«I discovered fingerstyle at the age of 15 by watching Chris Woods on YouTube. What a huge revelation. A couple of videos later, Jon Gomm. Another shock. I was playing electric guitar and didn't know you could get such a variety of sounds on an acoustic guitar. I didn't know you could detune your guitar to get what we call open tuning. I put my electric guitar away and tried to learn my first fingerstyle piece on an old acoustic guitar. It was Ain't Nobody, an amazingly hard arrangement by Jon Gomm with lots of percussion, very special techniques where you play your guitar like a piano, with your hands tapping on the neck. I tried my best to play these songs on my nylon string guitar, but it wasn't very successful. I decided to get my first steel string guitar.
Then I wrote songs, which resulted in my first album, Feelings, at the age of 18. For my birthday my godfather gave me a Tommy Emmanuel album called Center Stage. What a shock again. The fact that he played mostly in standard tuning, with a lot of improvisation and dexterity, really touched me. Since that day I've learned most of Tommy's pieces and tried my best to compose songs in that way. Then I joined a jazz school to learn how to improvise. Today I am very happy to follow these two influences: modern percussive fingerstyle and fingerpicking, strongly influenced by Chet Atkins, who himself was a great influence on Tommy Emmanuel. In my songs, you'll find a mixture of these two influences: Jon Gomm and TommyEmmanuel's more traditional boom-chick style. It’s not what you would normally find in today’s percussive fingerstyle, but that’s the beauty of mixing these two styles.»
