It starts out like any other self-taught musician who was and is a music nerd.
I like to use one phrase to include it all.
Meaningful accidents happening consistently in my life.
I started playing an old classical guitar my brother bought but never played it until the 9th grade. My main inspiration were the typical teenager bands that later on led me to heavy metal, mostly Metallica and the other mainstream metal heavyweights.
That followed with me putting some heavy acoustic strings on my classical guitar with an action way higher than my knowledge of guitar – downloaded guitar pro and thought,” what is the easiest song on guitar?.. ” The conditions had to be 2 It needed to use open strings and to be short, very short.
I rebelled against the trend of learning the “nothing else matters” intro on guitar first culture and opted for “zombie” by the cranberries – needless to say, I had no idea what I was doing.
Some months into that, I decided to take real lessons – so after a whole lotta 3 guitar classes and learning a bit of theory and one classical piece, the teacher bailed out on me. He never showed up after the third lesson and I never retook formal guitar lessons in my life!
I continued down the self-taught path with heroes like Lick-Library and online guitar teachers that layered in my day-by-day knowledge. My guitar heroes changed from Metal guitar to Fingerstyle Acoustic guitar to funkier ones like Nuno Bettencourt and Later to Slow Hand Gods like David Gilmour and the session ace Tom Bukovac.
And in Nuno’s words:
” The way that I formed my unique style was leaning things the wrong way and creating my own way of doing them”
I am sharing with you the only song I learned as a 15-year-old kid on his three-day guitar course – still my best-performing YouTube video, though.
This whole mixture of different genres from Metal, to rock, to funk rock, and to acoustic music led to playing in cover bands that cover a lot of genres – That’s where music got a bit more serious. Why? Cause I was lucky to find a band that had a studio, and we rehearsed for 5 hours a day, every day, for years!
In the end, we didn’t play many shows cause you know, my small country doesn’t have a great music scene, and too much pop music going on! – but it got me on the right foot of learning guitar the right way and starting to serve the songs.
Then I got into Rockstock – The biggest Rock club in Albania, for the first ever Pink Floyd Tribute show, where I played David Gilmour Leads for hours! That got me in the club’s resident band for some of their projects.
All started moving until I met the guys from my nowadays band – the coolest rock/blues trio ever ‘Erina & The Elementals.’ We played the gigs, the festivals, and the TV shows and got into the Eurovision National Finals, performing with a 100-piece orchestra; pretty cool!
Years of being a player in acoustic projects and also a session band member followed up with no hint of recording in sight- until…Well.. until I learned that It could be done at home and that I didn’t need a Ph.D. for it or big words for music theory and gear! I used to play sessions across my city in studios, but I was always hired by the producer and didn’t feel much like I was part of it – plus, the pay was terrible – pretty much like most jobs in my country.
With no recording gear and knowledge whatsoever and no money to buy it, I started my first online sessions from my friend’s home – who is a remote mixing engineer for some famous label. Days went by working my day job (did I mention I do some music marketing nerdy stuff too?) and nights at my friend’s home recording gigs half asleep.
Months later, my first sound card was shipped, and things started rolling – some years and hundreds of online sessions later, here I am still offering my services – but quite more confident, skilled, and willing to SERVE YOUR SONG.
Life is funny and full of weird synchronicities. David, a UK producer who hired me on Fiver on my first days for a 10$ gig, turned out to become one of my best friends and eventually invited in 2021 invited me to talk to give a guest lecture to the Future Works University of Manchester on session work, working musician marketing on how to do a lot with little.
2023 came, and a scholarship from the UK government got me in London to study music business and continue my career in sessions. Much is still going on, and all due to people I collaborated with a year ago.
Airgigs, my favourite online musician marketplace, turned out to have a production studio in London, and they were kind enough to turn my story into a video for their website. The adventure is still going, and here I am living it.
I can say for sure that music is the gateway to life-changing experiences and the best way to connect with people. Many of my session clients became close friends and through them, I even got invited as a guest speaker at a UK university to share my experience as a session musician and music marketer.
Once you have your own thing going, it’s hard to go back! I’ll keep betting my all on this and see what the next life-changing experience will be!
I want to get to know your music and ideas first and have a chat as fellow musicians.
If I aim to record the best musical ideas on top of you creations – or create music based on your vision, then a conversation is due.
Email: altingjoni20@gmail.com
Whats App: +355 69 67 88 402
Needles to say that's what I do best and what I can offer to make your song better
I lead a double career as a marketer and have thus worked for some of the biggest guitar/gear brands.
If you want to learn guitar the practical way - then I'm your guy.
Check my lessons & hit me up