WHO IS YOUR TEACHER?

I have have been a successful professional songwriter and artist throughout most of the 10’s in my own bands The White Album and The Eclectic Moniker and have also toured and played with Poul Krebs, Søs Fenger and Dicte among others. I have many years of teaching experience behind me from intermediate to the highest level in Denmark, where I’ve taught songwriting and music students at the Copenhagen Rhythmic Conservatory, Aalborg Musikkonservatorium, a handful of MGk’s plus Den Rytmiske Højskole and Engelsholm Højskole.

In my twenties while studying electric guitar at Carl Nielsen Academy og Music (2003-2008), I taught guitar, band and theory at different music schools and MGk’s in Denmark.

I have also worked as guitar teacher in Germany, where I’m currently employed as part time music teacher at the Scandinavian School in Berlin.

Since around 2017 I have owned my own studio, that have gone through several relocations, where I’ve worked with other artists as a songwriter, music producer and mixing engineer.

I’m also a life long student of music myself and never seem to get tired of exploring the intricate mysteries and inner workings of music itself and the workflow related to the making of it.

For a more detailed recount of my way through life as a musician and artist, please scroll down.

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Hi, folks.

I am a songwriter, singer, guitarist, mixing engineer, arranger and music teacher, living in Berlin since 2020. I lived in Copenhagen for more than 10 years and I’m originally from Odense, Fyn, which is a beautiful island in the middle of the small kingdom of Denmark.

Growing up in Odense, I got my first guitar when I was around 10 years old and immediately started to write songs. I remember being so fascinated by this beautiful, strange and magical sound.

Music was already something I was into at school. I went to a Waldorf/Steiner School, where music had a high priority and I played Violin, Flutes and Bassoon. I started in the local music school as well because I wanted to play guitar and I had 2 very influential guitar teachers there. The first one was almost like a second dad to me. His name is Arne Holmgren and I still see him from time to time. We started off playing classical guitar, but I quickly advanced to more serious music like Pearl Jam and Guns ‘n’ Roses.

The second one was Svend Staal Larsen. The local fusion guitar hero, who had a nice career in the 80’s and 90’s. He taught me many things, especially concerning technique, that really accelerated my development.

At that time I took a big leap in my taste. I was around 18 years old and had listened mainly to grunge rock, heavy metal and fusion. But then the jazz bug bit me and I didn’t look back.

I would go to the local Music Library and take home the max amount of CD’s you were allowed, I think it was 30, and along with that, heaps of sheet music. Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Pat Metheny, John Scofield, Jamey Aebersold Playlongs and Omnibook, for days.

At the music school I met a special group of guys that I ended up playing with for around 10 years. The band was called QUARTz and was made up of Mads la Cour (tp), Andreas Lang (bs), Kasper Tom Christiansen (dr) and myself. We went to the Music Academy in Odense together for 5 years, where I studied ‘rhythmic guitar’, which means everything from jazz to blues to bossanova to rock and pop etc. But mostly jazz in all its forms.

It was a solid education. Mostly focused on technique and theory and hardly ‘creative’ at all. However, I learned a lot and had amazing teachers like Jakob Bro, Thor Madsen, Henrik Andersen, Niclas Knudsen, Wolfgang Muthspiel, Kasper Tranberg, Perry Stenbäck, Bo Stief, Erik Ørum von Spreckelsen, Niels Thybo, Anders Mogensen and many others. I probably learned more than anything though from playing with QUARTz on our many tours, often to the Northeast of Germany, where we had quite a following and also taught on a summercamp every year for almost a decade. We would write really difficult and angular odd-meter modern freejazz/fusion music, that was extremely challenging to perfom. But we learned so much about the inner workings of music and composition from pushing each other past our musical limits.

When I finished the Academy in 2008, I had sort of a crisis. I think I was depressed. Overworked maybe from playing in 15 different upcoming bands and I couldn’t see the point of playing yet another guitarsolo. I needed a change. I moved to Copenhagen and got into the pop/rock gigging musician community there and met some lovely people and extremely accomplished and talented musicians, but I eventually found my tribe among the more radically artistic start-2010-indierockers on Nørrebro.

I then launched 2 projects that would be my main occupation for the next many years.

The first one started as a solo project but ended up as a 7-piece indiepop big band with many guests joining from time to time. We were often called a music collective. The Eclectic Moniker was the name of the band and we had huge succes in the first handful of years, winning DR’s Karrierekanonen and Odense Live Prisen, playing huge festivals like Roskilde Festival, Northside, Smukfest, Harvest of Art, Iceland Airwaves, Obstwiesen Festival etc and even opening for Elton John in Denmark in 2013. We were radio and TV darlings and released our music on A:Larm/Universal. We released our last album ‘Mirror Twin’ on Sony in 2016 and played our last show on Bornholm in the spring of 2017 after a very funny, eventful and also very intense big handful of years.

The other band is still going strong and just released a new single called ‘Switzerland’. The band is called The White Album and I have this with my old friends Jakob Eilsø and Claus Arvad. We started out playing only in England and was quite hyped there. Later we became a household name on the danish indiefolk scene and released 2 succesful albums on Warner Music. By then we’d pushed the band as far ‘pop’ as we could and needed to get back to some kind of roots. Since then we’ve been doing it ourselves DIY style. Mixing our own records and getting in to PR, Social Media and so on, embracing the new music industry on our own terms, while gigging mainly in Denmark, Germany and Switzerland.

I became a dad in 2016 and needed to slow down the live music activity to have more time with my daughter. As a result I began teaching again, which I took a 7 year pause from while living only from making records and playing live. I taught Songwriting and Music Production mainly at Engelsholm Højskole and later at Den Rytmiske Højskole as well as teaching individual students at Københavns, Helsingørs and Køges MGk and Rytmekons in Copenhagen. I also opened up a recording and mixing studio in Copenhagen and later Berlin, where I work for other artists.

Now a days I teach music at the Scandinavian School in Berlin (DSG) a couple of days a week. I still have my studio where I work on various projects for other artists. I’m very active with The White Album and have just released the first single of my new solo project, Aunt and Feather. Finally, I’m now launching this online music school, where I hope to pass on all the interesting goodness I’ve gathered in my heart and brain throughout the years.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments and thank you for reading through my story!

All the best, Frederik.