Jarrett Herman

I’ve been playing guitar for 17 years, beginning at age 13. At that time I and everyone I knew were all rediscovering the big classic rock bands from when our parents were young. Bands like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, etc. Those were the days of guitar heroes, and that era had kinda come back around alongside the appropriately named video game ‘Guitar Hero’, and later ‘Rock Band’. So like many of my friends, I started taking guitar lessons and within a few months of practicing I was learning some of my favorite rock songs. Once you feel that sense of satisfaction of making music with your own hands, or voice or whatever.. it’s amazing looking back from time to time at how far things have snowballed from that first moment. From playing through that first song, to nailing a difficult guitar solo, and eventually maybe writing your own songs and developing the tools to improvise your own killer guitar solo off the top of your head. However silly or insignificant it may sound now, everyone’s journey in music and beyond can be traced back to those first sparks of inspiration.

Fast forward about 5 years, and sure enough those first sparks had sent me on a journey that led me to study music at the College of DuPage. I had enrolled on a full scholarship so the main selling point of COD for me was the affordability. However, upon starting my first year I was blown away by the caliber of the faculty and the swanky facilities and resources that might not normally be associated with a community college. I feel incredibly fortunate now to have spent several years studying music there with some of the areas finest musicians and educators, including Dr. Tom Tallman (small group jazz ensemble, theory, aural skills) Dr. Ken Paoli (music theory, aural skills), Dr. Richard Havens (group piano), and of course the school’s incredibly talented guitar instructor Steve Ramsdell, who gave me my formal introduction and subsequent multi-year crash course in both jazz and classical guitar. Without them I wouldn’t have the tools that I rely on to continue to improve and evolve as a musician today, and I’m very grateful for the time I spent there.

Since then I’ve had a few odd gigs playing jazz and classical music over the years. But in the past decade or so, most of my professional experience playing music has been in rock bands, as well as teaching primarily rock and pop songs to students. It’s been a blast coming full circle with such a broader perspective and taking everything I’ve learned over the years and all these different experiences and applying them to many of the songs I’d known and loved from the very beginning. It was also through these experiences that I also began playing bass guitar and ukulele, easily transferring what I know from the guitar due to their more or less equivalent tunings.

And now I continue to look forward to more fresh and challenging experiences to broaden my horizons and keep growing as a musician, and by extension as a person – as I’ve found the two tend to progress hand in hand in many ways. Because above all, regardless of how far you go with it, music and being a musician can be an infinitely rewarding experience that can enrich every facet of life in ways you could never have imagined.