My name is Stein, and I started playing the drums in 2009. After smacking down hard on the concrete at the local skatepark, I decided it was time for a new hobby. I was getting more interested in music, and I had some friends who played guitar, but that all looked too complicated to me, so I chose the drums. I took weekly lessons at the MEC Amsterdam, located underneath the Muiderpoort station. At home I had an electronic Roland drumkit to help me practice as much as I could.

In 2011 two of my friends from school and I started a funk-oriented rockband. We would practice in the music classroom during breaks, and at the end of the schoolyear we performed a couple of songs at the Rozentheater as part of a annual art event we were able to participate in via our school. I played in quite a few short-lived musical groups during my high school days, as it was part of the practical exams of music class.

Experienced drummer

After high school I was suddenly left without a band to play with. At the time I was busy with college so I decided that it was just something that didn't serve me anymore. Early 2014 the urge to play crept up again, and through a Facebook post asking for a drummer in a pop-punk band I joined a new band. As a teenager I listened to a lot of pop-punk music, and Travis Barker was one of my favourite drummers, so it was a great fit at the time. The five of us wrote a couple of songs and recorded these later the same year at a professional studio. The next year was packed with a lot of live performances to get as much experience as possible. In the spring of 2015 we even took a little trip to Antwerp to play a show at Kavka, end as part of a band contest hosted by Pinguin Radio we played the maistage of Paradiso Amsterdam. Later that same year we would all go our seperate ways, as our interests had grown apart.

After a couple months without a steady gig, the urge to write and preform started to creep up again. Utilising Facebook once more, I found a group of musicians without a drummer. They called themselves Searching for Relief and already released a single accompanied by a music video, which was a good sign for me, as it led me to think the level of experience was higher than my prior experiences. They had recorded a 4-song EP, ready to be released, so the my job was quite simple: study the songs and hit the stages whenever we could. With Searching for Relief I have been fortunate enough to experience some of the best times of my life so far: Tivoli de Helling, Glassbreaker Festival, touring Germany, recording a 2nd EP and we managed to secure a spot on Jera on Air 2019.

Drumming lessons Amsterdam

Searching for Relief is currently no longer an active band, which is why I started putting a lot more time into teaching. Living in Amsterdam and playing in a band that operates south of Utrecht took up a lot of time, especially considering most of our shows were also quite far from home most times. I hosted my first lessons in the summer of 2019. I went into it without much preparation, and I found that even though I loved doing it, it was more difficult than I thought. This is the reason I decided that, after SFR broke up, I wanted to fully focus on my progression as an individual drummer, not just as a drummer in a band with 4 other musicians. All to put myself in the most comfortable position out of which I could confidently teach (almost) anyone reaching out to me, not just new drummers. Through 2020 I've been fortunate enough to have welcomed the first regular students to the drums and I quickly started to expand.

Besides my experiences with the bands mentioned above I've also been involved in a number of acts as a stand-in drummer. Over the course of 2018/2019 I've played gigs for bands that are musically very similar to SFR, like Take no Prisoners and Immersed. I've also taken place behind the drums for all-round popcover band The Aces. Throughout 2019 and early 2020 then Amsterdam-based singer/songwriter Ilmari Läntinen invited me to do a couple of shows with his ensemble. A pandemic and many ups and downs later, my lessons have been steadily building up to the point that teaching has become my fulltime occupation, which I enjoy very much. Besides teaching, I have joined All Dogs Go To Heaven, the formerly solo-project started by Searching For Relief frontman Björn Broekert, in spring 2023. Our first performances are scheduled for fall 2023.