Hello From Long Beach, California, Usa

My name is TK Major. I'm a songwriter, guitarist, and singer from Long Beach, CA. I've been playing... a long darn time. (OK, about 4 decades, most of which I was not busy practicing or developing my craft. I've seen others get where I am in 4 years. Or so. )

I've split my time between electric and acoustic, but in recent years, I've seldom pulled out my electrics, preferring the inexpensive 000 I got a few years ago (Silver Creek, a Musician's Friend house brand made -- pretty well made for the dough, which was minimal -- in China) and my ancient and worn Yamaha G130a from the early 70s (I bought it for $37.50 US in '74). But I have a bunch of other gits, as well. None of them fancy or expensive.

I've never been able to settle into a single style (of playing or writing). I've bounced around like a subatomic particle in a cyclotron, starting out as a folkie who listened to a lot of acid rock and outsider prog (not your ELP stuff, by and large), getting sucked deeply into the punk/new music. After I'd been in that scene for a few years I got nailed on my motorcycle by a careless driver, had to leave my old warehouse manager job, went to school, became a recording engineer, worked at that fitfully through the 80s, getting a belly full of the music biz (actually more than a belly full), became a database programmer, built a 16 track project studio where I did my own work and took clients (for much of the 90s), then got sick of working on others music and took down my shingle. Now I'm fully back to computer work [now on the web] for the money thing, and working on my own music for my own pleasure.

My musical tastes have always been on the wildly eclectic side. In the punk/new music era I listened to both punk and what some have called no wave -- the dark side of new wave like Television, Magazine, Joy Division. In the 80s, I drifted slowly away from punk as it seemed to be ossifying into the same cliches and formulae that drove me away from the mainstream of rock/pop world. I moved more into roots and the more adventurous outsider post-punk stuff. In the late 80s and early 90s, bored with the scene, I started reaching out and listening to rave, club, and, especially, dub-influenced stuff. When I first heard Portishead, I felt like I'd found a new home in the kind of dub influenced trip hop they and a few others were doing. I'd been a synthesizer lab tutor in school in the early 80s and I plunged back into electronics deeply. But I burn out -- and scenes burn out -- and by 2003, I'd pretty much abandoned most of my electronica trappings and was playing a lot of acoustic. I bought a cheap banjo and a cheaper mandolin (I'd always wanted both) and found myself drawn by my fingerpicking and by those new toys back to the bluegrass and folk I'd loved in junior high (when all the teenyboppers were listening to all that British Invasion stuff like the Beatles ).

Anyhow, I suspect I'm the only one left reading this... that is, if I didn't fall asleep proofreading...