01- Hi Marcio, how are you? Thank you so much for the interview, we would like to start knowing when you started playing, who are your main influences and who were you instrument teachers?
My biggest influence was my seven years older brother. He used to bring home some rock album such as Black Sabbath, Queen, Judas Priest. I got influenced by this due to watching my brother listening to all those records since I was pretty much younger, I was eight or nine years old.
When it comes to playing the guitar my biggest influence was Van Halen since my brother took me to watch his concert in 1983 here in Brazil, in the time which the band still has as alead singer David Lee Roth. I was only ten years old and from that day own I knew that I was going to play the electric guitar. So who really made me pick up a guitar and start playing was Van Halen, after another influences came up when I was a child such as AC/DC , Judas Priest and Iron Maiden.
And from this moment you started taking up guitar lessons?
After that concert, I came up to my dad and mom and Said that I wanted to start playing the guitar, so my mother decided to put me in a neighbourhood small school to learn how to play the acoustic guitar and the classes were in group. After that I became very interested about learning more and I start doing classical acoustic guitar lessons due to the advice of a friend of my brother who was keyboardist and played in a band and etc. It was really important , because I learned how to play musical scores, my first concepts of music, to study acoustic guitar more seriously with all those classical discipline and the technique part. It took 3 years of my life, and only when I was 15 years old I started taking electric guitar lessons and even so it was with unknown teachers. My first more known was Fábio Amaral due to the Mozart Mello’s advice. Actually, I was 16 years old and I looked for Mozart to take up some guitar lessons and he adviced me to take classes with Fábio who was in that time teacher of the old Ig&t. After that I started having some lessons with Jarbas Barbosa from Mantiqueira, then I had some classes Sidney Carvalo before him going to the USA who was a guitar player who really helped me in that time, who stimulated me to really study guitar and after sometime I start having classes with Mozart which was a really long story to get a vacancy to do that. To meet him in person and he was the guy who really put the discipline on me about the electric guitar study and helped me to structure my foundations as a guitar player, really as study.
These were my main teachers, after I ended up knowing others teachers who helped with some tip or another, but these were the most significative in my life as guitar teachers.
02- You majored in electric guitar, when you decided to start doing the college?
I majored in electric Guitar At FAAM and inclusively I have a curious story about this related to my guitar teacher. While I was studying with all those people I mentioned above, I also used to study with Ricardo Rizek who was a teacher of rules of harmony and musical esthetics who was a person really important in my musical life as well as personal life, someone who helped me a lot in several aspects. He stimulated me to get in the college which he used to teach named FAAM and he also adviced me to have some classes with Marisa Ramires who was also a great teacher which helped me a lot about the foundations. But when I had the entrance examination , I lost the general knowledge and I couldn’t do the first year at FAAM, so I did the first year at Carlos Gomes college because I really need to get in the college that year and after I transferred to FAAM. To see how god works in mysterious ways , during years I wished I could be Mozart’s student and when I get in at Carlos Gomes the guitar teacher was him and didn’t know it before, so I started there in the course of popular instrument bachelor and after one year I trasnferred to FAAM and I kept as Mozart’s student at his home. So I majored in at FAAM after two years, because in that time we had a 3 years course.
And what was the college experience like?
The same old story: “ You need a diploma to be a professional musicians”, not necessarily, I think there are several excellent musicians in Brazil with no academic formation. In my case , when it comes to musical structuring was really important, I started being aware with some subjects I would never have had if it wasn’t the college such as: countepoint, brazilian and universal music history, a ear training and rhythm course more advanced. It was extremely important for my musical develpoment, looking at the profesional question it opened some doors in differente places, for example : At Souza Lima where Ciro used to teach there before me, he was already a teacher in Souza Lima, he has always been a great friend and we used to play together in a electric guitar quartet, so he told me Souza Lima nedeed a teacher who was graduated from college and he adviced me there and due to the fact I did fill in the vacancy I start teaching at Souza Lima. I have teaching there for 8 years, and I am there exclusively due to my academic formation.
03 –Please talk about your former projects and musical accomplishements?
The project I had which really had a great importance was a band named “Anjo dos Becos” which I played from 1990 to the end of 1993. I don’t know if you know the band, but in that time the band was really important in São Paulo’s underground since it was the haverst time of bands which we had to face the record labels crisis , they didn’t have artists coming up, and happened soon after Collor plan. There were several bands in the underground and Anjo was one of the most important bands in the rock scene. It was really important for me, because I was so young and that showed me the kind of attitude you have in a band such as the companionship, group help, fighting for a dream, fighting for a dream, but after the dream was over. Lol I got a little disillusioned with some stuff that happened and I decided to left. So I started playing in the São Paulo’s night, because I needed to pay my bills and the college. This experience was really important since I used to play from Wednesday to Sunday with several people and several styles of music. So Heraldo (Ultraje a rigor) and Ciro Visconti (Diafanes) invited to form an electric guitar quartet.It was also a great experience for me, it was in 1997, and this quartet called Quadrivium lasted until the year of 1999. It was interesting , because I had done the college and I started using everything I had learned such as reading the score at first sight, reading scores, rehearsaling a piece a lot until make it to sound almost perfect and in a format which was something new in that time. It was a quartet of electric guitars, we didn’t know if someone had already done this in Brazil or all over the world, we did a search and worked about it. It was important, because we could show this work in places as the Prograa do Jô, Vídeo Show, Bem Brasil on Cultura, Gazeta, Bandeirantes and MTV.
After the end of Quadrivium, Ciro and I decided to rebuilt the quartet again using other name which was Quarttuour which didn’t last that long, because we walked away from the project and we never got together again to play.
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04- I would like to know what was your process to become professional like and if you compare to the new generation which has several tools and the Internet? |
I really saw all this stuff got evolved, this Internet and technology stuff. When I started playing the guitar I was in that old standard where there was no Cd, to get the records it had to be vinyl or you borrowed this from someone who had and you recorded a copy in a tape and this standard was there for a certain while. The whole thing started to revolutionize from the moment they created the Cd and start to invest in the personal computer own, that idea of having your own studio inside your home, to talk through the Internet as we are talking right now and when I talk to people from my old generaton, they tell some stories really close with the ones I lived,for example: To you learn a solo with tons of notes, I needed to take a old vinyl player which my father had which had 16 rotations and the most of the vinyls were 32 or something like that, so you started playing the vinyl playing in 16 and it got almost one perfect octave below. Can you imagine the work: you put the vinyl, put it slower and to learn all the stuff with the low sound and it was even an octave perfect below. Suddenly the whole thing had changed and the computer showed up with that stuff of getting songs from the Internet. The informartion start getting all over the place very quickly, this is interesting I went through all this transition part, from the vinyl to the computer and digital recording. The digital recording has changed everyone’s life, when I was a teenager I started recording the first demo recording of my band, we had to do a huge saving to get in the studio and doing ordinary recording, today if you have a notebook with an usual audio board, you can do a record much better if compared to seventeen, eighteen years ago. The technology question made with all the people got closer to what it really has to be, the audio quality and etc. If he wants to show your workd today, he is able to do that with a much better quality, it reflects on the professional and in the new guitar players.
Definitely! Today we also can count on tools such as Myspace, Orkut and etc...
Exactly! Talking about bands, the band I played for. To show your work to the neighbour cities, you in São Paulo and you want the people from Campinas to know your sound, it was a huge work. You did an ordinary demo tape in K7, you published this in a rock magazine.Someone had to buy the magazine, to read the article, to become curious about your work, to send you a letter , you take this letter , to send a tape trought the post office, to get in the person’s house, the guy listening to say if he likes it or not. Today it isn’t like that anymore, today if the person is in Tokyo and the person clicks on a button and he can listen to your sound, in other words it is radical and very big what happened. Today is much easier to people show their work on the Internet.
05 - I would like to know how you got interested by country guitar which thousands of guitar players don’t know and how the sideman side which this style proportionate you works?
Actually, this is the question of my life, because my professional life is pretty much this question. The question about getting interested about for the country showed up by chance, Heraldo Paarmann is a guy who already played country several years ago and he used to show me and to tell me that I needed to learn this style, but I have never had the interest, because I thought it wasn’t important. Due to the fact of playing in the São Paulo’s night and of my need of paying the bills, because there are times you have no jobs, a country band with a guitar player wanted showed up and I had no idea what playing country is. The guy called me, invited me to a rehearsal and I agreed to play even the idea in the beginning was to go there, to play, to get my money and that’s it. But I started studying the style, listening to the style and it started getting get my attention....
You started playing country with a Flyind V guitar, didn’t you? Lol
Kind of! Lol When I started playing country I owned a Ibanez Rg 550 in the style Steve Vai, Paul Gilbert and I used to play with that guitar which had nothing to do with the style, but It was the only one I had. As long as you getting to know the style, you start understanding more about and with this the first consequence was to not use the Ibanez anymore , I bought a Fender Stratocaster in that time which still wasn’t a country guitar, but it has much more to do with country than the Ibanez. So I kept studying until I got totally addicted to the style and something funny happened in that way: I used to play in a country band and had already played with eight band and parallely I used to play as free lancer, but I got out of work and it lasted for 6 months which I wasn’t playing with anyone, just doing a free lancer which was a very difficult professional and financial time. But I used to study 12 hours of country guitar a day inside the studio I had already at home, the whole day learning everything I could. This time was extremely important for my study and development, after the things got back to normal I walked away from country because I thought there was no future with this, I wasn’t sure where I could get with the whole thing. But a little sertanejo group (Very usual in Brazil which usually has two singers) showed up and since I was out of job I started working with them, it all happened eight or nine years ago. So I got used to work with artist which maybe couldn’t be a famous artist but he/she was someone in front of me telling me what I had to do. I hadn’t done this playing in the São Paulo’s nights, because we played as a band. Thanks to this first job with artists and due to my large number of contacts, several artists who weren’t exactly from sertanejo started showing up.Despite of today I am playing with a famous sertanejo group , I didn’t stay exclusively in this style, but due to the country guitar I ended up having something interesting to get the attention from the sertanejo people. That was pretty much when a friend of mine adviced me to play with Christian who was from the group Christian & Ralf since they did split and they are doing their solo career and it was important because it was the first big artista which I started working for, I started doing big concerts and I stayed with him for almost one year. It was a short period, because the band got back together and they formed other band with other people. I followed doing other stuff, some other artists showed up then such as Sula Miranada, Lia who is a songwriter and singer girl and was getting bigger in her career and she also has songs with Sandy e Junior and Ivete Sangalao, Rick who is an important guy in the musical inudustry, songwritter, also worked with Sandy and Junior, I worked with Zé Henrique e Gabriel who were releasing an album by Deck Discos of João Augusto and it was really important because I recorded their album and I also was in a period of ascension with all this stuff of working for a studio and because of this band I started working a big studo and from this moment the invitation to work with Christian & Ralf came up which I am playing until nowadays. So all this procedure, this process was important to you start knowing how to handle and to behave yourself as a guest musician of some artist. Parallely to all this stuff my recording part got bigger, I built a studio in my home which is actually a home studio, but it is professional where I can do works not only from someone else’s studios as well as at my own home, so all this experience was really important for me nowadays to know how to deal with this, deal with the professional question of posture which you have to have towards to it.
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06 - What is your opinion about the brazillian guitarist scene nowadays?
If compared to when I started, it is much bigger! There’s no doubt about it. If it got back in that technologic question which we already talked about, we can see it as one of the responsibles for this. There are much more guitar players playing well, you have several schools which invest in the didatic part to graduate a good professional.
So, I think it is much better, there are no doubts about this.
07 - How does your work at Souza Lima conservatory work?
Talking about my job, Souza Lima is really important for me at my musical life because it really profissionalized my side as an educator. As a professional guitar players I have several segments in my life such as: the sideman segement, the studio segement and the teacher segement. When it comes about my teacher aspect what really defined my didactic vision about guitar was the fact of working at Souza Lima. At the school there are the free course which as the name says you are going to conduct the student according to his profile, ams, musical taste fitting him in a dorsal column of subjects which he needs to know to be a good player, at least that’s my vision. There’s also the technicist course which you have a content which you have to follow and to conduct the student throught out this, with this kind of student you have to have other posture because he/she is going to have tests each six months and you have to make him get ready to face jury-box and my function is about getting him/her ready to make it throught. The other part is the “reading music scores” course which as soon as I got at Souza Lima what made me able to teach this course was my graduation and the experience with this kind of thing (Quadrivium), it also happened for my studio experience which takes from you at lest a reasonable reading of music scores. The main goal of the course is to make the student get in touch with this kind of subject which is always a problem for the guitarist...
If I hadn’t take that course, I would have serious problem at the college right now... Lol
That is just it! Lol... So everyone knows guitar players in general has a difficultie in the reading music scores development even more than the other musician like pianists and classical musician. The course came up before I was there, there was another teacher who gave up and asked me if I would like to take over, so I decided to create my reasoning line which I have been following since then.
08 - I would like to know more about your equipment for live and studio situations and if there is any sponsorship?
You didn’t asked, but I am going to add some items to this question. The recording thing for me is extremely importante, because it is a goal of life. I think the best way of development of a musician is to himself/herself record himself/herself. If I had to advice someone I would advice this person to buy a recording system, because this changes your playing. So because of this, this posture, I start to invest in another instrument which wasn’t the guitar to open my possibilies of work. Until certain moment of my life, I just played tje electric guitar, but when I started working with recording and artists I started to invest in instruments such as pedal steel which is a very usual instrument used in Country Music and it is obvious the fact of playing country did a huge influence over me to buy a pedal steel and start playing, for those who don’t know pedal steel is that instrument which is a 10 strings electric guitar which in you play at the horizontal line and there are some pedals and whammy bars you use to change the tuning of the instrument and you play this with a metal bar. The Dobro Roundneck and Dobro Squareneck , the first one is that metal acoustic guitar which has a much more “metal”(not heavy metal) sound which shows up in blues album, an example would be that acoustic guitar which shows up at the cover of Dire Strais which for being Roundneck you play in the standard way. I also play Dobro with glass slide. The Dobro Squareneck which I also play you have to play in on your lap, you turn the acoustic guitar in the horiziontal position and it has a larger neck because you need to have the strings a little much more away from the neck and you play another kind of bar which fits in your left hand with the index and middle finger, it is another kind of dobro which you will see very often in country music. An example of musician with Dobro be a guy named Jerry Douglas who I am a really a fan in this style. I also started investing on Mandolin which is a kind american bandlon sounding a little different if compared to the brazilianone. I eneded up buying a banjo and due to the search for other instruments and sonorities I ended up looking for several different instruments.
Getting focus on the question about equipment, as I mentioned before I own a Pedal Steel Carter with GeorgeL’s pickups, Mandolin Epiphone with Piezo pickups, Dobro Rouneck Strinber, Dobro Squareneck Rogue, 5 strings Banjo Country Rover. Talking abot the Guitar, I use guitar built by Ivan Freitas which is a great luthier from São Paulo. His company is called Music Make and the main guitars I use were built by him, it is not a full sponsorship, actually is much more a support and he is a guy who supports me. I have one of his Telecasters, a customized Stratocaster and a baritone guitar is tuned down a 5th perfect to get a low sound. It is nt a guitar which I use to play New Metal, it is a baritone telecaster which I use to get some textures at the context of a recording. I also have a Variax which I use to record, a 12 strings Danelectro , a Les Paul with active pickuo which I own to play slide-guitar and an Ibanez Archtop. When it comes to acoustic guitar I own three folk acoustic guitar, one of 12 strings, another one of 6 traditional strings and one with Nashville tuning which I use to have an acoustic guitar sound higher since this tuning is almost one octave perfect up if compared to the starndard tunning. I also use a nylon acoustica of Crafter.
Talking about recording equipments,o Record in someone else’s studio I use a Boss Gt-5 “MIDED” with a Dg Stomp of Yamaha and of extra pedals I uso a boss compressor, a dunlop wah-wah and a talk box of Rocktron. Despite of being a simple equipment with it I can get everything I need, it is the same equipment I use at my home and besides that I also use my lap top where I record with a plug-in named amplitube 2. Some recording I ended up using this plug-in because it is quick and very useful. Talking about live concertts, I use a pedal called Utopia of rocktron which is used for electric guitar as well as pedal steel which I also play alive. Talking about the acoustic part, I use an Ag Stomp of Yamaha, since live I play acous tuicar, mandolin and also “setaneja viola” (traditional instrument in Brazil) despite of not being the usual way, I play it like it was an electric guitar with Slide. I use Rozini Violas which also supported me doing an agreement where they gave me a professional viola to tour with Christian & Ralf and to record the dvd.
09- Please leave a message for the guitar clinic viewers and talk about your future plans.
There’s something which people ask me about all the time, my friends, people from Souza Lima, students and etc which is about getting my songs done and have my work. I have already rehearsaled this work thousand of times, and I reunited some people to play, but I have never been able to finish this. I always invested in my professional live as someone who works for other people, but I have never had this dream come true. I don’t have an album of my own and it is something I have always wanted to. So there will come a time which I will have to stop everything to invest on it. So, despite of my all rush since I never stop, I sleep five or six hours a day and I wake up playing the guitar and I sleep playing the guitar. I work so hard with this. The future plano is to have an album of my own, my work and try to release for people to know this I want to show.
An instrumental work?
It has to be, because I am going to sing! Lol I am not singing! Lol
Focused on country?
No, I don’t think only in the country. I love country, I do love I made my confession! I think it is awesome, my biggest hero of country guitar is Brent Manson. He is my biggest influence, he is the guy which I most heard and studied ever. But I don’t intend to released something focused only on country, defenitely will be influenced bt, but I want to do something general. Going through the rock which is a very strong influence in my life since I love rock, to go through the instrumental musical and the fusion. I don’t know it is something that you have to play the guitar and play. Actually, people ask me: What do you like? What is your style? I like to play the electric guitar, you can put me in a band, but if I am playing and just doing something in the background I am going feel depressed. It can be whatever you want: Funk, Rap, Heavy Metal,Jazz. It doesn’t matter, if it has guitar I think it is cool.
When it comes about the message, I would like to thank you Rafael, it is something we have been trying to do for such a long while and an oportunnity which you gave me to talk about things I believe, I am really happy with that. To be honest, I did just few interview in my life, the most of them alive and the written ones were just a few in the time of Quadrivium and Quarttuour. I didn’ have much Personal Interview like this one , I get really happy about that.
Talking about the guitar players in general, try to listen to different things which the most of the guitar players are used to listen to. To look for new sonorities! This is my advice which I would give to person who is studying guitar, not in the style question, but about the artists. When the guy listens to jazz, he listen to that, this, this one and the same for rock and etc.Try to look different names, other sonorities and other focus to have a different influece if compared to the most of guitar player and saying again what I mentioned in the interview: To buy a recording system! Record yourself, there’s nothing better about development than this. Develop the rhythm, the good taste, the tone and these stuff. These are the advices I want to give!
One more time thank you Rafael and a hug to everyone! That’s it!