First of all, Fayte sounds like it would if it didn’t have the “y”. That’s fate. Or, just call me Gary Rebholz if you insist on realism.
Mom taught me my first guitar chord in the kitchen of our Madison, Wisconsin home on her old Silvertone acoustic guitar (which she still has) and turned me loose with a Mel Bay book of chords (which I wish I still had) to figure out the rest on my own. I figured out a bunch, I guess, and have a whole lot more left to figure out still.
I began my public musical expedition as a knob twister. My first gig was running live sound for a band called Flying Saucers. The band's greatest claim to fame was that Steve Marker was our lead guitarist. Steve later went on to fame and fortune with the band Garbage. I have run live sound for various acts off and on since then, but as yet, Steve's the only one I've made famous!
My first band (pictured here) was the rockabilly outfit Kevin Fayte and Rocket 8. That’s where the stage name “Buster Fayte” came from. It started more or less as a joke, but people liked it and it stuck. I played the bass and generally cut loose on stage as my alter ego, Buster. This seemed to entertain the fan base well enough, and it certainly entertained me! Rocket 8 kept getting asked back for more gigs, and we had a nice run of local popularity in the Madison, Wisconsin music scene that lasted the better part of the 80s. That was lots of fun. Our sole album, Ridin’ in a Rocket was picked up by Nervous Records in England, which made us feel pretty cool for a while!
Several bands of no real consequence, other than that they were all pretty fun, followed the Rocket 8 years and I finished up the 90s playing the local coffee house circuit as a solo performer in the folk singer/songwriter tradition. During that time I released a tape called The Righteous Troubadour. I think both of the people who bought that pretty much enjoyed it! Throughout all of this, I worked to constantly improve my home studio setup so that I could record my music.
During these years I was also working as a copywriter/graphic designer/software trainer both as an employee of different organizations and later as a freelancer. Writing has always been a passion and as I began to realize that I was pretty good at it, I started doing more of it.
In the late 90s, I started working on the training team of Sony Creative Software (SCS) and I’m still with them today as the training manager. In my job I’ve become an expert user of Vegas Pro (video and audio editing), ACID Pro (digital audio workstation), Sound Forge (audio editor), and several other SCS software titles. I spend my days developing videos and written materials that teach others how to use all of this software.
Sometime around 1990 I coauthored my first book, How to use Flash 5 for Sam’s Publishing, part of the Pearson Education group. I followed that up with two other books for Sam’s, Teach Yourself ACID Pro 3 in 24 Hours, and How to Use HTML and XHTML as well as one book published by Sony, The Video and Audio Production Guide. In the fall of 2008, after finally realizing that if so many of my musical buddies wanted to know how to set up a home studio like mine maybe I should write another book, I returned to the Pearson Education family with the release of my fifth book, The Complete Home Music Recording Starter Kit published by Que.
I continue to write and record my original music and hope to keep doing so for as long as I can still pick the guitar. I still live and work in the Madison area. I have a beautiful wife, Rebecca, and five amazing kids, Jake, Leah, Kyri, and the twins, Sam and Max, to keep life really entertaining. All in all, it’s been a great run so far and I’m pretty much the luckiest guy in town. Thanks for joining me on the journey!
