Hey, this is a cool thread. We get to see the faces behind the names, and the names behind the screen names! I had been on TalkBass for quite a while under the handle DavidRavenMoon.
OK, my name is David, I'm 51, and I live in Montclair, NJ, which is also the home of Stephen Colbert and Buzz Aldrin, though I have never run into either one of them around town (note to self: get out more). I've been married for the past 6 years, and have a 17 year old son and a 4 year old daughter. My son is a very good artist.
Here's the wife and kids:
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I have been playing music since I was a child. I knew what I wanted to do ever since seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan when I was 6. I started on drums, because my brother played drums, and then moved on to guitar at about 10, and then on to bass a year or two later. I also play keyboards, and along the line was a classically trained tubist, and played baritone sax. I haven't touched either one of those in many years. These days I play bass and guitar regularly, but don't get to gig too much anymore. Though I'm looking for a good progressive band to play with.
I've always taken things apart, and like making things, so when I broke the wiring in an old 60's violin bass I had, I accidentally rewired the pickups out of phase. I thought that was kind of cool, so I put a phase switch in my Sekova Les Paul Custom copy, and started putting phase switches in friend's guitars. I was hooked! I started doing a lot of other mods and things, and started a side business called "Marz Guitars" in the late 70's. My day job at the time was in defense communications.
I was also playing in bands... in the 70's was the prog rock band Dethslaker, which became the band Dreamer, which is still playing around the NJ shore scene.
Me in 1977 with the band Dethslaker:
Then I formed a new wave band called The Jetsonz, which eventually morphed into a more goth/electronic band called Expresso Tango.
Here's the Jetsonz in 1980, and me with my 8-string bass, which was made from a '74 P bass!
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The Jetsonz got to open for a lot of 80's acts like Billy Idol, Violent Fems, Wall of Voodoo, etc.
Around that time I left the electronics field and started working in graphic arts, as a lithographer. I come from an artistic/musical family... my mom was a jazz singer in the big band era, and played guitar. My dad played a little mandolin and sang Irish songs, and my older brother was a drummer and then a photographer, and is now an assistant professor of photography at Brooklyn Collage in NYC.
Sometime in the mid 80's, my girlfriend at the time was a hairdresser, and worked with a girl who's brother-in-law had a guitar company called American Showster Custom Guitars, in Maplewood NJ. They had just come out with a guitar that looked like the tailfin on a 1957 Chevy Belair. So I got a job there and left the printing industry. While at Showster I made a lot of changes to how the tailfins were made, and added things like rear adjusting pickups, since on the original you could not adjust pickup height!
I made guitars for players like Billy Gibbons, and Robbin Crosby.
Here's Robbin's guitar, and a body on my workbench.
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At Showster I met John Gagliano, and we became best friends. The guy that ran Showster was a real shyster, and stopped paying us, claiming money problems (while he bought a vintage T-Bird and a new house) so first John quit and then I followed. This was right before the deal with Kramer. Right before I left I designed the Stealth series of guitars that Kramer made for Showster. I never got any credit, or even compensation for those guitars, and he patented my ideas (which he said he didn't like at the time).
John and I started our own business, SGD Lutherie, in about 1992, and we had a workshop in Hoboken NJ, in the same building that once housed Guild Guitars. John was just finishing up grad school as an industrial designer, and worked with Ned Steinberger making the first three or so NS Double basses, including Tony Levin's original bass.
I set out to take all the things I had gleaned over the years about what worked and didn't work in the various basses I was playing, and designed the perfect bass for me, the
SGD Scorpio.
The SGD table at the 1995 ASIA Symposium. Here you can see a lucite longhorn, some Scorpio basses, and an Alchemist guitar. Far right is the old 8-string (Mantaray) with a new hand made neck and paint job.
SGD went on hiatus for a period of time, and I started it back up about 5 years ago. Currently my focus is on hand made bass pickups, since I didn't have a full time workshop to use, but John and I have set up a nice shop in his garage, so I'm starting to build some more basses.
I was dissatisfied with the pickups I had in my bass, and set on a quest to get the tone I hear when I play the bass unplugged out of the pickups, plus with the type of electric bass tones I hear in my head. So just as I started building because I couldn't find a bass I wanted, I started making pickups. In the end a lot of time and money is invested, but I do it because I'm a player, and I'm fussy.
I currently do the pickups and repairs and setups full time, since getting laid off from a graphics job 2 years ago. On the side I do web and graphic design. I do all the pickup winding at home, in a small corner workspace.
it is a stressful job especially here in New Orleans, and he fights to stay "normal"
But I have fun. 
