The Grooving Arts Band Cellar

On this page you will currently only find some personal info about me, Martin Ecker, guitarist of the band Groovng Arts. Expect to see some personal info on the other members of the band as soon as we find the time (which might not be so soon :-).

Some info about me
Music
Computer Science

Some infomation about me:

Click the picture to see some more pictures of me, of my equipment and of other things I come across!	Name:	Martin Ecker
	Snail mail:	Email me if you want to send me something via snail mail.

	Email:	martin.ecker@liwest.at or if the above one doesn't work: martin.ecker@gmx.net
	WWW:	http://members.liwest.at/GroovingArts

Music

One of the most important things in my life is making music. I startet playing electrical guitar at the age of 16 when I was a big fan of Metallica. I bought all their CDs and tried to transcribe most of their riffs. Eventually I wanted to learn how to play those stunningly fast solos that Kirk Hammett used to play. So I bought all the songbooks and learned to play those solos. I grew very fast - technically and musically - and soon started to discover other music styles. I started to listen to and play different kinds of music like blues, funk, rock and mostly progressive rock. Especially Joe Satriani, Steve Vai and finally Dream Theater's master guitarist John Petrucci had a lot of influence on me in that period. I also learned to play many of their songs and licks and believe me, it sometimes took me a long time to learn a new song (Steve Vai and Dream Theater songs are really hard to get a grip on). But eventually I could play them all and now I hope to have found my own musical personality. I compose a lot of stuff in many different music styles (when I don't have to do stupid things for unversity, that is) and usually record it with the aid of my computer if I find the time.
In the meantime I also started to play bass and keyboards so that I can record songs all by myself. This is especially important for me because I want to see a song not just from the guitar point of view. I also want to have at least an idea what the other band members have to play and how all instruments interact with each other.

A quick note on the equipment I use for recording and playing. I have a couple of guitars. Mostly I use an Ibanez Universe 7-string guitar with DiMarzio pickups. My other guitars include an Ibanez RG series 6-string, a Jackson Dinky Reverse Professional (which I incidentally got for half the retail price because the music store where I bought it thought that I had ordered the cheaper model :-) and a Kramer strat-like guitar of which I don't even know the name (I got it really cheap from a friend, but it sounds good). Additionally I have a classical acoustic guitar, a cheapo Harley Benton electro-acoustic guitar and a nice, little Ukulele ;-) Take a look at the picture section to see some pics of my guitars. And maybe you even know the name of the Kramer model I own and can mail it to me. As preamp I mostly use a Line6 POD (great device) and also a DigiTech GSP-2101. I furthermore own a Marshall valvestate 8080 combo and a Marshall JCM-800 top with a Marshall 4x12" box. As mic-preamp I use a Behringer Ultragain Pro 2200. The microphones I currently use are a Shure SM-57, a Shure SM-58 and occasionally an AKG C-414. I usually record with Cubase
Go to the link section of this site for some music related links.

Computer Science

I started coding at the age of 12 on a Commodore 128 in BASIC. I continued to learn C64 assembler and then about two years later got my first PC. It was a 386/25MHz which I bought for about 27.000 Austrian Schillings. Boy, would I get a cool computer for that much money nowadays! I started to learn Turbo Pascal and coded some things like a little database system, a vocable trainer for Latin with which I made fifth place in an Austrian programming contest and a complete adventure scripting system comparable to the SCUMM system of the LucasArts adventures Monkey Island 1 and 2 or Indy 4. Unfortunately I'm more a musician than a designer so I never made any graphics for this adventure system :-(
Then I moved on to learn C and C++ and in the meantime I began to code in 80x86 assembler a lot. For my Matura in 1996 I wrote a so called FBA for which I coded a 3D engine completely in assembler. After a little break doing my civil service as an ambulance driver, I started my studies of computer science at the University of Linz which is what I'm doing until now. Currently, I'm working on my diploma thesis titled "Design and Implementation of a Platform- and API-Independent, Scene-Graph-Based, Real-Time 3D Engine with Support for Programmable Pipeline Architectures". Long title, huh?