Hey guys,

     I'm Michael Alexander, the guitarist from a

band called Pergamum. I just wanted to let you

guys know a bit about me, as well as some of

the music out there I have released. Most people

coming here have seen "Classical Metal", which

my brother and I played and recorded ourselves,

at the time we had a $150 dollar camera, a

couple of lights, and a downloaded 30 day demo of Adobe Premier. It was filmed in our wine cellar back in early 2009 where we turned classical songs into one metal version, that we ended up calling "Classical Metal".  We didn't think the song would get this many views online, I thought 20,000 views would be awesome! But never thought we'd get over 7,200,000 views from all around the world, along with many kids giving it their all while covering it in various videos and school assessments. That's one of the things that made me happy, seeing kids that had been inspired to shred it up!


     My first musical instrument was the keyboard given to me when I was 6 years old. I ended up playing with it for a while, but never really wanted to get into the technical side of things. But one thing the keyboard had inspired me with, was composing. It's been a great help in that area, while putting together harmonies and progressions, along with chords that I've found useful in the past, including most recently to date.


     When I was 16 my dad bought my sister a guitar, it was a red Ibanez Rg series (the one in the Classical Metal video), I ended up playing it and haven't put it down since. I'd often practice and jam alot with my brother (Jason Alexander, drummer of pergamum), some days for 8 hours straight, seeing how far we could go, both speed-wise and writing. Being home schooled gave us a lot of time on our hands to write music.


     I had always recorded our songs by ourselves at home. It started with just a stereo (which included a tape deck), then a Tascam tape recorder, a MRS-4 Zoom recorder, and finally Cubase. When Cubase 2.0 came along everything progressed from there, by being able to record straight to the computer.


     Before long, my brother and I created more demo's in early 2004. Since we'd do a lot of pre-production, we knew it was time to find a singer. We put songs on myspace, including a song called Heavy Impact (which at the time was instrumental). It got around the myspace circles quick, and before long singer/screamer Jake Dobson, had got in contact with us and we soon began jamming with him.

     At that time in our lives we hadn't heard vocals with screaming before as it was quite new to us, but when we heard it, we knew it was the right sound and feel we were going for.

 
     In the song "Heavy Impact", it had breakdowns in it, and at the time we didn't know what a breakdown was. So when Jake mentioned it, we were like "what's that?". We'd been calling them "crunch parts" or "a heavy part". I guess that's where the name "Heavy Impact" came from, haha.


     Playing, while being close to the neighbours got us many noise complaints, and plus.. drums we're the loudest thing on the planet! as it is in a band. So having police knocking often, and the repercussions, due to playing music too loud (that I can't post), one thing I can say is.. we got the cash we needed to buy more noisy drum kits and quad boxes/amps! :)  


     After living in that area for 2 years, we eventually moved somewhere we could play day and night, and where we could set up a studio which I later called GrandStandStudios. Still quite young at the time we decided to record a song with Jake. This song was called "Serpent", and along with that came the change of the band name from "Ability" to "Pergamum". At that time people took it well at shows and online, so we then decided to work on an album which we later called "Feel Life's Fear". During tracking of the album, our house flooded out, causing us to move between houses, while recording and mixing the album.


     At that time we had some basic recording gear: Cubase 2.0, a Pentium 4 computer (single core back then, so slow!), and a $200 Tascam usb ASIO driver. Back then hard drives were slow, and there was no such thing as fast computers for loading a couple of VST reverbs.. which resulted in many computer freezes! We made do with what we had at the time, and what was available to us. We were happy with the outcomes, considering we were just a bunch of kids mixing and producing our own album.


     After the completion of the album "Feel Life's Fear" we went on tour. We played with many bands, and to name a few: Bring Me The Horizon, Bleeding Through, The Ghost Inside, I Killed The Prom Queen, Between The Buried & Me, In Trenches, Deez Nuts, The Chariot etc..


     Shortly after touring we started working on a classical song. We wanted it to be metal, as well as it having not one, but many parts of well known classical songs. I wrote the music on a big board. At first it was a bit tricky trying to wrap my head around it, but once I thought it through, we layed it down while taking turns recording each other's parts, all on our mini camera.. We even made our own camera dolly out of a cymbal stand, lol!


     After the release of "Classical Metal" I had many requests for tabs from it, and had posted them on myspace at the time. I had many people download them, write them out in other formats, along with finding out sites had well over 30,000 downloads of the tabs from various sites. It inspired me to offer guitar lessons to everyone, anywhere in the world.. Through skype, which at first I thought would be a bit strange, but after seeing how many people are doing it, I thought I could take it on, giving people the opportunity to do it this way.


     During that same year we then started work on our newest album "The Promise". This was originally going to be released at the start of 2010, but in a way I'm glad it wasn't. If it was, we wouldn't have had as many tracks on the album, along with my favourite song, "Awesome God" First hearing this song when I was very young, from a band "Delirious". I thought this could send a great message to people out there who may not have heard it before, and considering it's one of the most well known Christian church songs, I thought it had the potential to be played in a heavier version, as well as having a positive Gospel message behind it, I just had to have it on there!


     This site, 'School Of Shred' that I've been working on completing for sometime now, will be a site offering people free beginner to advanced lessons, as well as it being knowledgeable with facts about all type of guitarists and some of their lessons and bios that I searched through the internet to find helpful.

      Aswell as playing and composing music.. I've had my own studios over the years coming under the name GrandStandStudios  check my latest one out below.  I've also done many other projects, from rock to acoustic.. So if you have a project you would like mixed, touched up, or even re-amped with my amps, or simply want to record a track, check the links below with all the details in the mixing/session section. Check the resources, along with videos I have added from Youtube for your convenience, about Pergamum! Including the official music video from one of the tracks on the album "The Promise", called "You Can Resist".