Lead guitar, Reaper (1998–2015). Now teaching.
Photo: Dana Okafor
Twenty-two years of Bay Area thrash, several thousand dive-bombs, and an Explorer-shaped guitar that's been dropped more times than it's been tuned. These days I teach instead of tour — same riffs, better hours.
The whole storyComing up
You send the riffs, I play them — the channel's format, in the room, no edits
Free for current students; everyone else, bring something for the studio fridge.
Clinic: the alternate-picking hour
The drill I give every single student, and why
Picking-hand and fretting-hand sync — the actual bottleneck
Questions, riffs, and probably a rig argument
Night Chain — album launch (guest solo)
Sitting in for the solo on the title track and whatever else they'll let me play.
Word on the street
“MacVay teaches the way he played: fast, exact, and with a total absence of mercy for the note that wasn't quite in time. The best hour I have spent with a guitar in a decade.” ★★★★★
— The Pit Report, Reyna Castillo (Riff Roulette — live, spring edition)
“Skeleton Dance is the record where Bay Area thrash remembered it was allowed to swing. MacVay's title-track solo is a masterclass in saying one thing at four hundred beats a minute.” ★★★★★
— Six-String Dispatch (on Skeleton Dance)
“The gear channel that actually explains the gear.”
— Shred Weekly
Who
I grew up in San Jose, and by the time I was thirteen I'd worn the label off a copy of Bonded by Blood and decided the electric guitar was the only thing worth being serious about. Two years later I could out-pick most of the guys twice my age at the local shops — which is a nice way of saying I had no life outside a practice room.
I co-founded Reaper in 1998 with a rhythm section I met at a battle-of-the-bands nobody remembers, and spent the next seventeen years living out of a van, a tour bus, and eventually actual hotel rooms with actual pillows. The nickname came from a soundman in Oakland who got tired of hearing the same lightning-fast alternate-picked lick on soundcheck every single night — it stuck harder than any riff we ever wrote.
Reaper called it in 2015. No blowup, no drama — just five guys who'd started having kids and mortgages and decided the road wasn't built for that. These days I split my time between session work, a gear-nerd YouTube channel, and teaching — which, twenty years ago, I would have called selling out. Now I call it the best gig I've had.
A '78 Explorer-style in drop-D standard, a 100-watt head that has outlived three cabinets, and a pedalboard I keep meaning to simplify. Hometown San Jose, California; active 1998 to now; currently teaching, session work and the channel.
Four full-lengths and an EP, a first European tour on which the amp got impounded at customs for a week, a headline slot at the biggest Bay Area thrash festival there was, and a farewell show announced in advance and played on good terms all round.
One-on-one lessons online and in the room, small-group sessions capped at four, and a growing number of teenagers riding the new-wave-of-Bay-Area-thrash revival who found Reaper through their older siblings' record collections.
Where
You send the riffs, I play them — the channel's format, in the room, no edits
Free for current students; everyone else, bring something for the studio fridge.
Clinic: the alternate-picking hour
The drill I give every single student, and why
Picking-hand and fretting-hand sync — the actual bottleneck
Questions, riffs, and probably a rig argument
Night Chain — album launch (guest solo)
Sitting in for the solo on the title track and whatever else they'll let me play.
Reaper — the Skeleton Dance anniversary set Postponed
Skeleton Dance, front to back, with as many of the old guys as can get the night off
The festival has moved to the spring, and the set moves with it — new date to follow.
Small-group Saturday: rhythm bootcamp
Four students, three hours, one metronome
Bring your own guitar; the amps are here
31 Jul Open studio night, Axe & Smith Guitar Studio, San Jose
17 May Riff Roulette — live (spring edition), Axe & Smith Guitar Studio, San Jose
16 Jul Guest appearance with Toxic Halo, The Boiler Room, Berkeley
12 Sep Reaper — the farewell show, The Regency Ballroom, San Francisco
6 Aug Reaper — headline set, Bay Area Thrash Fest, Craneway Pavilion, Richmond
Latest
The label rang on a Tuesday to say the 2007 record had crossed the line, mostly on the back of the thrash-revival kids streaming it. Three of us met at the studio to hold the plaque and argue about who wrote the bridge of the title track. (I did.)
The anniversary set at Thrash of the Titans is postponed with the festival, not cancelled — see the diary.
Four students, three hours, one metronome. The autumn run starts next month and is capped at four because nobody learns picking dynamics in a room of twenty. Bandmates learning together get first refusal.
The guest solo on Night Chain's title track is out — my first session credit in a suit, which the photographer insisted on and which I have not worn since. The launch is at the Rusty Anchor; I'll be sitting in.
Catalogue
The one drill I give every single student, in tab with the metronome markings I actually use. Most 'I can't play fast' problems are 'my hands aren't talking to each other'; this is the conversation starter.
Watch the walkthrough The Alternate Picking Drill — tab (PDF)
Two minutes of down-down-up at four tempos, written because every Reaper song has a gallop in it somewhere and every student wants to know how the right hand survives it.
The mechanics underneath the riff, so you can write your own once you've got mine down. Forty pages, no tab-worship: every technique gets applied to something you're writing, not just something I wrote in 2004.
What each box on the board did, what it should have done, and what it actually did on a wet night in Rotterdam in 2004. Grows a page a month; the video series follows the notebook, not the other way round.
Discography
Graveyard Shift Records, March 2002
Reaper — Strike MacVay, lead guitar
The debut LP: nine songs we'd played four hundred times before we recorded a note, done live in three days because that was what three days cost.
Reaper
Six Feet Closer
Telephone Pole Gospel
VFW Hall
Bonded (for the ones who taught us)
Graveyard Shift Records, October 2005
Reaper — Strike MacVay, lead guitar
The sophomore LP, written in the van on the first European run — which is why half of it is about customs officers.
Graveyard Shift Records, June 2007
Reaper — Strike MacVay, lead guitar
Produced by Lena Vasquez
The breakout record — the first to chart on independent metal radio, and the one the thrash-revival kids found first. The title-track solo gets its own video on the channel, bar by bar.
Side A
Skeleton Dance
Cauldron
Graveyard Shift
Bar Fight at the Boiler Room
Side B
Impounded
The Soundman's Lament
Eleven People
Skeleton Dance (reprise)
Gold — certified this year Independent metal radio No. 1, 2007
“Skeleton Dance is the record where Bay Area thrash remembered it was allowed to swing. MacVay's title-track solo is a masterclass in saying one thing at four hundred beats a minute.” ★★★★★
Six-String Dispatch, on Skeleton Dance
Stream Bandcamp — Reaper Archive Skeleton Dance — liner notes (PDF)
Graveyard Shift Records, October 2009
Reaper — Strike MacVay, lead guitar
An EP: five songs, one of them a cover, recorded in a weekend for a Halloween tour we then mostly slept through.
Graveyard Shift Records, April 2013
Reaper — Strike MacVay, lead guitar
The final studio LP, and the one we're proudest of — slower, heavier, and written by five people who already knew it was the last.
Blood Moon Rising
Werewolf Weather
Mortgage
The Last Van
Good Terms
“Blood Moon Rising slows the tempo and doubles the weight; a band writing its own ending, and writing it well.” ★★★★
The Pit Report, on Blood Moon Rising
Night Chain, self-released, 2026
Night Chain
Strike MacVay, guest solo
Session work: the solo on the title track of a young Oakland band's first record. Tracked in one afternoon at Axe & Smith, on the Explorer, through the head that has outlived three cabinets.
The channel
Gallery
Photography by Dana Okafor
Get in touch
Strike
Axe & Smith Guitar Studio
1180 Lincoln Avenue, Studio B
San Jose, CA 95125
