I was born on Christmas day, December 25th, 1975.
For my 12th birthday my parents gave me my first
keyboard, a silver Yamaha SHS-10. After building
serious interest in playing the keyboard, a decision
for taking music lessons was made. To be able to do
so properly, I invested in a larger keyboard with
large keys, a Roland E-10. Also at this time, I
became inspired by some of the great synthesizer
musicians like Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre, Harold
Faltermeyer and Jan Hammer. In the eight years that
followed, I learned to play many different music
styles. During this time, I upgraded my Roland E-10
to a Roland E-70.
In the last few years of my music lessons, I
increasingly showed interest in composing music to
express my feelings and tell stories with my music.
To be able to give more shape to this interest, I
bought a music workstation, a Roland XP-50,
containing the latest sounds of that time. Inspired
at the same time by the pop-music performers of the
late eighties and the beginning of the nineties, I
started to write and compose my first songs. One
summer, I wrote "Mystery Girl". The writing and
composing of this song would later turn out to mark
a defining moment in my music career. After
finishing "Mystery Girl", I wanted to continue
writing and composing until I would have enough
material to put on a CD. In the years that followed,
I created the songs that are now on the "Mysteries"
CD. Playing the keyboard and studying a variety of
music types led to a style of playing that allowed
me to manipulate different sounds in a different
way, using the same keys. I played the drums, bass,
guitar, organ, strings, piano and lead sounds until
all songs were completely arranged. With a
background in instrumental music, I created a
crossover between my interest in the popular music
of that time and my initial background in
synthesizer music. This crossover came about by
replacing all parts that are typically sung in
popular music by the playing of lead instruments by
myself. At age 22 I took my music to a professional
sound studio (New Road Studios), had Italian
designer Cesare DeRossi design the covers for the
booklet and the CD and so the dream called
"Mysteries" became reality with a CD-launching
concert on June 4, 1998, celebrating 10 years of
making music.
In the aftermath of "Mysteries", much changed.
Starting a full-time job kept me from regularly
investing time in my music. After a few brief
successes based on "Mysteries", my music seemed to
die a silent death. Still, in the seven years that
followed, I kept investing in my music whenever
possible, extending my library of available sounds
with new sound modules (a Korg TR-RACK and a Roland
M-BD1) and a new controller-keyboard with piano-like
weighted keys, a Roland A-90. I always felt that
"Mysteries" never became exactly what I wanted it to
be. Although the people at New Road Studios
delivered a professional piece of work, the sound
that I had originally intended for the CD was not
brought about, simply because it was too expensive
to invest more studio time. Therefore, I wanted to
expand my knowledge to include mixing, recording and
finalizing as well. Over time, I invested in
high-end recording equipment to make way for the
dormant dream in the back of my mind: to make a new
CD, but this time with all the detail and the sound
exactly like I wanted it. And so, my own recording
studio was born: The Mysteries Studio. In these
first seven years, I wrote only four new songs. It
was with the last of these songs that I specifically
started to write for a new CD. This time, I wanted
to make all-instrumental synthesizer music only.
Still, although the idea of making a new CD was now
more alive than ever, the feeling wasn't yet right.
There was no sense of direction for the CD. Just
when the entire project seemed to slowly fade away,
after a hard period in my life, I found myself
writing a song that would later turn out to mark a
defining moment. The song, called "Journey to
Salvation" was my first track in the style of the
synthesizer music that originally inspired me. But
much more than this, the emotions I put into the
song provided me the direction I was waiting for. As
time went by, the music under my hands matured and
the new direction led me to come home to my original
inspiration: synthesizer music. I wrote five songs
the next year and six in the one following that,
leading up to the total of 16 tracks on the new CD
called "Journey to Salvation". The final song I
composed for this CD is called "Live Your Dreams".
That title was actually the first concept I thought
of after "Mysteries". Now it had become an important
statement: live your dreams, never give them up,
don't ever stop. In my own home studio, The
Mysteries Studio, I mixed, recorded and finalized
"Journey to Salvation". Celebrating yet another
decade of making music gone past, this time the
sound was just what I always wanted my music to
sound like.
Finishing "Journey to Salvation" completely by
myself was an important achievement in my life. I
had closed the book on a hard period in my life and
I felt I was now ready to move on to the next stage
with my music and at the same time help others make
their dreams come true. I had just moved house and
had the opportunity to build a home studio just the
way I wanted it. The only problem now was again
time. Matters got worse when bad fortune befell my
father around this time and a battle against an
awful disease had begun. At the end of 2009, the
severity of his situation reminded me that life is
short, but it is never too late to live your dreams.
Inspired by his will to go on, I started down a new
path in music. A colleague of mine once said to
me:"Everything is on YouTube nowadays!". Indeed,
Internet has brought the world closer together and
therefore it is a great opportunity to reach out
across the globe. For starters, I had the idea to
look for people on YouTube that sing (a-capella or
acoustically) in a way that spoke to me. After
arranging my own version of the song, I extracted
the audio from the YouTube video and synchronized it
with my own arrangement. This I did for the first
three covers. With enough practice, I decided to
start to really reach out and try to find talented
singers to work with. The first person to respond
was Geanie Jenkins, an incredibly talented singer
with a dream, just like me. The fact that she lived
in San Diego with 9 hours of time difference was
testimony to the fact that the Internet indeed makes
boundaries fade away. We worked on a fully arranged
cover and a live-performed cover very intensively
over a few months. The results amazed us both and
because I happened to be travelling there for my
work, we even got to meet face to face in the summer
of 2010; memories to last a lifetime... I knew I
found myself at the start of a new, beautiful dream
with hopefully many more successful collaborations
to come, making music that brightens people's day
and opens up their hearts.
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| Yamaha SHS-10 |
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| Roland E-10 |
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| Roland E-70 |
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| Roland XP-50 |
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| Korg TR-Rack |
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| Roland M-BD1 |
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| Roland A-90 |
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