Age: 17
Guitar: 2000 Santa Cruz Tony Rice
Mandolin: 1998 Kentucky KM-140
Banjo: 1996 Gibson Granada
Bass: An old thing my brother got for Christmas one year
Pick: A very hard tortoise shell pick
Guitar Strings: D’Addario EJ-17's
Mic: AKG C3000
Recorder: Tascam portastudio 414 four track recorder

A little about me:
I went to my first bluegrass festival and started playing music in the summer of 1995. Back then I was ten years old and dragging around a tenor banjo, going to the youth jams and what not. That Christmas I got a Yamaha guitar and a beginning guitar video from Santa (my dad). We've gone to that same festival in Minnesota every August for the past 7 years and each year I got hooked onto bluegrass a little bit more. The big year for me was 1999, when I seen the Lonesome River Band at that festival and got to talk to Kenny Smith and Sammy Shelor. My CD collection grew from about 3 CD's to about 50 that year :) and bluegrass is all I listen to now. My main instrument is the guitar and I started playing bass shortly after starting guitar in 1996. I started playing banjo sometime around March of this year just mainly for fun because I love the instrument (sorry everyone). I've been just messing around with the mandolin for two years or so, but just recently I've actually been trying to learn how to play so that I can sound good.

Influences:
For guitar, Tony Rice was my main influence. He's the guy that made me want to learn how to flatpick, so I studied his stuff for about two years. Tim Stafford, Bryan Sutton and Kenny Smith are also among my top influences. For Banjo, I love Sammy Shelor's playing. He's just amazing. I also like to listen to Ron Block, Terry Baucomb, Gena Britt, and Jason Burleson. For mandolin, it's Alan Bibey all the way! I just love his playing and I'm learning as much of his stuff as I can. I also love to hear Adam Steffey, Wayne Benson and Darrell Webb.

The Songs:
Salt Creek
It's just a great instrumental. I tried to do my best on it with every instrument. I think it's one of the first songs I learned on the guitar back when I was first starting to flatpick.

Eclipse
This is the first instrumental I wrote that I worked up with every instrument. I love it and we always play it in our band, but it was nice to record it playing all the instruments myself. I was pretty much straight forward with the banjo breaks except for some twists in the second one. I tried to do the best I could with the mando but I didn't play enough back then to do anything great. I tried to let loose on the guitar break while still keeping it sounding decent.

The Macbeth Song
I love this song. I wrote this song for a project I had in my grade 12 English class in May, and I got better than perfect on it! This is the exact version I handed in to my teacher so if you don't know the Shakespeare play "Macbeth," you're about to get an English lesson, through bluegrass! You don't get that everyday. The melody was taken from the traditional song "Tom Dooley" which I heard Blue Highway do live one time. This was also the first song I recorded with vocals.