I am simply a creator.
I started out very young with a love for piano. I seemed to have a talent for it. Soon I was winning composition awards and writing long hand written songs before I was 10. Then drums came into the mix. I started as a Jazz drummer. I listened to artists like Billy Cobham and Bill Bruford. I started taking lessons from Jerry Garcia of the Seattle Drum Shop. Soon I got to sit in with a group of jazz musicians that had a list of credentials a mile long. My first kit was an old pearl kit...but soon I upgraded to a beautiful Garcia set made of pine. The tonation of this set was amazing! This was the set I would tear it up with as I started playing rock.
As my junior year of high school started, music took a back seat to sports for a while. It wasn't until I entered the University of Washington that music came back into my life. I remember taking a piano class in college taught by Marc Sears. We had access to the piano rooms whenever we wanted. I found a lot of hours in those rooms. It had been a long time since I touched a piano...however I had some things I had to get out. Piano again became an emotional outlet for me and kept me sane. I began writing a song that would become the song that inspired me to create more. The song was Melancholic Dream. It is an 18 minute long song with around 3 movements in it. This song was telling a long story of my freshman year at college. Soon other songs began flowing out of my fingers. I would play on the downstairs piano in McMahon hall and I remember people coming down to me telling me how beautiful the song was and who it was by. This was part of the fuel that made me realize that people enjoyed what I was doing. It made me feel good to bring joy to others by sharing my music. And so my music career started.
After my second year of college I started dealing blackjack in a tribal casino and started playing drums in a band called Decent. We all knew eachother from high school so it was a fun little run. After Decent broke up we got a band together called Static Bloom. We stayed together for about 4 years or so. It was a great time. After Static Bloom finally called it quits I focused my musical energies on being a solo artist. Soon I was ontop of the New Age charts on all the online music sites. Throughout this time I put out 4 solo CD's. My music has been licensed on TV and in around 6 different countries. I feel very blessed that people out there are still getting enjoyment from what I created.
In 2004 I met a wonderful woman, Jackie, who became the person I leaned on. In 2007 we had a son and I found a new love for photography. My son and her daughter basically live behind a camera now because I shoot so many pictures. I really started studying what style I enjoyed and how I wanted to portray my images. As a natural progression I also started to get into video. One day I wanted to learn how to do a special effect and I stumbled on to videocopilot.net. After watching just one of Andrew Kramer's tutorials I was hooked. From then on every spare second I had I was practicing after effects and trying to learn how to do better special effects.
In 2010 I started a film company called Karate Monkey Films. My friends and I like to make short comedies, anything really to make people laugh. We've come up with some pretty good ones and have some more in the works. Besides Karate Monkey I am working deligently on some Melancholic Dream Productions video work as well. This includes photography, music videos, shorts and feature films. The goal is to create and inspire.
