Life
I'm a CPA, and have been for over 30 years. Because I have a professional consulting practice, and my specialty is taxes, I have never been able to put in the guitar practice hours/woodshedding that I would like, to achieve any level of technical adequacy. So, I am blissfully not concerned about ever being able to "shred" or such things, and at my age I'm fine with that! I can still appreciate those that can, and who can push the note-per-second boundries!
I'm super-fortunate to have a family that allows (indulges) me to even make time for music. One of my rationalizations has been that playing music is cheaper than playing golf (and requires more movement, concentration, and eye-hand coordination), and I'm hoping that club dues and greens fees are still what I have heard they were ($$), so that it's still true!
Music
I'm not a professional musician, unlike a lot of the people in many Rochester bands. But I have been fortunate to play with very talented Rochester-area musicians over the years, who have tolerated my playing, singing, and odd humor!
I love playing guitar and performing music. It has been a pursuit of mine for most of my life, excluding when I didn't play at all from approx. 1985-2000, due to finishing college/night school, getting my career started and advancing, relationship issues (!), parenting of young children, etc. etc....LIFE, basically.
I am a lifelong student of music, and lifelong appreciator of great musicians/guitarists. I've been fortunate to have seen most of the guitarists that I consider great musicians, and my bucket list of guitarists that I have yet to see, has grown very short; because most have stopped touring, retired, passed away, etc.
Guitar
The tones of a guitar are a beautiful thing to me, whether from a steel string acoustic guitar, a nylon string classical guitar, or an electric guitar. I swore I would never get a digital profiler/processor/modeler, because all the electric guitar tones that have been played or recorded, that I personally consider to be both tasty and unique, have been straight to a old tube amp and/or included analog devices in the signal chain (thinking of Duane Allman, Mick Taylor, Larry Carlton, Robin Trower, Eric Johnson, David Gilmore, Jeff Beck, and, of course, a skinny kid from Pasadena…).
But time and technology march on, and so must I. And so, I freely confess that I use a digital processor/modeler, and even though it did cure my analog pedal addiction, I'm still chasing and tweaking tones as part of my quest for great sound. It's just all occurring on my laptop now.
Thank you for vising this site; if I'm playing at an event that you are attending, please come up and say hello! Our first drink is on me!
Please check out "other" Paul Henrys! There are a couple of real professional musicians in there: