He toured as the lead guitarist for the legendary Oak Ridge Boys for 23 years while maintaining a busy recording schedule in Nashville. He has made hundreds of TV appearances, played thousands of live performances nationally and abroad – including three performances at the White House – and has shared the stage with everyone from Lou Rawls and James Brown to Merle Haggard and Tim McGraw. He currently works at Sweetwater as the guitarist for the recording studio and also creates written and video content for their website and social media channels.
"I look at music fairly holistically, especially stylistic, genre-wise, or even era-wise, decade-wise. And so, it’s all sort of available, musically, at any given time. So, that can be option overload."
"Growing up it always felt like everybody that was in the entertainment business, it was almost like they were inside the TV... And it felt so distant and so far away you just didn't know how to crack that barrier."
"There's always more to learn. There's always a new way to look at something. There's always some new piece of information you can digest and work into what you do. So, just on that level, it's infinite. Music is infinite."
"If you're going to do anything in the music business it's really important to know how to be good in front of a camera."
"So, they, of course, heard me playing guitar and said, 'Wow, you're a really good guitar player. We know somebody with Marie Osmond and they're actually looking for a guitar player. Would you like us to make that connection for you'?"
"When you think about auditioning for a road gig especially, it's one thing to work with somebody on a recording session for a couple hours in the studio and you're wearing headphones and everybody's fairly isolated. You gotta communicate a little bit, but it's not, you don't really have to hang out with them. But if you're on the road with 'em, you're sharing your life together... So, you gotta be a good hang. That's really important."
"On so many facets of the business, you see -- no matter what trajectory your business takes -- you see a lot of the same people on the way up and a lot of the same people on the way down. So, it's always good to be good to people, for a bunch of reasons."
"We'd get there at 8am and that was everything. That was our music rehearsal. That was the shot blocking for the cameras, and that was audio and everything, and we had to knock that out really fast. We had, like, 45 minutes or an hour. We'd learn two or three songs and just, ya' know, it was like One, Two, Three, here we go."
"We also had to be flexible because something would inevitably go wrong, of course it does, ya' know? And it's just all about keeping your composure and keeping your head on straight and just being a pro."
"If you're waiting for the muse to strike you... to write a song, man, you've gotta get in. You just gotta, ya' know, just, pencil to paper or hand on the instrument or whatever it is that works for you to write a song. You just have got to do it. You can't wait around for all the stars to line up and for it to be perfect. It ain't gonna happen."
"The first time I ever performed at the White House was actually, it was the, it's kind of something that all the presidents do. You don't really hear about it, but it's like the last official party, quote unquote, on one of your last days in office. So, we played in the East Room."
Original composition (instrumental) for product demonstration
Original composition for an advertisement for a guitar line (instrumental)