Teen guitar prodigy from Central Pennsylvania to open for Stone Temple Pilots at nearby rock festival

ve for rock music at an early age, listening to the bands his parents played in the house.”My mom used to play a bunch of music, anywhere from pop to rock,” Warner said. “The most I listened to is rock, so I was listening to bands like Godsmack, Papa Roach, Creed. … That’s basically what I grew up on for quite a while.” One artist and song inspired Warner enough to ask his parents for a guitar: Stevie Ray Vaughan’s performance of “Voodoo Child” during a 1989 appearance on “Austin City Limits”. “I watched the whole thing,” Warner said. “When I saw him play, I was in shock and awe. I knew instantly I wanted to play guitar.” Just a few months after watching Vaughan’s almost 10-minute performance, Warner got his first guitar for Christmas. Warner said it was a “knockoff” Stratocaster, which is a bass guitar that starts at about $400 and goes all the way up to over $2k according to the Fender website.

Today, Warner plays a customized guitar made by Lancaster County-based guitar makers, TwinDix.Over time, Warner said he took formal lessons and watched numerous YouTube videos to hone his skills, noting that it was challenging at first to learn how to play correctly, but he had no intention of stopping. “I had an emotional connection to it,” Warner said. “It was one of those things where I had found something I was interested in, and I wanted to do it for life. I can’t be separated from it.” Warner soon developed his own taste for music, discovering different sounds and shifting his focus from rock to blues. He was introduced to Anthony “Big A” Sherrod, a blues player from Mississippi whom Warner met amid his travels. He eventually became Warner’s teacher and mentor. The Juke Joint Festival, a blues festival based in Clarksdale, Mississippi, is where Warner’s mom, Bambi Warner, said her son found a passion for playing the blues.

“Big A had him come up and played a whole set with him, and he wasn’t even prepared for it,” she said. “He’s like ‘You’ll be fine’, and pulls him up, and he ended up paying him for the gig. I was like ‘No, no, just the experience alone is enough, you can’t put a price on it,’ and he was like ‘Nope, he worked. He did what I asked him and he’s getting paid for it.’”Warner would go on to play at local events, and even do a mini tour in the eighth grade, before realizing that if he was gonna follow his dreams, he might need to adjust how he goes to school. That took a minute for his mom, Bambi Warner, to get behind. “I got a lot of backlash for it for a little while. But once she understood it, she was on board with it,” Warner said.

“I just wanted to be home a lot more, just because of the music.” Since then, Warner has been able to keep his grades up while continuing to follow his musical dreams. His mom said she is proud of her son’s accomplishments, especially since she and her husband are not as musically inclined. “We did the lessons for quite a bit, but Alex learns in a different way. He listens to the music and can hear it,” Bambi Warner said. “He’s got perfect pitch, which is insane because neither or my husband nor I play, so we have no idea where he gets it from.”“He does all of these things, and he still keeps an A average grade throughout high school,” she added. “He’s still working hard and getting through his schooling, and he’ll graduate early next year.”Right now, if you watch Warner perform, he does a mix of covers, including songs like “For the Love of God” by Steve Vai, “Play That Funky Music” by Wild Cherry. He recently started performing his first original song, “Peace, Love, Blues,” released in February. Alex Warner hopes that he will become an even “better player,” by developing his sound and writing original music.

“Five years from now, I hope to be out and … have a solid band … get an album out,” he said. “I really want to try to become a better player than what I am now because my ultimate goal is to be the best I possibly can be.”On Sept. 14, Warner will get to further his musical resume, opening for Stone Temple Pilots, Nothing More, and Hinder at the 2025 Rock Fest, held at the Hollywood Casino in Grantville. Warner said he feels good about the upcoming show, but strives to be even better.“I’m not fazed by [it] much, but it definitely is nerve-wracking because now I know I have