@thelma.weller

Self-taught on a pawn-shop Jazzmaster bought during the second lockdown. Spent two years convinced Drop C# was a temporary phase; now the rest of the rig is built around it. Plays in a three-piece called Sextant. Doesn't own a capo.

Started on a Squier Strat through a Marshall MG combo at 16, hated everything about it. The Jazzmaster reissue was a 27th-birthday gift to herself; the Twin Reverb followed three months later when she realized the offset's pickups needed real headroom.

Born in Tacoma in 1993, raised by a mother who taught high-school chemistry and a father who fixed elevators. Community college for two years, then a graphic-design certificate from a place that has since folded. Lives in a Ravenna duplex with two roommates and a cat named Pedal. Day job is in-house designer at a Seattle outdoor-apparel brand — mostly tech-pack diagrams, occasional catalog work. Sextant rehearses Wednesday nights in a Sodo storage unit she splits with three other bands. Engaged once, briefly, in 2021; still wears the ring on a chain.

Picked up an acoustic at 16 because a boyfriend left one at her parents' house and never came back for it. The Squier Strat followed a month later, bought with grocery-store paychecks. Took six lessons from a metalcore guy at a strip-mall studio in Lakewood, quit when he insisted on Yngwie exercises. Played bass in a short-lived Tacoma noise-pop band from 2017 to 2019 — two splits, one tour to Boise that lost money. Sextant started in 2022 as a Built to Spill covers project and drifted somewhere else by the third practice. Now writes most of the band's material on the Jazzmaster, usually at the kitchen table after the roommates are asleep.