Tino

My board right now!

It wasn’t until my mid 20’s until I started making serious moves towards building a rig. I’ve practiced electric guitar since I’ve started playing. But I’ve never performed it (leading at least) until I started playing for my church. It’s been such an enriching experience thus far. However, I still play those styles with my brother from time to time (just for pleasure now). I also now play (for pleasure as well) with a work mate of mine. He’s an on and off semi professional drummer. I gather with him and his friends and we have our fun. That playing definitely goes into the indie rock scene/style. That’s new for me. And I have a ton of fun doing it. So as you can tell from all of that, my rig is built (and being built) to be as versatile as possible. What I plan to keep on my board at all times is compression, boost and overdrive for gain staging, volume, modulation, delay, and reverb. Nothing too radical, but those things do allow me to fit in a lot of different spaces. I hope this site thrives and prospers. Guitar playing has been a great source of inspiration and fulfillment for me. I’m still on my journey. And I’m by far not the most learned or skilled when it comes to gear. But being a part of this culture and being able to share and relate will only impassion me more.

What kind of music do I play is the next question I suppose. I don’t like to place limitations on something like this. So it probably wouldn’t surprise you when I say that my tastes kinda go all over the place. And what stylistic spaces I play in follow suit. Routinely, I place for my church’s worship band a few Sunday’s a month. We play a lot of different people’s songs. But most consistently we play Elevation, Hillsong, Bethel, Mosaic and our original songs. When I was younger, I played in three piece band with my brother and my best friend. We landed a lot of different types of gigs. House band for college homecoming reunions, talent shows, coffee shops, holiday parties, student events. Just to name a few. Our instrumentation was pretty straight forward though. Those settings never really called for anything super sophisticated, sonically at least. They were mostly vibe setting, which was cool with us. That’s what we were all really into. I laid down rhythm guitar (usually acoustic), my brother sang and played lead parts on an electric guitar, and my best friend played a simple drum kit. We definitely had a pocket in regards to vibe and style. We played a lot of music that featured mellow lead guitar and smooth male vocals. We found ourselves doing a lot of John Mayer. Those were our favorite tunes. We went from covering R&B, soul, 90’s and early 2000’s hip hop, blues, classic rock, bossanova. But we got creative with it too. We liked to take top 40 stuff, too, and arrange it to fit the vibe. It got really soulful and super enjoyable to play.

With that being said, I’ll take this opportunity to introduce and say some relatable things about myself. I’ve been playing since age 14. I’m now 29. I was not some virtuoso from the jump like a lot of you guys may have been. I didn’t really make my first major breakthrough as a guitarist until I was 18. What started connecting the dots for myself was a music theory course I took my senior year in high school. I’d like to take this moment to forewarn that I am not, nor do I claim to be, some kind of music or guitar philosophizer or pontificator. However, in my journey, when things started clicking for me due to this music course I took in high school, I attribute it to two things. This is a categorical generalization I make about guitar playing. Those two things are technique and knowledge. I jumpstarted and inspired a journey of knowledge seeking through completing this high school level music theory course. And then I took a few more courses in undergrad where I could. I’m not a natural player. I don’t have giant John Mayer hands. So building these knowledge structures was fundamental to my technical development.

Hi All! I really like the concept behind this website. I know there is a lot of gear sharing and vibe showcasing going on on places like Instagram and Reddit, but those are places where a community for everything exists, and therefore, competing with each other. This place is only for our community and culture. Which also has allowed for the design of the site to function in service of diving deep into the culture of gear and tone.