Well, since I started this blog with the intention of writing about the people involved in our own little scene, it would only be fair to start with myself, considering I'm also the host of this blog.
I will be your host for this blog
People usually refer to me as Marty Innerlogic. The Innerlogic-part comes from my little post-hardcore band
Innerlogic, which has played a significant role in my life. I'll get to them in a later posting. I'm 34 years old as of this writing and I've been involved in music since I was about 12, when I got my first real cassette-player (it was the 80's, folks). I starting playing guitar at 13, which has since then grown from an innocent hobby into an obsession, a way of life and ultimately a way to make a living, since by now I'm a guitar teacher by profession.
At 17 I started playing in bands, which I obviously still do now. At 18, right after high school, I was allowed to study at the
Groningen Conservatory, where I studied Jazz guitar and music teaching. I graduated when I was 22, becoming an unemployed musician. That's when started doing courses in IT, and at 24 I had graduated as a Sysadmin. I then got to work in IT support, hopping from one temping job to another while combining everything with playing and recording with several bands and teaching music.
Me rocking out earlier this year. Notice the hipster-indie beard.
As I mentioned earlier I started playing guitar when I was 13. At that age I had just discovered hard rock/heavy metal, gradually moving from Queen to Van Halen to Extreme (yeah, really...) leading me to Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax and Slayer at 15. This was around 1990/1991, so everything was still Before Grunge or BG as I will refer to in later postings. Three years later everything had changed and I was an avid (death)metalfan going into hardcore punk while spinning Faith No More records next to Steve Vai and Nirvana. Needless to say, I listened to everything that had guitars.
My first guitar was an old Spanish guitar which I had found in the attic. My mom had played a little guitar when she was younger. This is the guitar on which I first started studying scales. By that time I had made up my mind that I needed to have an electric guitar, so I started running several paper routes to save up money for a real electric guitar.
Around that period I also discovered that even though our town was boring and small and nothing really ever happened, we did have a great reasonably big independent record store called Pop-Eye in the town's centre. Pop-Eye was specialized in alternative music and had all kinds of underground stuff, with an especially big section in the back of the store with loads of metal albums and cd's, right next to the punk and hardcore-stuff. I wasn't ready for punk yet though, that would come a few years later. I would go around after school to hang out, browse the record bins, glare at the t-shirts I was afraid buying (seriously, those death metal shirts were pretty scary for a 14 year old and the music was even scarier) and listening to all those albums I could never afford buying. I discovered tons and tons of music there and I eventually got to know the owner called Hains and the rest of the staff really well in later years.
In august 1992 I finally had enough money to buy a real electric guitar and I bought a
Charvette guitar. It was a grey superstrat in the cheapest series that Charvel made, but is was quite a good guitar for the money. A few months later I had saved enough to buy a small guitar amp, a mini-Marshal 10 Watt practice amp. And boy, did I practice.
In 1993 when I was 16 I started taking guitar lessons from a guy called Russell Elford who lived in the nearby town Heerenveen, where I went to high school. He got me even more serious and motivated about playing guitar and he was also the person who first started explaining jazz-music and advanced chords and harmony to me, opening a Box of Pandora. I absorbed everything he teached me. By that time I was heavily into the guitar heroes of that era (Steve Vai, Joe Satriani,
Allan Holdsworth) and I had made up my mind that I wanted to study guitar for real at a Conservatory. Russell also dealt a little on the side with guitars and amps, so in the next year I bought my first real amp from him, a Marshall Valvestate 8080, which I still have but is completely beat up. He also got me my first really good guitar, a
Charvel Fusion Deluxe. That guitar would become one of my main workhorses for the coming years.
Charvel Fusion Deluxe, not unlike mine.
And that's when 1994 started and the bands came in. More on that in part II.
