M3 Roadworx

M3 Roadworx is Ole Kirkeby, a Danish amateur guitarist originally from the Copenhagen area. I am an engineer by trade, and after having been in academia for ten years I now work at Nokia Research Center in Helsinki, Finland. After I left Denmark in 1991 to do a Ph.D. at Southampton University in the UK I haven't lived in the city of Copenhagen. When I was in my early twenties I was into drums in a big way and I practiced several hours daily. However, the guitar took over completely after I m...

M3 Roadworx is Ole Kirkeby, a Danish amateur guitarist originally from the Copenhagen area. I am an engineer by trade, and after having been in academia for ten years I now work at Nokia Research Center in Helsinki, Finland. After I left Denmark in 1991 to do a Ph.D. at Southampton University in the UK I haven't lived in the city of Copenhagen. When I was in my early twenties I was into drums in a big way and I practiced several hours daily. However, the guitar took over completely after I moved abroad. In Southampton I had some luck when I somehow managed to get regular gigs with pianist Anthony Briscoe (who went on to work with Craig David) and bassist Nigel Slee (who now runs the jazz scene in Leeds) at a point when I couldn't really play at all. We formed the "File Under Jazz" trio and did most of our rehearsals, even the early ones, with a small audience at either the "Stage Door Cafe" or the "Nuffield Theatre Bar" since these places had a piano we could use! A couple of years later I formed "Bill & Ted's Excellent Jazz Band" (the name is based on the Bill & Ted movies) with guitarist Bill Pritchard, one of the local veterans. I was Ted since I had learned to play from the books of Ted Greene (in fact, so had Bill but since he was Bill already he couldn't be Ted). In 1999 I began to experiment with a 7-string guitar tuned in major thirds, and in October 2001 I put the website www.m3guitar.com online. Recently, I have started to make complete music in a little home studio based around a powerful PC. I firmly believe that what makes music interesting is a human element, and that it is essential to add the performance of a musician on top of the sequencers and the loops. Some people like the 'hypnotic effect' you get from exact repetition -- I don't. I find it boring, even annoying, and I make a concious effort to avoid it in my recordings.