Artist description Just a kid who loves music and dreams of sharing that love

Music Style Acoustic Rock

Musical Influences Quality musicians

Artist History You know Confucius once said, “Wheresoever you go, go with all you heart.” It is a lesson that still needs to be taught to the world today. But in the face of the many, there are the few who are willing to follow their dreams with all their heart. I would like to say I am one of those few. It is hard to explain what it is like to have music running through your blood but if you are a fellow musician you probably understand. It has just been set on my heart from an early age to pursue this…dream. This dream has a pretty complicated background but I think it’s important, and also more interesting, that the whole story is told. Born on April 16th, 1981, San Jose, CA, in the heart of Silicon Valley, I arrived on the scene of a growing computer empire. Growing up, everyone I knew was involved in computers one way or another and seemed to be understood that I was destined for this life of business suits and BMWs. I lived with my parents and my brother and sister, and we moved a few times but always stayed in the same area. The first instrument I ever began to play was the piano. It also happens to be the only instrument that I have ever had true lessons in. I grew bored with it and the scales and all of the practicing of stupid pointless songs. So I quit and the music was silenced for a few years. When I was a freshman in High School, the music began to change my life. I got a drum set. It was always the instrument that I wanted to play and I started to practice every day. I fell in love with that drum set. Soon I began playing with kids at school and I began playing with the youth group at the local church that I attended. Basically I just kept playing with anyone who wanted to play with me, as much as possible. In my junior year I was playing drums at school and I was watching the bass player. This four-stringed instrument seemed pretty basic and I asked him to write down a few of the notes and where they were located on the fret board. Pretty soon I had figure out what every fret meant and with the help of my dad’s old acoustic guitar at home I was able to come up with a few tunes using the first four strings. “Well,” I thought, “If I can do the first four strings of this guitar, I might as well learn the rest of it.” So a kid at school showed me a few chords and how to do power chords and that was about all he knew so I went with that. So I practiced that much and then began trying different fingering and seeing what worked and what didn’t. Well I began to do that on the side while keeping my drumming as my main focus. I started a band with a few guys called “66 Shooter” and that began taking up a lot of my time. We played a lot of shows including an appearance at the big Christian festival “Spirit West Coast” in 1998. We then went and recorded a few of our songs and self produced our own album. But by the time I graduated from High School, we all seemed to be going our separate ways, and so that pretty much ended that. This was the turning point in my instrument of choice. I was going away to college and I began to realize that drums were cool but I couldn’t write music and melodies with my drumming and I had to turn my attention to guitar. I also quickly soon realized that if I was ever going to be performing my music I was going to need to work on my singing (to be totally honest, I couldn’t sing at all, seriously…bad). So that summer between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college I began to work on my singing. I just began singing along with the radio and all the pop songs that were playing at that time. Slowly but surely, hearing and singing songs like “I want it that way” over and over, my singing began to get better. I began to get back into piano as well. I would just work on putting chords together and began moving those around. My freshman year of college I joined up playing drums for the chapel band and also singing and playing drums with the concert choir. But by the end of that year, I was getting pretty burnt out on music as a whole. I had been playing drums in some type of band for about five years straight and I just was looking to taking a little break from performance and just quietly work on music on the side. So a few semesters went by and I just mainly worked on singing because that was what needed the most work. It wasn’t until the summer before my senior year that I really felt like my voice had begun to catch up with my guitar playing and that I was ready to start to perform again. Within the time that had passed I had purchased a new acoustic guitar (a Taylor 614ce) and that summer I bought a BR-1180 which is a digital track recorder which allowed me to digitally record the songs that I began to write. And so the writing has begun and the decision has been made to follow this dream. Charles F. Kettering said, “Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future.” Thanks for visiting this site and I hope you enjoy the music.

Instruments Guitar (Rythm and Lead) Vocals (Lead and BGV)

Additional Info Contact at mike@mikekoning.com

Location San Diego, CA - USA

Copyright notice. All material on MP3.com is protected by copyright law and by international treaties. You may download this material and make reasonable number of copies of this material only for your own personal use. You may not otherwise reproduce, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, or create derivative works of this material, unless authorized by the appropriate copyright owner(s).