Ever since I was young, I’ve had a love for many kinds of music and a strong sense of curiosity about how things worked. As a young child, I frequently took things apart to see how they worked, and after a few hard earned lessons on things that didn’t make it back together, I started learning how to be more methodical about taking things apart so that I could get them back together again and avoid the wrath of my parents that often understandably followed the broken gadgets. 

As a young boy, I had a strong love for classical music, but I remember being in the third grade when I was given a tape cassette of Bill Haley and His Comets.  The lead guitar of the one and only Franny Beecher was absolutely mesmerizing.  It had so much swing and feel in every line that my only complaint was that it wasn’t loud enough. It was this early rock and roll that I couldn’t get enough of that inspired me to start looking for a better, but mostly louder stereo. I’d go with my parents to yard sales, and checkout the sales at Radio Shack and eventually I had enough birthday and holiday money to get a decent system that quickly became an experiment set. I soon started trying to figure out how to hook multiple stereos together, trying different speaker configurations, etc. By the time high school came around, I was installing car stereos, speakers, and even building a bunch of custom designed speaker boxes for my car, as well as many friends’ vehicles.  I still remember reaching out to Kicker USA for advice on certain angles within the sub  boxes and how much batting to use since the boxes were custom built into the existing vehicle layouts.  

After college, I finally started learning how to play the guitar and soon found myself in many jam sessions and eventually doing gigs with a couple of bands. Around this time a family friend and blues legend, Paul Plumeri asked me if I could swap out a speaker in one of his amps.  That ‘amp’ turned out to be an original Fender Tweed Pro. Little did I know that this would lead me down a rabbit hole that I’d never return from and to working on all kinds of Paul’s amps in his extensive collection. I remember hearing that tweed pro cranked after the speaker swap and wondering why my Hot Rod Deluxe didn’t sound like that. Speaker changes soon lead to tube rolling, which lead to trying all kinds of vintage and modern amps, then clone kits, then doing amp mods, and eventually doing many repairs for different music stores over the years, and has finally guided me to brand new designs and my own branded, custom amplifiers under the Grind Amplification badge.