Marc Pattison
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Marc Pattison was born on March 4, 1968 in Frankfurt, Germany. He is a California based guitarist and was one of the first guitarists endorsed by several companies such as ESP Guitars, DiMarzio pickups, Morley wah pedals and Steinberg software based on internet visibility alone.
[edit] Biography and playing history
Even though Marc was born in Germany, German law dictates that a child take on the citizenship of the father, who in Marc's case was American. Marc spent his first 5 years in Germany when his parents moved to the United States. German was Marc's first language and he did not learn to speak English until age 5 when he arrived in the U.S.
Marc started playing guitar at age 13. He took lessons for less than 3 months when he quit because he was tired of learning single note passages/melodies for songs such as House of the Rising Sun, Row, Row, Row Your Boat or Swan Lake. He couldn't find anyone to teach him rock songs by bands such as AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple so he decided to teach himself. After this brief period of lessons Marc was mostly self taught and never took lessons again.
Marc first made a name for himself on the now re-structured site mp3.com. He heard about the site on CNN and decided to upload some material and quickly rose to the top of his genre; instrumental guitar. During the next two to three years, Marc topped the charts both in instrumental rock as well as the more broad genres of rock and pop and was being downloaded thousands of times a day by guitar enthusiasts. MP3.com decided to promote Marc as a success story and placed a statement and picture of Marc's in an advertisement in Guitar Center's buyers guide that went out to over 2 million homes and stores.
Back in 1999 mp3.com was the number one site for unsigned musicians to upload their music and be heard by a huge audience. The site was acquired by the major record labels due to a copyright infringement lawsuit and then shut down until it was bought and re-opened by download.com/CNET and turned into a place for signed artists to sell MP3s.
Marc was one of the first artists to mix guitar and electronic music in the genre of instrumental rock guitar and released such material on mp3.com with great success and managed to stay in the top 40 of over 30,000 bands for most of 1999. His music has been played on the now defunct KSJO radio in San Jose, California and also on the syndicated "Mikey" (DJ Mikey Esparza currently on KIOZ) show and has also performed live on Mikey's show 3 times and has had music on MTV's Undressed, Fox sports as well as many video games, DVDs and webpages.
Later artists such as Jeff Beck and Joe Satriani both put out albums using a similar combination of electronic and rock music, but in truth Marc fused these two genres together before either Satriani or Beck. Joe Satriani has since abandoned this stylistic fusion opting for a more bluesy rock based approach.
Later Marc went on to also compose electronic music without many guitars and also currently produces music in such genres as rock, metal, pop and RnB as well.
Marc has now been playing guitar for 26 years, has been mentioned in magazine articles in Recording and Guitar Player Magazine, has music in the video game Stunt GP, was recently featured on Clear Channel's website as a hot new artist because of a high chart status at GarageBand.com, has appeared on different compilation albums, including a double album of shredders released on liquid Note records in England and two Morley compilations, one where he was one of five artists including Steve Vai.
Marc has been downloaded over 2 million times since 1999 and continues to have his music played or downloaded thousands of times a week on various sites.
