I posted my first video 2 years ago on Facebook and the response I got totally blew me away, I never had thought that so many people would be interested in that kind of music, it is quite a specific thing, right ? A niche in a niche : ) So the great feedback motivated me to produce more videos and by now I have 11 performance videos on my YouTube channel. At a certain point I thought it could be cool to do some performance videos of playing my arrangements, there were some great examples on YouTube featuring Dobro and Weissenborn but not so much vintage Hawaiian music. This is where I learn the most, carefully listening to the old masters and figuring out what is going on, how they slide into notes, when they use what kind of vibrato, and so on. I used the Stacy Phillips book to learn some arrangements but started to transcribe steel parts from records right from the start. Thank you so much for the kind words, I am slowly getting there : ) Besides taking a handful of lessons from Alan Akaka and John Ely I am basically self taught. I also liked the fact that I can play a acoustic instrument without sitting in front of a computer, which is quite a common scenario when you are producing music nowadays. How did you get started playing Hawaiian Steel guitar?Īs I already mentioned I started out with Dobro, (using Cindy Cashdollar’s DVD) it was a perfect new challenge after playing guitar since I was 15, definitely some things in common with guitar but also pretty new and exciting. A year later we were joined by our singer Yuko, and that is the core of the band for 8 years now.
Soon the Bluegrass band was transformed into a Hawaiian Band, as much as we like Bluegrass it was clear that with vintage Hawaiian music we found our niche. In Hawaii I bought a CD called Hawaiian Steel Guitar Classics which contained mostly tricone recordings from the 20s and 30s and I was totally hooked. I was quite impressed and started to play a bit of slack key, just for myself and for fun. My first touch point with Hawaiian Music was hearing Slack key master Ledward Kaapana performing at the Kona brewery. Since my parents in law used to live in Hawaii we traveled there on a regular base. About the same time I started out on Dobro and formed a Bluegrass Band with two of my friends.
10 years ago I was hired by Native Instruments, a Berlin based software instrument company where I work as a Sound designer. For about 10 years I was producing my own and other peoples music, played live, spun records and was able to travel lots of countries doing music, great times. I soon became part of the very exciting scene. Everything was about Electronic music at that time in Berlin and soon I started using my gear to produce my own tracks. I moved to Berlin and set up a home studio. After studying there I realized that I am rather interested in music production than being a session player. After high school I moved to Los Angeles to study guitar at the GIT. I was already at that time quite interested in recording and worked with a 4track recorder and drum machines. I had a great teacher who encouraged me to improvise and soon I got into playing electric guitar, playing in several local bands.
Around 10 I started playing Tenor Horn in a brass section, when I was 15 I started on classical guitar. I started out with piano at the age of six without much success. I grew up in a musical family in Germany, my mother is a good singer, so is my father and he plays multiple instruments.