I used to be a “classical music DJ” in our national classical music radio station – Klassikaraadio. For some years I even did the morning programs that starts tooooo early for me 🙂 But there was a very good thing about the job – I listened to a lot of music that I would never had listened on my own and without someone forcing me. And I was listening to it with the most expensive AKG headphones that you can find. Also, I had the VU-meter in front of me and fast enough I got to know that some instruments sound louder on CD than others althoug all the meters show the same.

For example – harpsichord is always SO loud so it needs to be cut just a little bit. Classical guitar on the other hand sounds really quiet and it doesn’t help if you turn it louder. Classical music stations try to avoid compression but there is still something between your radio and the actual CD. So what could you do? You could compress the recording itself! This is exactly what I have done with my Dance Album and this is one of the reasons why radio stations all over the world like to play it. It’s louder than the other guitar CD-s.

One CD that I really admired when working in the radio was “The Renaissance Album” by Göran Söllcher. This recording is great in many ways! The sound is one of the first things that you will recognize. And it contains so nice and short and beautiful pieces that in a radio you can find a proper piece for every occasion. We had a rule in the radio that a piece of music always has to play to the end, so it was quite a work to calculate all the time. So this album helped me out many times!

I realized that most of the CD-s just aren’t playable in the context of the radio. Too quiet, too bad sound, too many wrong notes and ultimately – too boring!! That’s when I knew what I wanted to record. The name of my CD “The Dance Album”, is a tribute to Göran Söllcher although nobody knows that!