Ryan Alford – Guitarist

I’m a graduate of the Pennsylvania State University, and have been a hardware design engineer specializing in embedded PCs since 2004. Outside of my daytime job, I’m a guitarist and also play some mandolin. I’ve performed with a few musical projects in the State College and Pittsburgh areas, and currently play electric guitar for the blues & soul outfit Black Coffee, and Cosmic Collision – a classic rock band covering some of the better late 60′s and early 70′s rock. I am also a member of original soul/jazz trio Dirty Superb, and funk/soul/Motown band the Hounds of Soul. In Experimental Verses (with Michael Fortunato) you’ll see me get my hands dirty on mandolin and acoustic guitar. You might also see me backing Harold Taddy on the mandolin.

I enjoy the outdoors, especially hiking and backpacking. Having grown up near Boiling Springs, the near halfway point of the Appalachian Trail, I grew to love hiking its local sections. Since June 1999, I’ve hiked about 350 miles on the AT, which include the completion of the states of West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. I’ve also done several hikes in Colorado and Washington State.

I’ve been designing and building some form of a webpage since the pre Web 2.0 age, some of which have fragments that still exist today. During college, I coded my own database driven multi-user weblog project in PHP, but eventually “gave in” to WordPress.