What are your roots

[dave.king1]

once you've found even a small part of it, remains with us forever.

Music like all of the arts finds us, we may find our place in it but it finds us

[pablopepper]

Grew up listening to my parent's record collection. Stones, Beatles, Dire Straits, the Jackson Five and Simon and Garfunkel were pretty popular in my household. At age 8 I started piano lessons. Hated the lessons, really dug the theory (wish I kept that up), but loved messing about and making up stupid songs. At age 10 I discovered Def Leppard and decided electric guitars were the coolest thing on the planet. Not much has changed since then, ha!

I began playing guitar on an el cheapo 60s classical acoustic which originally belonged to my aunt. It had three strings because the rest of the tuning machines had broken off. I got a book from the library about guitars and learned to tune those three strings off the piano and I was away. A year or two later when I started high school, I also swapped piano lessons for guitar lessons with a borrowed classical with a full complement of strings. I cannot tell you how much I hated it. Spent a whole year relearning scales and theory when all I wanted to do was jam out on some chords. Gave up and returned the guitar.

At 15, I had my first proper job and a little bit of cash of my own to burn. Bought myself a bright red Falcon brand stratocaster copy (never heard of them since). It was a piece of crap, plywood body, crackly electronics and a bend in the neck that could launch arrows, but I loved it. This time, no lessons, just sat in my room and played along with my stereo. A few friends showed me how to play barre chords and that was it. In love. It was a good time for this to happen, early 90s, hair metal virtuosos were on the way out and grunge was starting to make an impression. All of a sudden being in a band was a possibility without having to have the skills of a shred demon. My first band Talon(ugh) was comprised of like minded fellows from my scout group with the added advantage of being able to use the scout hall as a rehearsal space. We played the local 'battle of the bands' circuit for a while playing covers of whatever was popular at the time (ie. lots of Nirvana, etc), never had a reliable drummer so fizzled out after a couple of years.

After high school finished, I joined up with a few lads who had gone to my school, but never really mingled with, and formed PDA (it stood for Please Don't Ask, hilarious right?). My first proper originals act. Heavily REM/Pixies influenced, it was a sort of alternative/folk/punk thing. Lots of vaguely angsty songs sometimes with piano and violin! Thanks to early shifting lineups, we found ourself at one point with three guitarists and no bass player. That's when I took the plunge and started as a four stringer. Bass, for whatever reason, felt a lot more natural to me and I fell into the groove and never looked back. A few years, a bunch of gigs and a lot of fun times later that band imploded due to internal tensions.

Spent a while trying to start something else up, but nothing ever seemed to gel. I got heavily into funk music. Bootsy, Parliament, James Brown. Also discovered Zappa. Weirdly, these influences led to an off hand, rather intense conversation at a party with a guy who performed the raps on my brother's band's (Hot Rubber Glove) records. A few days later I got a call to come and audition for a band he was putting together. This band ended up being my taste of the real music scene. Schoolfight was hip hop/rock outfit with ambition. In my time with the band, we put out 2 eps, a studio and a live album, we toured all over Queensland and a bit of NSW, headlined sold out shows at venues I had only dreamed about, played with bands I admired, got national airplay on multiple radio stations, had music featured in short films and a few dirtbike and snowboard videos and placed in the top 15 of the 4ZZZ Hot 100 twice. All things I really never thought possible. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with that band, but as a new father discovered that I did not have the time or will to dedicate to family, full time work and full time band, so I quit. The band is still around 10 years later, and I still go see them play once a year or so.

After that I lost interest, packed my gear up and didn't look at it for about 3 or 4 years. When I finally did find the will to get back in to it, I found my guitars needed work and I didn't want to pay for them to get set up (thanks to bad experience with a tech telling me my guitar was "unrepairable" AFTER they had charged me $100. The truss rod was stuck, I fixed it myself), I decided to learn to do it myself. Not long after that I came across a post about kit guitars on Reddit by Adam which led me here, and I've been here ever since.


Valley Fiesta show at the Zoo in Brisbane 2005 or 2006. I'm the one with the bass, duh.

[king casey]

Some common themes here.
As I posted in my intro post, I started on guitar @ 12 (my twin brother started on bass the same day).
The Beatles and Stones were the main offenders.
Alice Cooper & Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd when in high school.

Reached 16 and dumped the guitar in favour of saxophone.
Set myself up as a busker, with a view to getting gigs...a sideline in CD's.
Being doing that now for 7 years.
A few months back now I got back into learning the guitar.

Meanwhile my brother hasn't done too bad.
I got a mention on his wiki page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyn_P._Casey

cheers, Mark.

[pablopepper]

Holy crap, the Triffids, the Blackeyed Susans and the Bad Seeds! That's a hell of a career.

[wazkelly]

Some really good back stories here.

@ Simon, hope your health remains good so that you can get back into building when the weather fines up over there.

[Simon Barden]

Thanks. I'm really not bad at all most of the time - especially as I can now generally control who I meet with and avoid people who have colds/flu etc. Whilst there are never any guarantees in life, what I've got is one of those things that often doesn't get any worse - it's certainly stable at the moment - and I suffer more from my depression (though that's normally OK) than my CLL.

[wazkelly]

Hopefully this forum helps you find other things to keep you occupied and therefore keep the blues away.

[Simon Barden]

Sometimes it's just too tempting to keep sitting by the computer and not getting on and doing things. I've got an old DIY kit monosynth that I took apart to replace all the key contacts on. A$300 of new J-wire contacts but I've done nothing on it for two years now!

[DrNomis_44]

@ Simon Barden As a person who was diagnosed with minor depression a few years ago, you're not the only one mate.


While describing my musical roots, I forgot to include how I started off getting interested in music and one of the first musical instruments I learnt to play, anyway, I guess it all started in primary school, one of the subjects was music, I've read some of my old school reports and one teacher commented that I enjoyed music, one of the first musical instruments I remember learning to play was a recorder, I think my interest in playing guitars started when I was about 6 years old, I had to undergo surgery on the muscles of both my eyes because I was born cross-eyed as well as colour-blind and short-sighted (technically I should be wearing my glasses but they sometimes make it hard to focus my eyes, I can see well enough without them to be able to cross a road safely), so, my parents flew with me down to Perth (this was when MMA Airlines was still operating in the 70's, I have fond memories of that time), and I had the operations done at Princess Margaret Hospital (surprised that I can still remember that), and they were able to get my eyes more or less properly aligned so I could see better, after the operations I had to wear special sunglasses and I remember that my mum bought me a toy electric guitar made from thin painted sheet metal, she bought it because she thought I looked like a rock star.

[Kick]

The illness really sucks Simon