I have a lot of fun playing music now that I'm retired from the engineering world. It all got started with my kids being in the excellent musical theater program at the Edmonds Homeschool Resource Center (EHRC). Mike Corey does most of the music for them. My wife bugged him about how her husband was a musican from way back and how he should check me out. Well, there was a charity concert for Katrina that he was performing in, invited me to join, and we've been doing musicals ever since.

• Past/Present/Future Musical Performances:
• Fun Home - 2023-March - Ballyhoo Theater at EDCC Black Box - Guitar - (Electric, Steel String Acoustic, Nylon, 12-String Acoustic)
• On A Clear Day You Can See Forever - 2022-July/August - Ballyhoo Theater at EDCC Black Box - Sound (12 personal mics and orchestra)
• Best Xmas Pageant Ever - 2019-December - Red Curtian Foundation for the Arts - Guitar (Electric, Steel String Acoustic)
• American Idiot - 2019-July - Ballyhoo Theater at EDCC Black Box - Guitar 1 (Electric, Steel String Acoustic)
• Working - 2019-May - Northshore Performing Arts Center - Guitar (Electric, Steel String Acoustic, Nylon Acoustic, 12-String Acoustic, Mandolin)
• Footloose the Musical - 2018-July - Studio East - Guitar (Electric, Steel String Acoustic, Nylon Acoustic, Mandolin)
• Gutenberg The Musical - 2018-May - Driftwood Players - Guitar (Electric, Steel String Acoustic, Nylon Acoustic)
• B3ND: Our Time - 2017-December - Ballyhoo Theater - Guitar (Electric, 12-string)
• Xanadu - 2017-August - Ballyhoo Theater - Guitar
• Mary Poppins - 2017-July - Studio East - Banjo, Guitar (Electric, Steel String Acoustic)
• The Spitfire Grill - 2017-May - Ballyhoo Theater - Guitar(Acoustic, Nylon), Mandolin
• Bend2:R&J - 2017-January - Ballyhoo Theater - Guitar(Electric, 12-String, Nylon), Bass
• The Spitfire Grill - 2016-November - Edmonds Heights - Guitar(Acoustic, Nylon), Mandolin
• Carrie: the Musical - 2016-August - Ballyhoo Theater - Guitars: Electric(Les Paul, Strat), 12-String, Nylon
• Cabaret - 2016-July - Ballyhoo Theater - Banjo, Lap Steel Guitar
• Wizard of Oz - 2016-February - Edmonds Heights - Keyboards
• Bare the Musical - 2015-August - Ballyhoo Theater - electric guitar, 12-string acoustic guitar, nylon acoustic
• Big Fish - 2015-May - Edmonds Heights - 6-str acoustic, 12-str acoustic, banjo, mandolin, slide dobro, electric guitar, nylon acoustic (7 total!)
• Side Show - 2015-Jan - Edmonds Heights - Guitars, Banjo, Mandolin, Keyboards
• Legally Blonde - 2014-Aug - Ballyhoo Theater - Guitars, Mandolin, Keyboards
• Shrek the Musical - 2014-Jan - Edmonds Heights - Guitars, Keyboards
• Return To The Forbidden Planet - 2013-Dec - Edmonds Heights - Guitars, Keyboards
• Godspell (2012 ver) - 2013-Aug - Ballyhoo Theater - Acoustic & Electric Guitars, Mandolin, Ukulele, Keyboards
• The Wedding Singer - 2013-May - Bothell HS - Guitar, Mandolin, Keyboards
• Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat - 2012-August - Ballyhoo Theater - Guitar, Mandolin, Keyboard
• 13 - 2012-July - Ballyhoo Theater - Guitars (electric,acoustic)
• Xanadu - 2012-May - Edmonds Heights - Guitar, Kbd2
• Starmites - 2012-Feb - Edmonds Heights - Guitar, B3
• Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat - 2011-Nov - Northwest Savoyards - Guitar, Mandolin, Keyboards
• Nunsense - 2011-Apr - Driftwood Players - Kbd2, Bass (on kbd), Guitar, Mandolin, Lap Seel Guitar
• Schoolhouse Rock Live! - 2011-Feb - Edmonds Heights - B3, Piano, Guitar, Mandolin
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee - 2010-Mar - EHRC - Keyboards, Guitar
• Curtains - 2010-Jan - EHRC - Keyboards
• Fiddler on the Roof - 2009-May - Bothell HS - Accordion, Mandolin, Keyboards
• Once on This Island - 2009-Jan - EHRC - Guitar, Keyboards
• Footloose the Musical - 2008-May - Bothell HS - Keyboards, Mandolin
• All Shook Up - 2008-Jan - EHRC - Guitar
• Joseph and the Amazing Techicolor Dreamcoat - 2007-Nov - Driftwood Players - Keyboard, Guitar, Mandolin
• The Boyfriend - 2007-May - Bothell HS - Acoustic Guitar, Mandolin
• Cats - 2007-Mar - EHRC - Keyboard, Guitar
• The Pajama Game - 2007-Jun - EHRC - Keyboard, Guitar
• Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat - 2006-May - Bothell HS - Keyboard, Guitar
• Return to the Forbidden Planet - 2006-Mar - EHRC - Keyboard, Guitar


• Musical Instruments:
• Keyboards:
• Kurtzweil PC-88MX - This is my workhorse for most gigs. It's as solid as a tank, and easy to setup for lots of fast patch changes. Unfortunately it has the standard Fatar sticking key problem that this model is known for, fixed with a lot of disassembly and scotch tape.
• Ensonic EP-S - A 12-bit sampler inherited from my sister-in-law. Fun with floppies.
• Yamaha CP-70B - The first real semi-portable acoustic piano. It weighs a ton, but it sounds great and the action is unbelieveably good.
• Fender/Rhodes Stage 73 - My first electrict piano and classic from the 1970's. Now owned by Caleb Corey.
• Guitars: ( they will have their own page someday )
• Warmoth Dragon Strat - Birdseye maple SRV contour 11/16 corian nut neck with 22 fret 6105 stainless steel frets, planet waves locking tuner hardware, hardtail bridge, seymour duncan cool rails neck PU, seymour duncan classic stack middle and bridge PU, Ghost saddle acoustic bridge pizeo pickups, 5-way switch with blender pot, balanced output wiring, green alder body with yellow tiger maple burst, ivory pearl pickguard.
• Warmoth Dark Strat - solid rosewood thin contour neck with canary wood skunk stripe, 5/8" graphite nut, 22 6105 stainless steel frets, planet wave tuners, hollow mahogony body with canary wood front veneer, seymour duncan cool rails neck PU, seymour duncan vintage rails middle and bridge PU, Gotoh Wilkinson Tremolo, tortise shell pickguard, blender pot wiring, balanced output jack,
• '79 Fender Strat - 3-bolt 5/8" solid maple neck, hardtail, black hard ash body, pearl pickguard, all stock except for the pickguard ( stock was black on black ). It's heavy ( about 11 pounds ), but plays real nice.
• Sega Strat - Built this in the early '80s. Plywood construction body, natural laquer finish, DiMarzio neck PU, very stiff and loud.
• Kimberly Electric - A cheap 1960's vintage Japanese guitar (from Lafayette Radio and Electronics) that got tweaked with Gibson components. It's got a Gibson tune-o-matic bridge, microtune tailpiece, and a single Gibson PAF humbucker from a '60s LesPaul. Sounds like an SG and _very_ fragile.
• Ovation 1111 Acoustic - My mainstay acoustic since about 1982. The neck has warped over the years. It came with a lifetime warranty, but the patina of the sitka spruce top is hard to part with and I fear that if I send it back to the factory, they will just send a new replacement. I just recently added an Artec pizeo under saddle pickups and an in-body pre-amp to the guitar for the musical Godspell. The pickups sounded really nice. Someday I'll get a page up for this guitar detailing the installation and perhaps a few sound clips from the musical.
• Rogue Console/Lap Steel - A really nice lap steel for about $100. I got the sparkly blue one. I've been playing it with a C6 tuning for that country twang.
• Jackson JSR-22 "Dinky" - I picked up this guitar a a local pawn shop ( Creighton Music ) for about $120 for the Wedding Singer musical. A lot of the lead guitar lines needed a double coil 80's guitar and this fit the bill perfectly. I replaced the machine tuners with locking Schallers to keep it in tune when I bent the strings flat. These tuners cost more than half of what I paid for the guitar, but it was a worthwhile upgrade.
• Rogue Triolan Biscut Resonator - This guitar has been a bit of a regret. It didn't really have the spider resonator sound I was looking for. It sounds nice, but not quite the tonal bite of a Dobro.
• Washburn Oscar Schmidt 12-String Acoustic-Electric Guitar - Got this guitar for "Big Fish". It's a great sounding 12-string, but a bit of a huge neck. The built in electronics and tuner work great. Seems pretty good at staying in tune, but like all 12-strings, time will tell as to how well the neck survives under all that tension. (I've seen my fair share of cheap 12-string guitars with necks that warped badly over time)
• Sky Acoustic-Electric Nylon Guitar - This was a find down at the Tacoma Goodwill for $42. Had a nice drive down to Tacoma to pick it up as they wanted an extra $25 to ship it via UPS to my home. I replaced the steel strings with nylon ones (Earnie Ball) and had to reinforce the 1/4" jack as the wood around it was cracking. Still needs a little work on the nut to get the nylon strings to the proper height, but sounded great in the musical "Big Fish".
• Homemade Square Neck Plywood Spider Cone Resonator - When the biscut resonator didn't work out, I decided I had to find a spider resonator for the show "Big Fish". Nothing in the pawn shops or on ebay, but I did find a spder resonator conversion kit from a vendor up in Canada for $50. Ohhh, that could be the start of a custom resonator guitar just the way I wanted it. Took about 8 weeks total time, but it was worth it. I'm working on a blog about the counstruction of this guitar. I'll also add some clips from the show, as it worked out great. Also did the same trick as the banjo by mounting a PZM microphone inside the body and sending that to a local mixer and then to the sound board. Worked out great!
• Washburn Oscar Schmidt Les Paul Style Electric Guitar - It was only $200 on Amazon, but it's a better copy of a Les Paul than the Epiphone. Had to raise the action a bit to keep the strings from buzzing and removing the pick guard to show off the really pretty front burl maple veneer. The cheap Chinese tuners got replaced with Planet Waves locking tuners as the guitar would go out of tune quickly with string bending. I'll do a week of performances with Xanadu and see how it works out under real world conditions.
• Washburn Oscar Schmidt 6-String Acoustic/Electric Guitar - Another "Bon Marche" from Amazon at only $160. The pickups on this aren't as nice and don't sound as good as the 12-String Oscar Schmidt that I own, but it still worked out well in the first musical that I used it in which was "Spitfire Grill" which is all acoustic guitar and mandolin. Upgraded the preamp in 2017 and it sounds great now.
• Mandolins:
• Rogue FM-80E Acoustic-Electric Mandolin - It is a fairly inexpensive mandolin, but plays pretty well with some basic setup work. Fit and finish are excellent for a $100 mandolin.
• Washburn 1897 bowl mandolin - This is the 1890's instrument that made Washburn a significant presence in the musical instrument manufacturing world. It has warped a bit over the years, but still plays. My great grandfather bought it in the 1890's on the railway platform in Chicago from a street vendor when headed out west with his family from Kansas to Montana. I've got a photo of my grandfather playing it on a camping trip in the 1930's. Lots of memories with this instrument.
• Ukuleles:
• Banjos:
• Rogue B-30 Banjo - A really fine banjo for the money. It's got 30 brackets to keep the head tension nice and even, and a wonderful resonator back. I mounted a Yoga CP-07a PZM microphone on the resonator back and send that via a small mixing conslole to the sound board for performances. Sounds sweet!
• SX Tenor Banjo - Looks to be from the same factory as the Rogue banjo. It has a natural finish which I haven't decided if I like yet (the neck joint isn't real well sanded so it's a bit rough playing the high frets). Needed a tenor banjo for Mary Poppins, but ended up converting the parts to play them on a conventional banjo.
• Violin - An 1890's German factory made violin. It is marked "Schweitzer" with a fake label inside that implies it was built by Jacobus Stainer in Absam (Insbruck) in 1665. It is also finished with a dark stain on the edges to make it look old. Like the mandolin, it was bought by my great grandfather on a train platform in Chicago from a street vendor for the trip out west to move the family from Kansas to Montana.
• Effects and Amps
• Boss GT-100 Effects Pedal - I got this for American Idiot as an upgrade for the GT-8. The other guitar player I was playing with had a Fractal Design pedal and his pedal had some amazing distortion and clean sounds ( much better than either the GT-8 or GT-100 ). The GT-100 was much better than the Fractal Design at dialing in delay loops to record copy the Broadway cast recording version. In general, I can dial in a sound quicker with the GT-8 and it's tons of knobs, but the GT-100 is better for being able to save library sounds on a laptop pull then up when needed for a show. The reverbs seem a little bit better with the GT-100, but not a lot.
• Boss GT-8 Effects Pedal - This is my main workhorse for most musical theater gigs. It's not the best at any one effect, but it has lots of different settings that can be queued up at the touch of a foot switch. Handy for scores that have two guitar parts written, and I've got to swap sounds in just a few beats. Tough to program, but nice when its all ready to go for a performance. I typically play it through a pair of Behringer B205D (Mackie SRM150 clone) powered speakers. The have enough power to easily keep up with a 10-20 piece broadway style orchestra.
• Acoustic Image Coda-R - This is my newest amp courtesy of a donation from George Heidorn. It's a sweet little amp, designed primarily for acoustic bass support, but works nice as a super clean guitar amp. It has a 10" down facing woofer, a 5" midrange facing forward with a small switchable tweeter. Two clean channes of input with filtering and effects and a lightweight 400W class-D amp to drive the whole rig.
• Dual 12" cab with a Leslie 147 100W tube amp - This is my poor man's version of something between a Marshall 2x12 and a Fender Twin Reverb. I've got two JBL 2120s that actually came out of a Fender Twin Reverb (they are pretty heavy on the bass). This is a pretty loud setup. It is usually too much sound for most gigs (not to mention that it also weighs as much as a Fender Twin Reverb).
• Leslie 247 in a custom cabinet - My current woodworking project is converting a Leslie 247 ( the home version of a Leslie 147 ) into something that can be more easily hauled to gigs. Photos and a project page to be added someday.
• DigiTech MultiPlay - This is an early ('87?) analog CCD delay line effect pedal that does flange, chorus, and long delays. I like it better than the Boss GT-8 for really nice flangy effects.
• MXR Distortion+ - I've had this pedal since forever. It's based on an old 741 op-amp and clipping diodes, so it's pretty noisy when you crank the gain up, but it was my goto distortion effect in the 80's.
• Peavey Standard Mk-III 130W Head - My goto amp in the 80's. It's got both a clean and a crunchy channel and a real nice reverb tank.
• Behringer Europower PMH880S Powered Mixer - Handy mixer/amp that I run with a pair of ElectroVoice EV Eliminator Speakers

Back to StratoLoft homepage.