Hi - boys ´n´ girls ´n´ real rockers ...

Some facts:

• 1991: Co-founder of the band ´Rockin´s Great´ as keyboarder
• Since 1992 self-educating the capabilities of other instruments (drums, guitar, bass), of composition and discovering the passion for sound enigeering.
• 1993: Curch musician for 1 1/2 years (organ) including lessons
• 1995: Musician at a rock theater (piano)
• 1996: Solo concerts (piano)
• 1996: Musician at the project ´Axima´ (drums)
• 1997: Keyboarder in top 40 band ´From Dusk Till Dawn´
• 1997: Re-foundation of the band VOYAGE (keyboards)
• 1997/98: Solo evenings in piano bars (piano & vocals)
• 1998: Casted keyboarder for live- & promotional project ´Erwin from Au´
• October ´98 to Juli ´99 Course in audio engineering at SAE Munich
  Completed with diploma
• October ´99: Student of Middle Sex University in London (bachelor of recording arts)
• 1999: Musician at the music theater ´Immer weiter´ (piano)
• 1999: Musician at the children´s musical ´Arche Noah´
• 2000: Temporary keyboarder in the cover band ´Burnin´ Alive´

When you are reading the following notes, you will experience something about the person, that is called Pfingsti ´THE KEY´ Zeh, which is especially me.

Why did I come to the music in this way and why did I spend most of the time of my youth and of my life playing in this (in my)” band. Well, I think because I love it. I love the songs, I love the members, I love the sometimes even tough and hard rehearsals, I love to play live in front of our audience and finally I love to produce and listen to our/to my music on the CD´s, we released. As you have certainly noticed, music and VOYAGE is an really important and big part of my life and has become a real second family over the years. Let´s see where it all started:

In early 1991 some little boys, which all were in the same class that time, went to a rock-concert within the Ignaz-Günter-Gymnasium in Rosenheim. I think, this was the point, where the initial fire was lightened and where these little pupils got so excited and impressed of what the band plays and in which way the band acts on stage, that from this time their way was really clear and defined - We´ll become great rock-stars. So these kids decided to play together - the first band was born.

I don´t know why, but I got really fascinated of the keyboards straight from the beginning, and so the things took their way: I started with buying a little keyboard, the Yamaha PSR 6, if I remember correctly, which was in a today´s view a real bullshit-thing, but in these times I loved it. I think it has got 3 or 4 octaves and 99 astonishing sounds adding a fully inclusive rhythm-automation section. I didn´t know what to do or how to play and this nasty thing played almost all by itself and sounded really awful and terrifying, probably it sounded even better than our band in this time. I hope this has changed. So far - this instrument didn´t make me feel happy at all and I decided to invest for the first time and made my parents think, their gift for Christmas ´92 has to be a big (about 7 octaves) and spacy Keyboard, the Yamaha PSR-4500. The same time I started learning about how to play this instrument with this many black and white keys by buying a self-study-book: ´How to learn keyboards´ I think. I practised very hard and sometimes very long, learned the keys (c - g/five fingering) and their length, and finally could play things like ´Sum-Sum-Sum´ or ´Michael rose a boat´ - really big piano literature. Additionally I bought score-books of Europe, Bon Jovi, etc. and trained these (by marking the notes on the keyboard), so that I could play the lines, when we met and practised in the band.

As you might see, this was not gonna make me feel good and so my parents decided to give me lessons to learn this thing accurately and so THE KEY was born.

Following, I got piano-lessons for over 9 years at the same teacher, who trained me very well and opened up the big world of classical piano music for me, on which I got really fascinated and made a lot of efforts in hours and hours of exercising (in good times about 4 hours a day) and finger-training. I learned about Mozart, about Beethoven (why should I listen to B.´s music, when even he didn´t), about Bach, about Chopin and all the names of the big composers of the last centuries. Most fascinating, I think, became the music of Gershwin and Rachmaninov to me, perhaps because their way of composing is not as much an intellectual but an emotional way of composing and to make the things fit together. Pieces like ´Rhapsody in Blue´ or ´3rd Piano Concerto (d-minor)´”made me real working and studying to know and to perform these kind of pieces. The biggest literature-thing was certainly the score of ´Rhapsody in Blue´ for solo-piano, which I trained very, very hard and finally was able to play and to perform the whole thing, which I am even today very proud of.

When this would be my only kind of playing/learning the piano, I wouldn´t stand at the point, I stand on today, relative to my skills in playing the piano. To be taught the classical way of playing was the one side, on the other side there was my big part of self-studying other cultures and other styles of music to let them influence my way of playing keyboards in ´RG´ or in VOYAGE. With George Gershwin I learned the Jazz, with David Bryan I learned the Rock, with Elton John I learned about Pop-Music in fact. By bringing all these experiences together and make them join and fit in the role I play within VOYAGE, my personal and I might say, my own and one and only style, of how to touch and how to play the various keys, was created through the years by my own hands and by my own sweat.

Today I´m not only the keyboard-mind in our community of musicians, I am also the ´brain´ of all engineering and sound-technical stuff. I examined the international SAE Technology College by grading the Audio Engineer Diploma in 1999 as one of the best and actually I am Student of the Middlesex University in London and may leave the university in October 2000 with the international known grade ´Bachelor of Recording Arts´. These honours are evidences for my skills in audio engineering and producing and made me build my own studio ´RG Music´. In this venue, where we even come together to rehearse, we recorded our new Album in many, many hours of astonishing and sometimes even hard work in 1999 and I was responsible for the engineering, the producing, the mixing and thousands of bottles of delicious Bavarian beer during the recording sessions. Additionally I designed the album-covers and the other merchandising things.

Therefore I sometimes call the new CD ´welcome to your mind´ my baby, although I know that the album is our baby, the baby, the band created within nearly 3 years of our history (first songs were written 1997) and made it live. Now it´s up to you, to take one bit of the life and of the body of our baby and help to make it grow and to become real adult, big and great.

- Welcome to the future -

Yours - Stephan ´Pfingsti´ Zeh