My family has always been musical, my mum plays piano, dad used to play guitar now he plays uke and sings in a band. My mum used to teach me piano then eventually I came across the guitar and with a bit of inspiration (School of Rock!) I picked one up and fell in love!

My earliest musical memory is of my family and me sitting around an old cassette tape recorder (circa 1972, age 2) and singing different songs. I still have the recordings.

My singing debut was with this song:

I’m a witch
Boom! Boom! (clap, clap)
I’m a witch
Boom! Boom! (clap, clap)
With a pointed hat on my head…. (hands point over head…forming a hat)
I jump on my broom (pretend to jump on broomstick)
And I sweep the sky (sweeping motion)
While children are in bed (head resting on hands)

My mother always played vinyl records for me when I was a wee lad: Simon & Garfunkel, Mamas & Papas, Neil Diamond, John Denver, …

My aunt play piano, my other aunt plays about 3 i’ve forgotten, my mum play guitar my dad plays guitara and used to play bass. My cousin plays piano and violin, my other cousin plays trumpet and I play guitar, drums and vocals.

-My older siblings listened to a lot of David Bowie and Queen when I was young
-watching videos of the Clash, the Vapors, and DEVO on TV when I was young
-disney and warner brothers cartoons and movies- Winnie the Pooh, Fantasia, Dumbo, Peter Pan, and a lot of the shorts- Chip and Dale, Bugs Bunny
-DTV (disney’s version of MTV)- stuff like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtENGZz99TI
-American Graffiti

I always loved music, but I didn’t become truly obsessed with music until I was 15 and I started listening to a lot of classic rock and soon got into punk and all kinds of alternative. Then I got an acoustic guitar at age 16. It didn’t take me very much time to move to electric. I got a Les Paul copy because I wanted to be like Jimmy Page. It didn’t take me long to get into pedals yet and within a year I had a frequency analyzer and a blues driver.

How did I learn to love music? There are a few interesting sources.

The first, undoubtedly, is my mom. While not a musician, she loves music. She used to listen to disco, soul, R&B, pop, classical, and even a bit of rock. Whatever she could dance to. I was exposed to a lot of it as a kid, and while I’m a terrible dancer, I still have a soft spot for the great music of the 1970s and 1980s that made people move to the groove.

The second is my father. He’s always admired movie scores (as do I), and grew up with a wealth of exposure to traditional Mexican musical genres such as mariachi. He has a powerful singing voice, and every time I go visit my parents, I can expect him to break into mariachi songs just for the heck of it and fill the room with his voice. He also helped me learn how to play an acoustic guitar when I was young, but it wasn’t until college that I returned to playing an instrument – this time, picking up an electric bass and discovering my true passions.

The third, oddly enough, is video games. I love well-composed video game soundtracks, and having grown up with a fondness for RPGs, I was exposed to some of the best music video games have to offer. Video games have particularly contributed to my interest in experimental and progressive genres of music.

On a road trip a while back, I happened to watch School of Rock. At one point, Jack Black hands a kid a copy of Fragile, by Yes, and tells him to listen to the track Roundabout. My parents happened to have that CD, so I gave it a try. Suffice to say, I’m still recovering. From Yes came ELP and Jethro Tull, then Talking Heads, CSN&Y, Gentle Giant, Kraftwerk, Miles Davis, Stravinsky, The Cure, et cetera. Then, after I switched piano teachers from a twenty five year old session guitarist to a very old, experienced avant-jazz player, my world changed again. Steve Reich and Terry Riley, more Miles Davis, Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, and on and on down the rabbit hole. Lastly, I met my current band’s guitarist, who introduced me to indie and modern alternative: Radiohead, LCD Soundsystem, Decemberists, TV On The Radio, Dirty Projectors, Justice, Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective, and what have you. It’s an amazing journey so far, I can’t wait to see what happens next.

When I first heard music it hit me like a tidal wave. When I was a kid I remember waking into my cousin’s bedroom, he was blasting Iron Man out of an old cassette boom box while air-guitaring. It was so loud and so powerful. Ozzy’s Speak of The Devil record had just come out, so it was a live version. We listened to that record over and over. It sounded larger than life.

Another earliest memories of discovering music was watching cable and back then, between movies, HBO used to play music videos. Whodathunkit, but HBO played Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast… we were blown away! We went to the record store the next day. There it was sitting on the big rack at the front of the store. We walked out with it I listened to that record so many times I memorized it… the screaming guitars, the searing rhythms, the power of the vocals and the driving of the drums and bass. I was hooked.

I was lucky enough to get an electric guitar not long after these events. We went to Manny’s, on 48th St. in NYC. It was a Kramer Striker guitar with a Gorilla GG-20 Amp. The coolest part was that we drove from our home in New Jersey to New York. Lining the walls of Manny’s were autographed photos of Iron Maiden and so many other stars I had been listening to.

Now I wanted to play like the guitarists on these records, and I wanted my guitars to sound like theirs. So I bought & sold & traded tons of gear, searching for the coolest guitar sounds. I wanted the guitar to sound huge, with lots of distortion that was tight on the low end and thick on the high end.

I traveled to New York quite often in those days for guitar gear. I had fallen in love with ESP Guitar necks. These necks had ebony fingerboards and big jumbo frets. I would attach them to various Fender, Kramer and ESP bodies and experiment with Schaller and Seymour Duncan pickups. I had a ton of fun putting these guitars together and taking them apart with reckless abandon.

I was playing these guitars at shows in New Jersey and New York and hot rodding my guitars and my amp rig all along. For the amp set-up I was using modern rack gear and various pedals until one day, I went vintage! I had picked up an old Fender Bandmaster Head that I ran through a Marshall 8×10. I was still using pedals and preamps for the gain. Back in those days there was no E-Bay and there was no interest in older gear so you could pick up vintage gear cheap.

Then I got my first Marshall. It was a hand wired 1973 Plexi Super-Lead Head and a 4×12 from the mid-70’s. Once again, it felt like I was hit with a tidal wave! I had been playing a ’76 Black Les Paul Custom for a few years now and it wasn’t until I got that set-up: the vintage Les Paul and Marshall, that three things happened… I realized exactly what I could or couldn’t play on the guitar without all my rack effects, I realized what excellent tone was, and I became much more discriminating with my pedals.

Atomic Music in Maryland had a lot of gear that I would pick up. The first pedal I got after my Les Paul and Marshall that stuck was an EH Phase Shifter. I used that pedal for gigs in every style of music from hard rock to funk to R&B. I have an EH LPB-1 pedal which I used in the Video that’s linked on the Blog page. That pedal drives an amp so transparently!

So after years of playing guitar and experimenting with gear I found my ultimate guitar tone and learned how to play just like my hero’s. But I have two new hero’s now… my boys, Noah Hunter and Lukey Alexander. My boys are fearless and full of vigor, and they rock… and you can see in the video! The story is that I had just discovered Guitar World’s Betcha Can’t Play This series and I decided to give it a go. I had turned on my laptop and played it a couple times… then Noah comes up and starts listening… and rocking to my amazement!! Check it out! There are actually two versions on my http://www.YouTube.com/veryjimmy -one where Noah had just walked in, and then the one you see.

Thanks alot for reading! Thanks to Scott Mathews for finding the video!!

Best of Luck,

-Jimmy Maguire