I started playing the acoustic guitar when I was 12 years old, studying classical music themes and MPB (Brazilian Popular Music), which later changed due to my admiration for rock music, specially hard and progressive rock. At the time, access to the world of music was very difficult. Information was rare and there were few specialized rock magazines, TV and radio shows. At the time, two facts marked me and were very decisive to my getting interested in metal music. The first was that, in Porto Alegre, there was a radio show called Arrasa Quarteirão that aired the main progressive rock and heavy metal releases. It was common to hear “first hand” (I mean first hand for the listeners, for usually the tracks had been released two years prior to the release on the radio) tracks such as The Number of the Beast, of an English band curiously called Iron Maiden, or Ace of Spades, by Motorhead and Mob Rules by Black Sabbath. The second fact was that there was also a specialized rock store for those who were curious to hear these new sounds. It was a time for discovering new bands, sounds, album covers, etc.

After that I got very interested in a progressive rock band called Yes. I had all the records of the band and it made me discover a musical instrument called bass. Chris Squire, Yes bass player¸ caught my attention because of the way he conducted the harmonies and melodies of the intricate songs of the band. For me, it was a new conception to be respected and studied. In 1989 I received the first invitation to play in a rock band. I still didn’t have an instrument but I was invited by arranger, composer and guitar player Charles Vianna, to join the progressive rock band Fohat, in my home town of Gravataí, a few kilometers from Porto Alegre. The band had an old Giannini bass, on which I was able to learn my first lines. At our first gig I used a Giannini Duovox, a legend among Brazilian amplifiers. Until today I remember that incredible sound. I played with the band until 1993. We had played about 100 gigs in many cities in the state of Rio Grande Do Sul. The most interesting thing is that even though we played our own compositions and a couple of cover songs, we had many gigs, due mainly to strong connection and discipline among the band members. We took played many festivals, including the final of a rock band contest promoted by a big TV Channel in Porto Alegre, where we played a song called Alienígena, a reference to the comic book character Silver Surfer. The track was a big hit in our city.

Even though Fohat was a great school, I wanted to broaden my horizons. In 1994 we saw a wave of heavy rock taking over the country. Bands like Mr. Big, Pantera, Dream Theater, Skid Row, Metallica, Guns´n´Rosesand Iron Maiden could be always be heard on the radio. So, with in this spirit, other musicians of the city and I formed our own band, Alma Beat. This is the name of a book by Brazilian journalist Eduardo Bueno, from Porto Alegre, that would later become very well known in Brazil due to the publication of the book Trip of Discovery, about the history of Brazil at the time of its discovery. In Alma Beat, he broaches the American beatnik generation of the 50´s, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other lunatics who invented that alternative movement. In this spirit we baptized the band and hit the road. At that time many things had already changed in the music scene: there were specialized rock magazines, stores and radio shows. This motivated me to search for more information relating to my instrument, amplifiers and so on, and mainly to study musical theory. My equipment was already very different. I’d ordered a new bass from luthier Fialho Domingos, as I was looking for an instrument with better quality than that I was used to. Fialho was known for having developed the first instruments for famous guitar player Frank Solari and a bunch of other important musicians of Porto Alegre. What I didn’t know was that he’d take about six months to deliver the bass. It was an overwhelming period. I went twice a week to his workshop just to ask for any news on the construction of my bass. Finally, on the eve of an important gig, it was delivered, even though some details were missing from the paint job. This instrument was very important to the development of some techniques I had started to discover. I continued to study Chris Squire; however other bass players had already appeared, such as Billy Sheehan, Steve Harris and Glenn Hughes, of Deep Purple, whom I already had listened to in the 70’s without paying too much attention. I was impressed with the way he improvised over the grooves of drummer Ian Paice.

In 1994 we started to rehearse and I wrote my first compositions. To do this, I counted with the partnership of guitar player Luciano Franco. It was a good inspirational moment. Our set list included about fifteen of our own songs and classics of all bands previously mentioned. One of the band’s traits were the gigs with powerful performances. In Gravataí people used to say that we were a mixture of Pantera and Mr. Big, which was both funny and rewarding at the same time. It was a very good period during which I could improve several techniques that I hadn’t known in my first band.

The first half of the 90’s was so promising for rock music that in 1994 I opened a store called Riffmaker, where I sold CDs, T-shirts, VHS, picks, strings, etc. The store was in Gravataí and it only lasted a year. As I continued working a regular job, I did not have enough time to dedicate myself to the store and had to close it. Alma Beat finished its activities in 1996 due to absolute lack of space, since at this time all the scene was being overtaken by the grunge style from Seattle and hard rock was yielding to new trends.

In 1997 and 1998 I only played acoustic guitar at home with no further pretensions. Those were very difficult years, and I was determined to sell my equipment. But by the end of 1998, a friend called Juliano told me that close to his house some lunatics of a heavy metal band were rehearsing a lot. They would be the opening act for an Angra gig in Porto Alegre, in December. It was only a comment, but I kept it in mind because I liked Angra very much and I intended to go to the gig, which did not happen, due to a huge storm that fell over the city that very day. A week later I placed an ad in a newspaper to sell an amplifier. On the same page, besides my ad, the following was featured: “Hangar Band looking for a bass player with influences of Dream Theater, Stratovarius, etc…” I instantly remembered that this was the same band which my friend Juliano had mentioned before. After thinking for a while, I decided to call the number in the newspaper. The first voice of Hangar that I heard was that of a very receptive guy, with a good sense of humor and weird name: Aquiles. After this first contact, we decided to meet in a shopping mall to talk. On the 23 rd of December we met for the first time. I was expecting a bunch of long haired guys dressed in black. But to my surprise three guys with short hair showed up, two of which wore glasses. They were Aquiles, Michael and former guitar player Cristiano. I had never played in a heavy metal band before but the conversation was cool. They suggested an audition and gave me a cassette tape with eight tracks, which included bands such as Dream Theater, Malmsteen, Helloween and Stratovarius. At the time I hadn’t played for two years nor listened to anything similar and that made me very apprehensive. In January of 1999, Hangar was already recording their first album and I went to the studio to listen to the mix and socialize. The first song I heard was Voices. I found the sound weird since my reference of melodic heavy metal was Angra and Voices sounded very heavy to me. I remember mentioning this to Aquiles and I sang a part of a song from Alma Beat, called Sweet Mary, in order to try showing him my point of view about melodic metal. It was a mistake, because until today he remembers this moment and makes fun of it, imitating the way I sang that track. So I left the studio kind of worried. We set the date of my audition for the summer, because I would be on vacation and would have time to learn the tracks (from the tape). In February, when we finally got together for my audition I still had not learned all the tracks, but had studied them enough to play and know the end result. We went to the studio and I remember playing some songs, which motivated the following comment from Aquiles: “Hey, if you were not prepared, you shouldn’t have come!” … That meant I had had my first stressful situation in the band. So we continued the rehearsal, and started playing a song called Visions, by Stratovarius, which is about 10 minutes long. I had learned the song easily enough and thought that the band liked the way I played it. But years later Michael confessed that even they didn’t know how to play that song and had included it in the set list just to push me and see how I would do in the audition. All right…

After the audition, we started getting together and talking more often and what most caught my attention was the determination of the band members. They were really determined to make Hangar a great band. In 1999, we released the album Last Time, in which I did not record nor compose anything. I consider my first three years in the band as an adaptation in my way of playing a style completely different to what I was used to. During this process, the closeness of the band members was very important. We played several gigs, for instance the one we did in 1999, in Porto Alegre, for the release of the album Last Time. We spent two years hardly promoting the album at all and rehearsing a lot. During the second semester of that same year we played for the first time in São Paulo. It was also the first long trip undertaken by bus, eighteen interminable hours to play at the legendary Black Jack Rock Bar.

When everything seemed to be ok we received the unpleasant news that Cristiano would be leaving the band. He was the guitar player and one of the main composers. We were already beginning the compositions for the second album and I remember that Aquiles and Michael felt the impact of this change in the line up. When it seemed that we would have to restart from zero, I remembered a very well known name of the metal scene in the south of Brazil. So I called guitar player Eduardo Martinez and invited him to get to know the band, because I thought that he was the right person for Hangar, due to his profile and vast theoretical musical knowledge. And I was not wrong; he was really the right guy. Along with Martinez I wrote my first composition for Hangar, To the Tame the Land. The rest of the album was composed by April 2000. As a bass player I was used to playing hard and progressive rock. So the way Hangar played heavy metal was still something new to me. I needed to develop other techniques which would allow me to reach the standards the band demanded. Aquiles helped me a lot during this process. His peculiar skill of playing and his intricate drum bass were very important for my self-discipline. And discipline and good taste are elementary for a good bass line. During this period I had to adapt myself to using a pick, a resource sometimes hated by bass players. It was an option to playing the light speed tempos we play. Once more I had to recycle my studies and learn other ways of playing as, for example, the three fingers technique. Still in 2000 I went to São Paulo to record the second Hangar album, Inside Your Soul. It was my first recording experience. The album was released in May 2001. Between 2001 and 2003 we played several gigs. Amongst them, in 2002 we were the opening act for North American band Savatage, at the Via Funchal in São Paulo. And in the summer of 2003 we did a tour in the Northeast of Brazil.

In 2004 I started composing tracks for the third Hangar album. I also did a few gigs and played in bands of friends, such as Iron Maiden’s Tribute, with band Scelerata. In 2005 I accepted an invitation by guitar player Luciano Franco (Alma Beat) to join the band Cães de Aluguel, whose set list only included classical rock songs from the 60’s and 70’s. During two years I played gigs in bars and pubs in the south of Brazil. In November of 2006 I recorded the bass for the new Hangar album, which is without doubt my most important work in all these years as a bass player. In January 2007, guitar player Eduardo Martinez, keyboard player Marcelo Rodrigues and I formed a band, Riffmaker (a homage to my old store’s name), and played hard rock classics of all decades. I also finished recording the bass of five tracks of band Artheria, the new band of Hangar’s former singer, Michael Polchowicz.

To finish, I can say that I spent eighteen years playing bass in three bands with own compositions and two cover bands. During all these years, I always tried to persevere and trust my intuition as to the choice of musicians whom I would be playing with. I guess I have made the right choices. I’m very anxious to be on the road playing Hangar’s new album, sharing this work with our friends. Hugs for everyone!!!


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