ForestSounds Studio - open source acoustic guitar music

A musical biography

Speaking about yourself can be a bit embarrassing, but when you decide to do it, you should do it well, so here goes...
Does this mean you'll know everything about me after reading this? No, not quite! This little biography will, for the most part, be restricted to my passion for music in all it's fascinating forms. Everything else in my life is quite boring, I assure you...

Childhood music

I was born in Maarheeze, a small town in the south of Holland, in 1966. Most of my family still live there, but I decided to roam around Holland quite a bit.
During my childhood and teenage years I listened a lot to ABBA, Queen, Kate Bush, Mike Oldfield, Supertramp, and Pink Floyd. I discovered most of these artists through the record collection of my elder brother. What I liked most about that music was the strong sense of adventure in it. Listening to these wonderful albums that were full of surprises was very special. The music provided some sort of escape to a better place, where you never knew what would happen next.

Bleep bleep

Then, somewhere in my highschool years, I made a very strict turn to synthesizer music. Suddenly, my heroes were Klaus Schulze, Kraftwerk, Jean-Michel Jarre, Tomita and Tangerine Dream. I was completely obsessed with this music and whenever I heard a "real" instrument I wasn't interested in it anymore. I still own quite a lot of albums (CDs, that is) with electronic music, and listen to them every now and then, but I like them more because the music holds good memories than because of the quality of the music itself. I remember wanting to own a real synthesizer more than anything in the world. Now, some 30 years later, I do, and it's every bit as much fun as I thought it would be back then. I still think the synthesizer is one of the least understood instruments, mainly because it is seldomly used in a tasteful way. But way back then, I thought electronic music was "the bomb" and nobody could convince me otherwise. Non-electronic music? Whatever...

Vangelis to the rescue

This all changed when John Voesten, one of my schoolfriends, practically forced me to listen to Vangelis. This literally changed my life. Suddenly, it was completely uninteresting wether or not an instrument was electronic or acoustic. If the result is beautiful, who cares? I also heard Jon Anderson for the first time on his collaboration albums with Vangelis. To this day "The Friends of Mr. Cairo" is one of my all time favourite albums. I own almost everything Vangelis has ever released, and listen to most of it on a regular basis. To me, Vangelis is really unique. The quality of his albums is all over the palce, I realize that, but most of it is stunnungly beautiful and adventorous. I listened to Vangelis almost exclusively all throughout highschool and well into university.

Yes. Jazz? No, Yes!

Then something strange happened. I searched for some more music made by Jon Anderson, so I listened to some records by Yes. And hated it. Profoundly. But at the same time just kept listening to it. It was like you were being fed something incredibly filthy, but you can't stop eating the stuff. I can't explain it, it simply happened like that. Years later I heard from other Yes fanatics that the same thing happened to them. So my love for Yes was an accuiered taste, and what striked me about this strange band, apart from Andersons vocals, was the completely chaotic and utterly original guitar work of their guitarist, Steve Howe. That's how I became interested in the guitar. Steve Howe is the only reason I started playing. For some years he was the only reason I kept playing, but not anymore. He will always be very important to me, though.

Starting out on the guitar

My first guitar was a small steel-string guitar that Henk Tillemans, my brother in law who plays the guitar very well, lent me for the duration of one year. It was designed for nylon strings, but Henk replaced those with steel string. That's killing for a guitar and that showed: the bridge was kept on its place with steel bolts. Charming! I literally practised for hours every day, and after a couple of weeks decided that it was great fun. That was not an immediate feeling, the instrument grew on me over time. But no matter how much fun it was,I thought that it would be even greater fun using nylon strings. And so I bought my first proper guitar, a spanish guitar (which I regret to say I don't own anymore.
During my studies I played a lot as a street musician in Eindhoven. I'm probably the only one who ever played Bach music combined with pieces by Steve Howe. Most people hated it, but some pitied me and gave me their money. Looking back on that period, I think I tried to play hard pieces too soon. I so much wanted to play Steve Howe pieces that I couldn't find the patience to study less complex music. That changed later on, but back then, I was obsessed with playing "Mood for a Day" and "The Ancient", to name a few. I performed on stage a couple of times with Wilma van der Neut, a friend of my sister. She on (beautiful) vocals and me on the guitar, we performed our own arrangements of music by Queen, Kate Bush, Harry Sacksioni, etc.
I also performed on stage with Henk, playing two of his own instrumentals. We still have plans (although they are very vague) of doing some more performances together.

Finding my muse

After my studies I disappeared for a miserable year and a half in the army. We won't get into that period, but it was here that I started to write my own music, so I guess it had some positive effect on me after all. Writing my own compositions has helped me through some very hard times. Even now, being married to the love of my life, in good health and with my life running really smoothly, I still experience the urge to write music when something goes wrong. Small things like a broken plate or big things like someone dying that you love, it all goes into my music in some way or other. Let's just call it very cheap therapy, shall we?
OK, back to being released out of the army. Around that time, I purchased my first *really* good guitar: a classical instrument built by Frans van Oosterhout. It's a very warm instrument that I still love to play. It helped me get more and more serious about my playing and my music. Later I moved to the West of Holland, where I continued writing new music.

Let's put it to tape (or harddisk)

I've never been quite comfortable with playing my own music to others, but discovering that one of my former collegues owned a home recording studio changed all that. We recorded some of my pieces, and it's since then I'm not "ashamed" of them anymore. I had played them for audiences, families and friends in the past, but always with a bit of an apology attached to it. Most of the times I didn't tell them it was my own music, only after they said they quite liked it. And even then I always said it was "nothing special". I know, it's pathetic, but there you have it... Not that I'm really proud of it now, but I'm no longer embarressed by it. I tell people beforehand that I'm writing and playing my own pieces, and I'm very happy with most of it. In 2002, I decided to buy my own recording gear and make some serious recordings. That quickly changed into recording a full CD with 12 original compositions. Two years of my life, almost all of my spare time was dedicated to this project. The CD was released in august 2004, and to this day I'm really proud of it. There's not a single thing about it that I regret. There are a lot of things that, today, I would do different, but I still sand behind every decision I made back then. It's 100% me. It took some months for me to distance myself enough from the project. Only lately can I listen to it and really enjoy it. And it's very special that others apparently can do the same...

Musical webmaster

For me, ForestSounds Studio is the ideal way to distribute my music. But that doesn't come easy: building and maintaining this site takes a lot of my time. But on the positive side, I have learned a lot about html, css and php because of it. I guess it's like this: the music is an outlet of my emotional side, the webside is a way to let out the technical nerdiness that's inside of me a little too much...

...and what about tomorrow?

As hinted at before, I've never been more satisfied with my life as I am at this moment. I'm also full of ideas for a next CD. I will keep using this site to distribute the music, in most cases for free. After all, here at ForestSounds Studio, it's all about open source acoustic guitar music.

Gerard Slooven-Semmelink, april 2006.