Trey Azagthoth is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 musician best known as founder and guitarist of the Florida

Florida

Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...

 death metal

Death metal

Death metal is an extreme subgenre of heavy metal. It typically employs heavily distorted guitars, tremolo picking, deep growling vocals, blast beat drumming, minor keys or atonality, and complex song structures with multiple tempo changes....

 band Morbid Angel

Morbid Angel

Morbid Angel is an American death metal band based in Tampa, Florida. UK music magazine Terrorizer ranked one Morbid Angel album in its “Top 40 greatest death metal albums”, with their 1989 debut Altars of Madness appearing at number 1...

.

Azagthoth began playing at the age of 16. His playing features much utilization of the whammy bar, complex finger tapping

Tapping

Tapping is a guitar playing technique, where a string is fretted and set into vibration as part of a single motion of being pushed onto the fretboard, as opposed to the standard technique being fretted with one hand and picked with the other...

, extensive use of a Morley Wah-wah pedal and other effects, and wailing guitar solos that have a distinct tone fans consider to be his trade-mark sound. He also does synth work for Morbid Angel. He cites Mozart, Eddie Van Halen

Eddie Van Halen

Edward Lodewijk "Eddie" Van Halen is a Dutch-American guitarist, keyboardist, songwriter and producer, best known as the lead guitarist and co-founder of the hard rock band Van Halen, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame...

 and Randy Rhoads

Randy Rhoads

Randall William "Randy" Rhoads was an American heavy metal guitarist who played with Ozzy Osbourne and Quiet Riot. A devoted student of classical guitar, Rhoads often combined his classical music influences with his own heavy metal style. While on tour with Ozzy Osbourne, he would seek out...

 as a huge influence and inspiration on his music. His state of mind when he solos is what he refers to as the "Temple of Ostx". A collection of some of his famous guitar solos from Morbid Angel's sixth album "Formulas Fatal to the Flesh" were put on a B-side record entitled "Love of Lava" which later were included on the second disc of Morbid Angel's 8th album, "Heretic". His non-musical interests include anime

Anime

is the Japanese abbreviated pronunciation of "animation". The definition sometimes changes depending on the context. In English-speaking countries, the term most commonly refers to Japanese animated cartoons....

, his favorite shows being Sailor Moon

Sailor Moon

Sailor Moon, known as , is a media franchise created by manga artist Naoko Takeuchi. Fred Patten credits Takeuchi with popularizing the concept of a team of magical girls, and Paul Gravett credits the series with "revitalizing" the magical-girl genre itself...

 and Gundam

Gundam

The is a metaseries of anime created by Sunrise studios that features giant robots called "Mobile Suits" ; usually the protagonist's MS will carry the name Gundam....

. His favorite video games include the Doom

Doom (series)

Doom is a series of first-person shooter video games developed by id Software. The series focuses on the exploits of an unnamed space marine operating under the UAC , who fights hordes of undead and demons in order to survive...

 and Quake

Quake (series)

The Quake series is a line of first-person shooter video games produced by id Software.-Overview:The Quake series is somewhat unusual in that its focus changes frequently; the story of Quake II has nothing to do with Quake, and Quake III Arena has little to do with either of its predecessors...

 series, Castlevania

Castlevania

Castlevania, known as in Japan, is a video game series created and developed by Konami. The series debuted in Japan on September 26, 1986, with the release of for the Family Computer Disk System , followed by an alternate version for the MSX 2 platform on October 30...

, Street Fighter

Street Fighter

, commonly abbreviated as SF, is a series of Fighting Games developed in Japan in which the players pit the video games' competitive fighters from around the world, each with his or her own unique fighting style, against one another...

, Devil May Cry

Devil May Cry

is an action game developed and published by Capcom, released in 2001 for the PlayStation 2. Although it is the first game in the series of the same name, the events in Devil May Cry are second in the series storyline's chronological order, taking place after Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening and...

, Legacy of Kain

Legacy of Kain

Legacy of Kain is a series of action-adventure video games developed initially by Silicon Knights in association with Crystal Dynamics. After a legal battle, Crystal Dynamics continued the series without Silicon Knights and Eidos Interactive became the publisher...

 and Metal Gear Solid

Metal Gear Solid

is a videogame by Hideo Kojima. The game was developed by Konami Computer Entertainment Japan and first published by Konami in 1998 for the PlayStation video game console. It is the sequel to Kojimas early MSX2 computer games Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake...

. In between writing and recording the 2003 album "Heretic" Azagthoth created a zdoom level called "Chambers of Dis". This was up for downloading on his personal Myspace

Myspace

Myspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....

 page and can be found on the Morbid Angel home page.

Decibel Magazine ranked him number 1 on their list of the 20 best death metal

Death metal

Death metal is an extreme subgenre of heavy metal. It typically employs heavily distorted guitars, tremolo picking, deep growling vocals, blast beat drumming, minor keys or atonality, and complex song structures with multiple tempo changes....

 guitarists, and he was listed at number 7 in Joel McIver

Joel McIver

Joel McIver is a British author. The best-known of his 20 books to date is the bestselling Justice For All: The Truth About Metallica, first published in 2004 and selling close to 50,000 copies in nine languages since then. McIver's other works include biographies of Black Sabbath, Slayer, Ice...

's 2009 book The 100 Greatest Metal Guitarists

The 100 Greatest Metal Guitarists

The 100 Greatest Metal Guitarists is a book by British author Joel McIver, published in 2009 by Jawbone Press and featuring a foreword by Glen Benton of Deicide. Foreign-language editions appeared shortly after the original English language version. It contained a list of 100 guitar players in...

. Trey uses Ibanez and Jackson guitars, and at one point B.C. Rich, but has stated on his personal Myspace page that he has worked out a deal with Dean Guitars to make, as he calls it, a personalized "X-Core" V.

Trey's Gear has included, for some time, two Marshall JCM900 tube amps put into a chain into a stereo type effect. His favorite effects include an MXR Phaser and multiple chorus and delay pedals. These are run straight to his guitars, which have included the following companies: Jackson (Warrior), Ibanez (Universe), B.C. Rich (Ironbird), Dean (the new "X-Core" V), and Charvel (an explorer and superstrat shape).