Dan McAvinchey

Dan McAvinchey is an American guitarist, composer and publisher. In 1996 he founded Guitar Nine, pairing an online magazine with a small record label while the rest of the music world was still deciding whether the internet mattered.

The magazine ran six issues a year for twenty-five years, 150 in all, carrying 2,623 columns by 238 contributors on technique, recording, songwriting and the business of releasing music independently. Alongside it, the shop sold 3,272 records between 1997 and 2012, and the site cataloged 1,478 instrumental and guitar-led musicians from nearly 80 countries.

He is a musician who spent most of his working life on the other side of the desk: writing about how to finish a record, then getting finished records into the hands of listeners who were looking for them. Guitar Nine sold albums by independent guitarists all over the world to a niche audience that knew exactly what it wanted.

Two educations

Born on the 27th of December, 1960 and raised in La Grange, Illinois, he graduated from Lyons Township High School in 1978, and then earned a B.S. in Computer Science at DePaul University in Chicago, graduating cum laude in 1981.

The guitar arrived the same year he left school — a Hohner Telecaster copy, given as a graduation present. He began lessons almost immediately with a local teacher, Steve Accardo, a dead ringer for Paul McCartney, who taught him for nearly two years and gave him a foundation that held for the rest of his life. His college girlfriend, later his wife, bought him his first proper instrument: a Gibson SG.

What followed was fifteen years of running two things in parallel without either needing the other. He worked as a software developer — a spell in Mexico City for a hardware manufacturer, then a bank, an IT consultancy and a software company — and moved to Raleigh in 1982 with no job waiting, on the reasoning that a growing city would find him one.

The guitar stayed, but as a pleasure rather than a plan. He taught himself keyboards and learned multitracking from books and videos, and when sequencers arrived on keyboards and drum machines came within reach, something shifted: a whole production could be built at home by one person. Songwriting turned out to be the part he enjoyed most.

One skill he did not have was singing, which pushed him towards instrumental music — Santana, Journey, the Dixie Dregs, Jeff Beck — and towards a persistent frustration at how little of it there was to find. By the mid-eighties that was beginning to change, with Shrapnel Records, David T. Chastain's Leviathan Records and No Speak putting out instrumental albums and a scene of independent players forming behind them.

Founding Guitar Nine

In early 1996, with the internet arriving for everybody at once, the two educations finally had a reason to meet. Fifteen years of software, fifteen years of guitar, and a medium that suddenly needed both.

Guitar Nine began that year as an online magazine paired with a small record label. The premise was narrow and deliberate: instrumental guitar music, and the people making it without a major label behind them — the thing he had spent a decade being unable to find enough of.

It was the third business he had started. Two in the 1980s had failed, and he is clear that the failures were the qualification — what made the third one work was knowing what the first two had got wrong.

The name had to be two words, short, and easy to remember. Nine did a great deal of work in song titles — Satriani's Ice 9, the Beatles' Revolution 9, Love Potion No. 9, Lennon's #9 Dream, the Temptations' Cloud Nine, and a Hendrix song this site still makes a joke about in its footer. It was also, already, on the license plate of his car.

The magazine was built on guest columnists — players and industry people writing about what they had worked out for themselves. Over its life 238 of them contributed, and the archive still takes new writing.

Two long-running features defined its editorial character. First and foremost, The Undiscovered profiled independent guitarists nobody had heard of; The Rediscovered went back to the best of them years later. Secondly, the artist interview series ran to 235 conversations.

For the first three years it ran alongside a full-time job. He finally left the software company in 1999.

Guitar Nine Records

His own record, Guitar Haus, came out in 1997: ten instrumental tracks plus three unreleased demos, written, played, produced and recorded by him, with MIDI drum tracks contributed by Nigel Olsson of Elton John's band and Rod Morgenstein of the Dixie Dregs.

The German spelling came from a trip to Germany. He owned a handful of instruments at the time, but had no idea he would one day be living in an actual guitar house.

It was reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic and as far as Slovenia and Belarus — unusual reach for a self-released instrumental record in 1997, and largely a consequence of the site that came with it.

The label's first compilation, Handz Of Danz, followed: fourteen tracks by six guitarists who all happened to be named Dan.

Six people

The shop was not the plan. He had built the e-commerce tools for one purpose — selling his own record — and then musicians he had reviewed in the magazine began asking whether he would sell theirs too.

He found six. By June 1999, three years in, close to 140 artists had signed up and the site was marketing more than 170 titles — grown by word of mouth and by print advertising in magazines like Guitar World.

It is worth remembering what 1997 was like: an independent musician had essentially no way to sell a CD over the internet. What Guitar Nine ran was a consignment arrangement built at scale and aimed at one genre, and the concentration was the point. Somebody arriving to buy one artist would leave having found ten more.

What a new shop lacks is a track record, and the thing that solved it was somebody else's. Early on, with perhaps ten or twelve titles in the whole catalog, David T. Chastain put ten of his Leviathan Records releases in — very nearly doubling the store overnight and, more usefully, making it a place other independent labels could take seriously. Chastain had no evidence it would work. He simply trusted it.

Later came a version of the same thing that meant something else entirely. Ronnie Montrose — one of the guitarists he had grown up listening to — had started his own label, RoMoCo, and he placed his instrumental solo records with Guitar Nine.

Trust was the actual currency of the thing. An artist consigning a box of CDs to a website in North Carolina was taking a real risk on a stranger, and enough of them took it.

Both sides of it were international from early on. Buyers came from everywhere, and so did the artists and small labels — Finland, Germany, Taiwan — for whom a site in North Carolina was the most practical route to a listener anywhere at all.

The catalog eventually reached 3,272 titles across two web sites: the instrumental one, and Guitar Music 9 for guitar-led records that happened to have a singer, so an artist did not have to leave one album behind. Every record carried a write-up, and for a great many of those releases it is now the only substantial thing written about them anywhere.

CD sales ended in 2012, overtaken by consumer preference for downloads and digital streaming. The magazine carried on for another nine years.

His own writing

Alongside editing, he wrote several series of his own, mostly about the mechanics of getting a record made and sold by yourself — the part that gets left out of technique columns.

• The Power To Release 28 columns
• The Essentials 5 columns
• Guitar Meltdown 4 columns
• Studio Nine 8 columns
• Artist interviews 169 interviews
• Undiscovered artist reviews 708 reviews
• Album descriptions 3,272 descriptions
• Lines of code 99,660 lines

He also wrote Supercharge Your Playing, ran 55 reader surveys, and sent 108 newsletters between 1996 and 2021.

The last line of that table is not a slip. Both sites are his own code, written the same years as the columns — the two educations never did stop running in parallel.

After the revenue

With the shop closed, Guitar Nine became something with no income at all — and carried on for another nine years anyway. There were straightforward reasons. He had a stable of regular writers who wanted to keep contributing, and a mailing list of more than twenty thousand people who still wanted to read them.

There was also still a job to do. Selling had moved to iTunes and to singles, so the site listed its artists and pointed at their iTunes pages — a web site that no longer sold anything could still be the place you found out what to buy.

Then the ground moved a second time. Over those years YouTube became formidable: free lessons, free backing tracks, new artists, all of it in video. Reading a column to get better at guitar started to look like the old way of doing it. The writers who stayed, adapted — most of them ended up writing columns built around a video hosted somewhere else.

The magazine could still be useful about the business of music, which no video was covering, and so it kept going on that. What finally settled it was discovery: once finding new players happened on YouTube directly, an issue of a magazine had stopped being how anybody found anything.

It wasn't just a Guitar Nine problem. One by one, the print guitar magazines he had grown up reading were ending publication too. The last three issues went out in 2021; the hundred and fiftieth was the final one, and the last reader survey ran that March.

He kept the site up regardless — partly as a resource, and partly because it remained a way of staying in touch with a great many of the artists.

Present day

Guitar Nine remains online and open: every issue, every column, every record the web store carried, with nothing behind a login. A section called the “G9 Attic” was created as a way to take a nostalgic look back at the promo items, the ads, the web page designs, the best selling artists, and other artifacts. The site still takes new writing from guest columnists.

McAvinchey still maintains an arsenal of over 100 guitars — the Guitarsenal — cataloged room by room, plays guitar nearly every day, and maintains a separate archive of film, television, music and books.