From 1990 until 1999, I very unsuccessfully studied classical piano with five different piano teachers in three different music schools. It was the only formal music education I got until I decided to study musicology at Ghent University. I probably would have persevered at being awful, but there just weren't any more music teachers to study with. My name was supposedly flagged as "unteachable", and at least one of my piano teachers had the courage of telling it to me like it was: "you are A-MUSICAL". Harsh words for an eleven year-old to digest, but there definitely was some truth in her statement. However, as a means to find new ways to motivate me, she asked me what I wanted to play. When I told her I liked Tchaikovsky, I ended up playing boring Bach-pieces for a couple more years. I am not saying father Bach isn't any good, but "Präludien und Fughetten" hardly kindles the imagination or enthusiasm of a piano-skeptic eleven-year-old rock-fan.
During this period - so from a very early age onward - I started going to gigs with my dad and my four-year-older brother. I have very faint recollections of sitting on my dad's shoulders at the "Gentse Feesten" summer city festival in Ghent, Belgium. Also, I still have my 1993 ticket to Deep Purple. After a Swiss fall-out with Ritchie Blackmore, the band featured Joe Satriani on guitars during the remainder of the "The Battle Rages On"-tour. It was the very first concert I ever went to; it was phenomenal.
In 1992, I played my very first gig on a borrowed Roland keyboard, basically triggering some programmed rhythm tracks. It wasn't glamorous at all. Shortly after, I had to fill in as a bass player in my brother 's high school band. I was ten years old, and still in elementary school at the time. I had to learn bass from scratch and the bass looked enormous on me. So, highly-suspended and quite inelegantly, it had to be drop-tuned to C# for me to be able to reach the low E on the third fret. From then on, we played together as a high school pop-rock cover-band called "Icarus" until 1997. We were pretty alright, and even though we were just school kids, the level of musicianship was more or less okay.
The only good part of being a non-practicing Roman Catholic is that, at the age of twelve, you get presents. In my case, that was a bad-ass black Pearl Export drum kit. Over the course of puberty, I pounded all the life out of that kit, and I like to think that I had gotten pretty proficient at playing Iron Maiden stuff. Prior to 2000, I played a grand total of 2 live concerts, namely with "Union Match", a Metallica-tribute band.
My young musical life was shaped by three profoundly influential events. The first event must have been in 1989, when my dad put on the vinyl "Made in Japan" by Deep Purple. There is just something magical happening on that record. The second event was that, within one month time, I saw Purple featuring Joe Satriani in Flanders Expo (at age eleven) and my brother bought a Marshall Valvestate 100 with a 4x12 1960 cabinet. When I heard the - in retrospect pretty cheesy - lead channel, I simply knew that I wanted to be an axe-slinger. So, I started practicing intensely, playing my brother's Squire Stratocaster for about 3 years. The third event was in 1996, when I bought an axe of my own: a black Ibanez S-270. I broke my left wrist later that same week. As I couldn't wait for six weeks to play such a thing of beauty, so I filed away the piece of the cast around my thumb, and started practicing in a slightly angled yet hyper-correct position. It was probably the most pristine playing technique I 've ever had.
Throughout 1996, girls didn't dig me all that much, so - having little distractions from the opposite sex - I was a hormonally challenged young lad involved in a deep, satisfying and loving relationship with a metronome. For up to four hours per day, I played the different pentatonic scales and a couple of faulty arpeggio's over and over again. In that year, my musical horizons were expanded by three persons: Frederik Leroux (an incredibly gifted guitar player who introduced me to Steve Vai and Dream Theater), the late Jan Sageman (who sold me an Ampeg VL-1002 and first introduced me to the seven modes of the major scale and guitar positions) and again my older brother, who always guided me in more than one way. He took a jazz summer camp and taught me a thing or two about both classical and jazz harmony. Also, as soon as he got back from band camp, he bought a Tascam Porta 0.7, which I used even more intensively then he did. In retrospect -especially if you compare to what became commercially available ten years down the road- it was technologically an unspeakable piece of rubbish.
So, in the summer holiday of 1998, I spent practically every waking moment in the searingly hot attic of my parents' house, recording tons of awful "Sturm und Drang" songs, in the poorest quality a double speed, double side 4-track recorder could provide. Basically, what you did was create up to 8 noise bands, which very faintly played back pieces of a song. As the machine broke down a few years later, that undoubtedly "splendid" material only lives on in my imagination. I still have the notebooks and remember shards of the very image-conscious lyrics, but in order not to defy good taste, I choose to take them to the grave.
Earlier on in 1998, I had done my first ever gig playing the guitar with a 3-headed high school group, called "Zarathustra". One year later, the band struck again (after which we split). I do have quite fond memories of those gigs. In the following years, the line-ups got confusing and the band-names got increasingly ludicrous. With "Jimmy Vanilly & the Chilly Willies" we played two not-so-amazing gigs, and with the anarcho-marching-band-metal-collective "Jacky Charcuterie and the Boney Hams", we played a total of about 10 gigs, with about 18 different band members. Good times!
From 2002 on, my life being an amateur musician became a bit more stable. Every once in a while, I played with "Easy Five Jazz Quartet" and I officially joined "SpellbAund" in 2003. Over a ten year period, I think I must have played something close to 200 gigs.
In 2009 -coinciding with the advent of my MacBook Pro- I made the sound decision to start recording music again after a small decade of being a cover-musician. My favorite weapon of choice is the easy-to-use GarageBand. It is difficult to understate how much the technology has evolved in just ten years time. At the risk of sounding really old, I would say that kids today have it a lot easier to make some decent tunes. Anyways, as "kxszander", I sporadically tend to make the music that comes from within. That means that it defies genre classification and it is for the larger part instrumental. I share some material on SoundCloud, but essentially it is a way to exercise my hobby of arranging music; the songs are there for my personal enjoyment, but it is a bonus if other people also like them.
In summer of 2010, I started "MiXXed and Mashed", a new remix, mash-up and medley cover-band that had been multiple years in the making. And finally, from 2011 on, I started playing as a hired gun again, mainly for fun, in a couple of very different side-projects. With "LLumen", I am offering my drop-tuned thrash-services to an Electro-project, and finally, in "Elected Babies", I am brushing up on Hard Rock (i.e. Alice Cooper) riffs.
During this period - so from a very early age onward - I started going to gigs with my dad and my four-year-older brother. I have very faint recollections of sitting on my dad's shoulders at the "Gentse Feesten" summer city festival in Ghent, Belgium. Also, I still have my 1993 ticket to Deep Purple. After a Swiss fall-out with Ritchie Blackmore, the band featured Joe Satriani on guitars during the remainder of the "The Battle Rages On"-tour. It was the very first concert I ever went to; it was phenomenal.
In 1992, I played my very first gig on a borrowed Roland keyboard, basically triggering some programmed rhythm tracks. It wasn't glamorous at all. Shortly after, I had to fill in as a bass player in my brother 's high school band. I was ten years old, and still in elementary school at the time. I had to learn bass from scratch and the bass looked enormous on me. So, highly-suspended and quite inelegantly, it had to be drop-tuned to C# for me to be able to reach the low E on the third fret. From then on, we played together as a high school pop-rock cover-band called "Icarus" until 1997. We were pretty alright, and even though we were just school kids, the level of musicianship was more or less okay.
The only good part of being a non-practicing Roman Catholic is that, at the age of twelve, you get presents. In my case, that was a bad-ass black Pearl Export drum kit. Over the course of puberty, I pounded all the life out of that kit, and I like to think that I had gotten pretty proficient at playing Iron Maiden stuff. Prior to 2000, I played a grand total of 2 live concerts, namely with "Union Match", a Metallica-tribute band.
My young musical life was shaped by three profoundly influential events. The first event must have been in 1989, when my dad put on the vinyl "Made in Japan" by Deep Purple. There is just something magical happening on that record. The second event was that, within one month time, I saw Purple featuring Joe Satriani in Flanders Expo (at age eleven) and my brother bought a Marshall Valvestate 100 with a 4x12 1960 cabinet. When I heard the - in retrospect pretty cheesy - lead channel, I simply knew that I wanted to be an axe-slinger. So, I started practicing intensely, playing my brother's Squire Stratocaster for about 3 years. The third event was in 1996, when I bought an axe of my own: a black Ibanez S-270. I broke my left wrist later that same week. As I couldn't wait for six weeks to play such a thing of beauty, so I filed away the piece of the cast around my thumb, and started practicing in a slightly angled yet hyper-correct position. It was probably the most pristine playing technique I 've ever had.
Throughout 1996, girls didn't dig me all that much, so - having little distractions from the opposite sex - I was a hormonally challenged young lad involved in a deep, satisfying and loving relationship with a metronome. For up to four hours per day, I played the different pentatonic scales and a couple of faulty arpeggio's over and over again. In that year, my musical horizons were expanded by three persons: Frederik Leroux (an incredibly gifted guitar player who introduced me to Steve Vai and Dream Theater), the late Jan Sageman (who sold me an Ampeg VL-1002 and first introduced me to the seven modes of the major scale and guitar positions) and again my older brother, who always guided me in more than one way. He took a jazz summer camp and taught me a thing or two about both classical and jazz harmony. Also, as soon as he got back from band camp, he bought a Tascam Porta 0.7, which I used even more intensively then he did. In retrospect -especially if you compare to what became commercially available ten years down the road- it was technologically an unspeakable piece of rubbish.
So, in the summer holiday of 1998, I spent practically every waking moment in the searingly hot attic of my parents' house, recording tons of awful "Sturm und Drang" songs, in the poorest quality a double speed, double side 4-track recorder could provide. Basically, what you did was create up to 8 noise bands, which very faintly played back pieces of a song. As the machine broke down a few years later, that undoubtedly "splendid" material only lives on in my imagination. I still have the notebooks and remember shards of the very image-conscious lyrics, but in order not to defy good taste, I choose to take them to the grave.
Earlier on in 1998, I had done my first ever gig playing the guitar with a 3-headed high school group, called "Zarathustra". One year later, the band struck again (after which we split). I do have quite fond memories of those gigs. In the following years, the line-ups got confusing and the band-names got increasingly ludicrous. With "Jimmy Vanilly & the Chilly Willies" we played two not-so-amazing gigs, and with the anarcho-marching-band-metal-collective "Jacky Charcuterie and the Boney Hams", we played a total of about 10 gigs, with about 18 different band members. Good times!
From 2002 on, my life being an amateur musician became a bit more stable. Every once in a while, I played with "Easy Five Jazz Quartet" and I officially joined "SpellbAund" in 2003. Over a ten year period, I think I must have played something close to 200 gigs.
In 2009 -coinciding with the advent of my MacBook Pro- I made the sound decision to start recording music again after a small decade of being a cover-musician. My favorite weapon of choice is the easy-to-use GarageBand. It is difficult to understate how much the technology has evolved in just ten years time. At the risk of sounding really old, I would say that kids today have it a lot easier to make some decent tunes. Anyways, as "kxszander", I sporadically tend to make the music that comes from within. That means that it defies genre classification and it is for the larger part instrumental. I share some material on SoundCloud, but essentially it is a way to exercise my hobby of arranging music; the songs are there for my personal enjoyment, but it is a bonus if other people also like them.
In summer of 2010, I started "MiXXed and Mashed", a new remix, mash-up and medley cover-band that had been multiple years in the making. And finally, from 2011 on, I started playing as a hired gun again, mainly for fun, in a couple of very different side-projects. With "LLumen", I am offering my drop-tuned thrash-services to an Electro-project, and finally, in "Elected Babies", I am brushing up on Hard Rock (i.e. Alice Cooper) riffs.