About Me

When I was a kid my parents wanted me to play an instrument, they suggested the piano or the clarinette, which didn't sound appealing to me at all, so at the age of 11 I started to learn how to play classical guitar. I had lessons at Krefeld's local music school for about 5 years, but as soon as I discovered my love for metal in 1981 my interest drifted away from the classical stuff pretty soon. Instead of practicing some etudes I was sitting down with my guitar, listening to Black Sabbath's "Greatest Hits" all day long, trying to figure out all those magical riffs, so Toni Iommi kind of took over my musical education. My other main influences at that time surely have been Iron Maiden, their double leads have been as magical to me as Iommis riffs, those two bands for sure had the biggest influence on me back then. Also people like Randy Rhoads or Michael Schenker definitely had an influence on my playing, even though I definitely see myself as a rhythm guitar player. I will always prefer a cool riff over any kind of shredding. Aside from the typical metal people I really love David Gilmour, Mark Knopfler and Joe Bonamassa. All of them have an incredible tone, they just have to play one lick and you immediately know who is playing, this is something that matters much more to me than any fancy technique or shredding at the speed of light.

Together with some friends I formed my first band around 1985, we were still influenced by the classics, bands like early Maiden, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple or Rainbow always played an important role for us, but also new bands like Metallica made a big impression on us and made us drift away from the typical NWOBHM sounds. The band suffered from the usual problems most bands had, the lineup changed all the time, the name changed constantly (from Zodiak, to Redeemer, to Prophecy, to name just a few) and we never even played a single gig, but at least one demo was recorded. Unfortunately I don't have it any more, I would love to listen to it today, I am sure that would be an interesting experience. Some time in 1986 I left that band and joined Lucifer's Heritage. The band already had recorded two demos, we played shows, worked on more new songs and finally got signed by No Remorse Records in 1987. The only thing we still had to do was change our name, Lucifer's Heritage led to too much confusion, because most people thought we would be a black metal band, so while recording our debut album "Batallions of Fear" we changed the name to Blind Guardian.

My contact to Sinbreed obviously came through Frederik. One day while we were touring for "At the edge of time" he told me that he would play some gigs with his sideband Sinbreed in a touring break of Blind Guardian and asked me, if I would like to play those gigs with them. I love playing live, I liked Sinbreed's music, so I agreed to do those shows. I didn't really have much time to learn the set, actually I used some days off during our South American tour to prepare myself, but even though we didn't even do a single rehearsal before the first show things worked perfectly fine and we had a lot of fun. When they approached me about becoming a permanent member I immediately agreed.