I've played in various groups for about 8 years now and while I've enjoyed playing music with other people (and I'm looking now for other musician to perform with) sometimes it's best to just do things yourself. This profile is dedicated to the sort of material that I've written and recorded by myself, or with assistance from musicians who never plan on performing live with me.I started playing in 7th after I asked my dad (who learned guitar as teenager and played in a band as well) to show me my first couple of chords on his guitar. I practiced just about every day for the first couple months, and to this day, it's a strange day if I do NOT at some point pick up a guitar, if only to strum two or three chords.The first band I played in was 'Deseret" and I find it hard to believe that anyone except for me, Ed, Kate, and Mike would care about that band at all. For a while Mike was out of the band and during that time period I forced myself to learn guitar. Around freshman year of high school I quit/got kicked out and formed my own group, which consisted of me and Kirk Pillar (who is now in Blutige Nacht; a metal band also based in the Aurora, IL area) and eventually, after not talking to him for something like a year, me and Ed started hanging out agian and he joined 'the Infidels', which we re-christened Infidelity.Around this time my parents gave me a roland digital recorder for either christmas or my birthday (I can't remember which) and I quickly recorded my first 'solo effort' over the demo disk included with the recorder. Over the next couple years I would use a truly monumentous number of Zip disks to do the same thing, or helping Ed record his songs (he worked the same way as me, recording every part except for the drums, which I would play), and once in a while even collaborating (but that was rare then, and was progressively rarer the longer we worked together).I taught Darin to play guitar over the phone somewhere around 1999 and he joined the band as soon as he could play. Musically, Darin didn't really see eye to ey with me or Ed, but he was basically the only person we could find. Darin is now actually a very good guitarist and bassist and fairly competent on drums. He never was as comfortable with recording all the parts to his own songs, but, having no choice, more or less, does so as well now.I did a stint playing in Blutige Nacht with my cousin Alaine and it forced me to apply the music theory electives I took as an undergrad at UIC, since Alaine didn't part write and wanted all her music notated. While I didn't really like the music we played, it was still incredibly thrilling to hear Alaine play the parts I wrote. Shortly thereafter Lauren joined infidelity as a trumpeter and I got to experiance the same thrill hearing her play parts that I wrote.Infidelity went nowhere fast becuase we were so anti-commercial that we felt uncomfortable telling people to pay to see us play or pay for CDs. Except Darin, he sold copies of one or two Infidelity 'albums' and to this day neither me nor Ed has seen a penny from those sales. Ed left Infidelity during early January, 2006, and us surviving member, Darin, Lauren, and I are searching, with various degrees of desperation, to find another member and continue to perform.But Infidelity was primarily a 'live' phenomenon, even if 'live' meant practicing in my living room, and almost all the material that me or Ed wrote was recorded by mostly one person, and in my case, almost ALWAYS one person. As it becomes apparant that Infidelity may be dead for good, I'm looking towards breaking this tradition and finding other musicians (particular brass and vocalists) to work with recording my songs.If you're interested in that, well:
[email protected]'m now performing in a new, as yet un-named group that includes all the old infiidelity members except Ed. I'm still interested in meeting and working with other musicians though.
