How do I even begin to fill in an ‘About’ page bio? Its been a long story and an even longer list of where my musical journey has taken me. I am a musician. I play the various guitars; acoustic, electric and bass. In the previous version of this page, I ended up typing it in the third person so that the bio could be copied and pasted for publicity, media, news, and all that silly stuff I dreamed about. So now, here we are and I am forced to re-write the bio. From scratch, for two reasons; I have not updated my bio in almost ten years and second, it just needed to change. I have so much to share since that first draft of my bio page. Here we go…
Rene Ferrer has been playing guitar and bass and making music since he was a kid growing up in New York City. There were a few years of early guitar lessons, but the biggest musical experiences began in Junior High School where he joined the school’s concert band. His first stage performances were with the concert band learning to play jazz standards first on the trombone and then as the electric bass guitar player. Later, in high school, he joined the concert and the jazz band on trombone and also bass. In both schools, the guitar was either not available or was not used in a concert band setting.
Attending high school in the mid 1980’s, there was a lot of music to listen to in class, outside of class, on the way to class, it was everywhere. It was where he was exposed to hard rock and heavy metal bands via his classmates and that was where the electric guitar took hold. The sounds of heavy metal bands of that time was the thing that got the electric guitar into his hands and changed everything. There were many places to play and learn about the electric guitar… after school jams at his friend’s houses, sneaking in to the school auditorium with practice amps and pretending to be rock stars, and local ‘battle of the bands’ at the YMCA. The electric guitar sounds of that time took hold and inspired for years to come.
During that time, in the 1980’s and into the 1990’s the New York City music scenes were developing and booming. Rene was able to see it first hand in the Lower East Side, the East Village, everywhere. The punk scenes were every guitar sound imaginable, then the heavy metal bands arrived and took over the downtown club scene. Those sounds from all of those bands make up a large part of his influences and sound. In the early 1990’s, the music scene began to change and the local rock club scenes started to lose favor and disappear. Rene took a ten year hiatus from music, dedicating himself to marriage and a successful IT career. There was the occasional guitar fling once in a while, but mostly it got put away.
Around the time of the new millennium, in the early 2000’s, a brief meeting and jam invitation from a local blues band re-kindled the guitar flames. The open and fun environment brought Rene back into playing and thinking about performing. When he got back into playing, he was introduced to a group of musicians in lower Manhattan at a place call The Off-Wall Street Jam. It was a place where musicians gathered and were organized into jam groups and played their instruments. It was a fun and exciting time there and many musical connections were made there. Many of Rene’s band contacts and gigs were a direct result of his membership with The Jam. That place will always be a happy memory.
Since then, there have been dozens of groups, hundreds of performances, countless jams, connections, more gigs, more jams and even more connections and long-time friendships. 20 years(!) of playing and recording and living the music life in New York City…
Coming up: recordings, albums, tours and current news.