I Accidentally Hacked the Guitar
In 2018, a week before moving to Mexico, I sat down and wrote a guitar book in about a week.
That sentence is technically true.
It's also completely false.
The actual process had started years earlier, without me realizing it.
Back in high school, I played guitar in a band called Bandidos. We played simple Latin rock, power chords, and whatever songs young bands in Puerto Rico played in the early 90s. I loved music, but I wasn't "the theory guy." I wasn't studying modes or jazz harmony. Guitar was mostly energy and emotion.
Then life happened.
Career. Marriage. Divorce. Companies. Code. Books. Teaching. Moving.
At some point before moving to California in 2012, I sold my old guitar in Puerto Rico. I figured that phase of my life was probably over.
But once I got to California, I suddenly had something I hadn't had in years: free time.
So I bought another guitar.
At first, I wasn't even trying to become a "good guitarist." I just became fascinated with the fretboard itself. The layout. The repetition. The symmetry. Why certain shapes worked everywhere. Why others didn't.
I spent more time staring at patterns than learning songs.
Then one day I watched a YouTube video about pitch axis theory.
And something clicked.
Not in the normal "I learned a new scale" way.
More like suddenly seeing the operating system underneath the instrument.
All at once, modal harmony stopped sounding mysterious. I could hear why something sounded Lydian or Mixolydian. Chord progressions became emotional colors around tonal centers instead of isolated theory concepts. The fretboard stopped feeling like hundreds of disconnected notes and started feeling like a navigable system.
That moment changed everything.
And this is the important part:
I didn't realize it at the time, but I hadn't invented some revolutionary new theory system.
What I had really rediscovered was the major scale.
But because I didn't come from a formal theory background, I arrived there from a completely different direction.
I wasn't thinking in keys, note names, or interval formulas.
I was thinking visually.
I started dividing the fretboard into smaller navigable areas that were easy to practice independently and easy to connect together later. Instead of memorizing the neck note by note, I learned to recognize recurring geometric relationships.
To me, it felt less like studying music theory and more like learning the topology of the instrument.
And strangely enough, that approach worked.
Over time, I became a much stronger improviser than I ever expected to become. Friends who had played longer than me would ask how I understood the fretboard the way I did. People started describing me as a "badass guitarist," which still feels strange to write. Audiences reacted strongly to my playing.
Which is deeply weird if I think about it too much.
Because I didn't come from the traditional guitarist path.
I skipped learning hundreds of songs. I wasn't deeply trained in formal theory. I approached the instrument more like a programmer reverse engineering a system than like a conservatory student studying an art form.
And without realizing it, for years my brain kept compressing patterns in the background.
I kept simplifying shapes. Finding shortcuts. Connecting visual territories together. Reorganizing the fretboard mentally into something easier to navigate.
I wasn't consciously "writing a method."
The method was slowly writing itself internally.
Then, in 2018, right before moving to Mexico City, I realized something strange:
The framework already existed in my head.
So I sat down for about a week and just extracted it.
Diagrams. Explanations. Shapes. Practice areas. Connections.
Not invention.
Transcription.
That became Hacking Lead Guitar.
The funny thing is that the system actually worked.
Years later, musicians still reach out to me about it. The book still quietly sells on Amazon and Gumroad. And the same visual approach I stumbled into ended up becoming the foundation of how I improvise, compose, and think about the instrument.
I've noticed this pattern throughout my life.
Sometimes the visible work takes days.
The invisible work took years.
The week I wrote the book wasn't the beginning of the idea.
It was the moment the idea finally became dense enough to fall out of my head.
I never found a composing partner, so I built one — the same maker instinct that led me to reverse-engineer the fretboard.
Months of mentorship with Kiko Loureiro took my guitar playing in a completely different direction: guided, structured, and built around someone else's experience.
A book that quietly sells years later is the kind of relationship with our creations that doesn't show up on launch day.
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