Who is Patrick Lew?

Patrick Lew got his first guitar from his mother, a cheap Fender Squier for about a hundred dollars. He developed a serious interest in rock music by the time he reached his teens, and began teaching himself how to play the guitar. At first, he didn't knew how to play guitar by self-taught lessons. Not knowing how to do this he went into a music store and strummed his guitar for a minute. That's all it took. From then on, he was able to learn on his own. Patrick never learned how to read or write musical scores. But he listened carefully to some of the songs he liked, and by error reproduced the chord progressions on his guitar. He listened to many rock records of the hair-metal and grunge era. All forms of African-American blues and white music tuned Patrick in, as did traditional Asian music. He watched other players on television or at school and took his guitar everywhere he went, improvising material constantly. While Patrick was a very primitive musician because of being mostly self-taught, he was also capable of improvising atonal guitar solos and energetic chord progressions. The guitar became an extension of Patrick's image, a young adolescent Asian American boy dressed in skater outfits. But however, Patrick was living under Asian stereotypes and his parents showed little respect for him to master the guitar. In any case, the guitar was something Patrick would dance to when he listened to his favorite bands on his CD player. By the time Patrick got to Wallenberg High School, he had grown into a tall and slender boy with long legs. He was still shy, but he began to develop an interest in girls. And when he found that his type of music attracted the more gothic Asian females, his interest in music grew.

On Patrick's 18th birthday, Patrick's mother bought him his first Les Paul, an Epiphone with a hot rod design. He also received a Marshall amplifier and soon Patrick would join a band. Patrick and his high school friends formed a band called Samurai Sorcerers. One of the members, Eddie Blackburn was a classmate of his in drama class. Their first playing gig was at the Kintetsu Mall at Japantown in San Francisco. The gig was nothing special, just a band of starving artists playing in the street corner. The gigs were always unbooked , but the Samurai Sorcerers began to earn some attention at their very own high school. Like most all-American teenagers at the time, the Samurai Sorcerers dressed like skateboarders and was unpredictable onstage. Their music was eclectic: hair-metal and J-Rock (Japanese visual rock) and grunge with an energetic and sludgy beat. When Patrick wasn't playing guitar with the Samurai Sorcerers, he went to raves. Whenever a DJ put on a new record on the turntable, everywhere he went Patrick listened and watched and learned. Patrick's guitar skill began to slightly build up. He began experimenting with computer software and record his guitar work onto it, and was looking for ways to create sounds that were his own. When he got into using computers to make music and told his band about making J-Pop songs on a PC, they laughed and lectured him. When he started dressing like an anime character, they lectured him. And when he showed them a CD of anime songs he made, they didn't understand him. Soon the Samurai Sorcerers drifted apart, but Patrick had his own project and made his own music at his home. As performing music became important to Patrick, he spent most of his evenings at his house using the computer along with his guitar to create new sounds. When not performing, Patrick and his friends can usually be seen hanging around the local hot spots in San Francisco. Although his personal life was sort of dsyfunctional and became the subject of much rumors.

Two months after graduating from Wallenberg High, Patrick began attending a community college near his house. He currently is working on a solo project and performing with former members of the Samurai Sorcerers Eddie and Shawn in a band called Silent Minister.