to be listened. The bassist is able to create lines absolutely different to the lines of the guitars, making the bass a soloistic instrument, creating intricate phrasings admired and reproduced from a very big number of bassplayers. You can notice his grade in tracks like Overactive Imagination, Trapped In A Corner and The Philosopher, where DiGiorgio performs a spectacular bass solo in duet with Chuck Schuldiner's guitar
In 1984, he founded a high school band named Sadus along with his friends Jon Allen, Darren Travis and Rob Moore, a Tecnic Thrash Death band. In Swallowed In Black, expecially in Last Abide and Images, we can notice that Steve plays funambolic riffs and unexpected changes of beat. With Sadus he recorded the last album too, Out Of Blood, in 2006.
He has played bass guitar in other metal bands such as Control Denied, Autopsy, Testament, Vintersorg, Iced Earth.
He is also a founding member of the jazz-band Dark Hall, born in 2003.
In 2004 he became the bassplayer for the Sebastian Bach band, ex-Skid Row lead singer. With Sadus, he also plays additional synthesizers.
Within his genre, Steve DiGiorgio is respected for his playing skils. He is noted for his ability to execute very fast 32nd notes with his plucking fingers, as opposed to using a pick or playing at half the speed of his bandmates as many metal bass players do. In most musical genres, the bass guitar is plucked with two fingers, but this is inadequate for duplicating the speed at which many death metal guitarists play. (Metal guitarists have the advantage of playing with picks, which makes the execution of rapid 32nd notes relatively easy.) In order to compensate for this, DiGiorgio uses three fingers in a sequential pattern. DiGiorgio is not the only bass player who uses this technique (others include Terence "Geezer" Butler of Black Sabbath, Mika Horiuchi of Cellador, Cliff Burton of Metallica, Alex Webster of Cannibal Corpse and Billy Sheehan).
He uses Ampeg amplifiers (the "big ballsey one million watt SVT", as he calls his main amp) and exclusively strings his basses with Rotosound strings.
As for basses, he currently has an endorsement deal with ESP Guitars, and his main axe is his custom-built ESP 5-string fretless. He also owns several basses by Carvin and Rickenbacker, as well as a homemade fretless Fender copy.
