The Beginning

So after years of waiting and hoping, I’ve finally acquired andyhernandez.com. The purpose of this blog is not meant to do anything groundbreaking, but more to give my online identity its primary home.

Who am I?

Obviously as the domain name suggests, I’m Andy Hernandez, an ambitious twentysomething who is always looking for more. I thrive on art in all forms. Music and design are my channels of expression.

Music

I began playing music around age 10.  My first attempt at becoming a musician was the piano.  At the naive age of 10, I thought learning the piano would be kind of like playing video games.  A small learning curve that one could master in a matter of months, weeks, or even days.  Obviously, this was not the case.  The piano fever died off and I attempted to take on the “I’m a musician” title once again at around age 15.  This time around, my instrument of choice was the saxophone.  Approximately 4 years later, I was still playing saxophone, but had probably about the same knowledge as I did 6 months into it.  Around this time the bass player for our group started to get a little “flaky” in terms of attendance.  So there was many a time that I would just pick up the bass and try to follow along.  Turns out, I learned more in the first 6 months of playing bass than I did in 4 years of playing saxophone.

I’ve been playing bass for about 8 or 9 years now (go on, calculate my age if you’d like), and have progressed quite significantly considering the fact that I have never had any formal training.  On that note, as of this past Saturday (March 20) I began taking lessons with amazing jazz bassist, Nicky Orta.  I will keep you guys up to date on this, as of now, he is nothing but greatness.

I am currently playing with 2 separate bands: Tadeo y Cefas and Shema. Both of them are Catholic bands that play contemporary music.  Tadeo y Cefas on the one hand ranges from funk and rock all the way through latin rhythms such as cumbia and vallenato.  Shema belongs to the complete opposite spectrum, with the bulk of songs being very pop/soft rock driven.  Just go ahead and visit their websites to find out more about them.

Design

This is a strange one.  I began my “professional career” thinking that I would love to be a computer programmer due to the fact that I had a strange obsession with math.  I attended FAU for 2 years, during which I realized that I could not be more far off from the truth about where I should be in my life.  Not really sure how, but one way or another I ended up applying and getting accepted to The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale.  Never having dabbled in the whole creative field before, this was totally new to me.  To make a long story short, during my time there I ended up becoming the tutor for the entire Interactive Media program.  By the time I graduated from AIFL, I had already acquired a decent list of employers on my resume.  I ended up graduating and receiving the Highest Achievement Award, which is not given to just anyone in the program.  I currently hold the title of Creative Director at a company called Equisolve in South Florida.

I will work on keeping my blog as current as possible, but please forgive me if I don’t.  Comments and link-backs would be a nice encouragement to stay active though. =)