I started playing acoustic guitar sometime around the age of 9 as an extracurricular course in school. At the age of 11 I took electric guitar classes. But not much heavy metal happening there YET. What really ignited my passion was when I got my first heavy metal and thrash CDs and saw one of Metallica's live shows on MTV (yeah, they still played music back then). That's about the time I left music school and started teaching myself some metal guitar techniques.