HELLO + WELCOME TO MY BLOG!
This is the first time that I have really written anything online and I have started this blog to (mainly) keep a database and diary of my happenings within the world of music, however, I may occasionally write about other intriguing topics that may or may not be related to music.
So then, here’s a little bit of history about myself (I tried to keep it brief, but as you will see, I may have waffled on a bit and diverted in some sections, so my advanced apologies)…
I grew up in America until the age of 6 and was brought up by my German father and Northern Irish mother. I moved to the UK however, just before I was 7 years old and I have lived here ever since then (for around 15 years).
I lost the southern-American Texan accent pretty soon after I joined a private preparatory school in Banstead, Surrey, and I grew into my teenage years at a boarding school in Leatherhead, Surrey; I had some of the best times of my life at that school and have made many friends there that I know I will keep for life!
I have been fascinated by music for as long as I can remember. And ultimately, music has always been a way of means for me to express my true emotions. Emotions that would not always come across as strongly with words. It overwhelms me at how intensely music can intrude into our deepest emotions.
I can remember back when I must have been around 5 years old, hearing my two sisters play the piano during their lessons at home, and I naturally took up lessons myself at a very young age (there’s a very embarassing story that my mother always tells about finding me sitting on the piano stool after climbing up it at the age of 3 and playing a couple of notes ‘rather well’ to my mother’s surprise! – there’s a photo somewhere…if I grow the courage, I will upload it at some point). It wasn’t until I was about 15 years old however when I decided that I wanted to take things seriously with music and that I would love to work towards building a career in the industry, and especially in classical piano performance.
And so, I ended up changing schools at 16 years old and was offered a scholarship to the Purcell School of Music for young musicians in Bushey, Hertfordshire. This was a monumental changing point of my life! I finally felt free! I was not judged for who I was anymore (unlike how most people feel when they attend school and have to compete with all the flailing testosterone within the room). I finally began to come out of my shell and I started to discover who I really was. I must admit though, some of the people at the Purcell school were pretty ‘unique’, to say the least!…I expected a fairly geeky crowd who were self-absorbed within their own little worlds of ‘practice’ and ‘music education’, however, I soon realised that some of these people have been at this intensely pressurizing and expectant school for many years, and that they simply needed more release than the average person studying their ‘PSHE’ and ‘General Studies’ exams; needless to say, there was lots of partying involved!…
I became quite involved in the social side of the Purcell School (especially being a new-kid on-the-block), however, at the same time I was practicing the piano for several hours a day (sometimes around 7-9 hours in one day). When I started at the school, I felt like I was completely useless there and that there was so much more talent than me and so I started to practice the piano even more than before until I finally felt that I was improving to a similar standard of the other pupils within my year-group.
I auditioned for several music colleges within the UK (and abroad), and I was offered a scholarship on the spot to my first-choice music conservatoire (the Royal Northern College of Music), and so I decided to take this wonderful opportunity up and made my travels up north in the summer of 2007!
It was around that time however, that I suffered an injury in one of my wrists, which ultimately led me to giving up on my piano studies after several months of torment and hope that I would be able to still make it as a professional pianist. Every one of us will need to pay our mortgage and we all need to be able to pay our survival costs in this ‘complicated’ world, and so I decided to give up my life-long dreams of being a concert pianist and decided to change my direction towards the more ‘commercial’ side of music.
I discovered the wonderful world of TECHNO during the time that I was living in Manchester and working part-time at a designer ladies shoe and boot store, strangely enough! I went to my first night of techno at ‘The Music Box’ in Manchester (thinking it was a trance night by mistake), and heard the great music of Dusty Kid. I though to myself, where the hell does he get this music from!… Over the next few weeks, I started looking into Dusty Kid and I dug into his live-set recordings and found the names of many tracks that he played out live that evening…days later, I ended up buying my first pair of Technics 1210 vinyl decks – this was the start of ‘DJ Rob Meyer’, and subsequently, the start of the starvation-period of myself…I was spending more money on records than I was on food to the point where one of my good friends in Manchester started to cook me food in order for me to survive!
I made the move back to London in 2008 and am currently in my second year of studying on the ‘BA (Hons) Commercial Music’ at Westminster University (at their campus in Harrow). The campus is full of arts students (Musicians, artists, photographers, animators, designers – the list goes on!) and I am having a great time here and have made many new friends and collegues that I am sure I will work with on many projects over the coming years
I won’t go any further for now, and many thanks to anyone who has taken the time out to read this far – I hope to improve my writing skills over the next few months whilst composing this blog and I shall be updating on a regular basis, so please come back and have a read, leave some comments, and say “hi” !
😉
Rob M.
Rob Meyer 