I grew up on Long Island, in a house that always had music in it. There was a piano, and the radio was pretty much always on. I tried a bunch of instruments as a kid and none of them stuck, but then I picked up a guitar as a teenager and that was sort of it for everything else. I'd been a computer kid up to that point, and the guitar just took over.
I went to the Crane School of Music and graduated in 2000. It was rough at first, because I couldn't really read music and I spent most of my first year fixing that just so I could keep up with everyone else. But once I got past it things really opened up, and I got deep into jazz, found my own playing, and somewhere in there figured out that I liked making music with other people a lot more than playing on my own, and that part never left me.
I figured I'd perform and teach and that would be the life. Then about six months after I graduated a literary agent called (she knew my guitar teacher, Doug Rubio) and she was looking for someone to write a guitar book. I'd never written anything longer than a term paper, so it was a little terrifying, but I said yes anyway, and with a very patient editor I got it done. It sold, they asked for another, and pretty soon I was writing most days.
Around all of that I was teaching constantly (private students, lessons, anyone who wanted to learn) and somewhere in there it clicked that the books were really the same thing, just at a bigger scale. I've always liked taking something that looks complicated and showing someone how it actually works, and that's stayed at the center of pretty much everything I've done since.
One of those books was about home recording, and researching it pulled me into the world of music software and the people who build it. One thing led to another, and in 2008 I left New York and a musician's life behind and moved across the country to work in technology.
I figured it would be temporary, and it's been nearly twenty years. I build software, and lately I spend most of my time on AI, which I use in just about everything I do now. The teaching followed me there, too. A lot of what I do is mentoring, helping the people coming up figure things out, and that's honestly one of my favorite parts of the job.
I never really stopped writing or playing through any of it. The writing is slower these days (I just put out a third edition of The Efficient Guitarist, and there's a second volume on the way), but it's still there. And the music never went anywhere either; there's almost always something playing in my head, and most of the time it's me, whatever I'd play if I had a guitar in my hands. I'm in a classical guitar ensemble every week, I sit in with jazz players when I can, I'm finally learning piano, and I go hear live music whenever I get the chance.
The biggest change came late. When the pandemic shut the office, it hit me how much of my world was work, and that even when I was home I was still inside, writing and practicing and playing. We'd left the city by then, and with some time on my hands I started going outside, and I spent so many hours out there walking and riding a bike and just existing in a world I'd never really spent any time in. I'd spent my whole life indoors making things, so being outside that much was new to me, and it changed me more than I expected.
I don't really know what's next, but I know what the pieces are: the music, the work, the time outside, the people I love. And mostly I'm just trying to live it and enjoy it.