Guest Composers

## **Alex Pfeffer**

Alex Pfeffer completely composed the Industry album Solaris from 2013, published under the label of Two Steps From Hell. He also composed some songs for Nero and Balls to the Wall, two additional TSFH Industry releases. He returned to compose the album Chaos Theory in 2020.

### Biography (from the Official Website)

Alex was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany in 1975.
At the age of twelve he showed great interest in rock and guitar music, spent lots of time watching MTV’s “Headbanger’s Ball” and finally, at the age of 14, decided to buy his first electric guitar. After five years of private guitar lessons with guitar teacher Joachim Rothe, Alex met his first band, which had by far more poser photo albums done over the time, than gigs or even songs. A few years and bands later in 1997, he decided to take one more year of private guitar lesson with guitar teacher Thomas Dill and prepared himself to study at the Los Angeles Music Academy. This was by far the most intensive time in terms of music and it was such a pleasure to jam with teachers such as Frank Gambale, Bill Fowler, Jeff Richman, Joy Basu, Linda Taylor, Jean-Marc Belkadi and many others …

Alex
 graduated in September of 1998, came back to Germany and worked as a private guitar teacher for around two years and he also became the lead guitarist in the rock/pop band “Reinvented”.

After
 winning several music and band contests, the band got signed with the record label BMG, recorded and released one album and several singles and toured all over Germany with bands such as Reamonn, Guano Apes, H-Blockx, Glow, LAW and many others …

Especially during the studio recording sessions with the band, Alex was carried away by computers, sequencers, plugins, sample libraries and VSTi’s.

… which first was the little home studio to record and work on upcoming “Re!nvented” songs in Alex’s basement, should later become his project studio “the cellarroom”, where he started to work as a composer and sound designer for video games. Since Alex was nine years old he was into computer games and so he decided to mix up the “seriousness” of work together with his hobby and the interest in music. The result was a composer and sound designer for video games.

Let your hobby become your job is probably the best thing which can happen!

“Re!nvented” split up in 2003, Alex moved to Munich and already worked on quite a few little video games but also other multimedia projects. Finally, in 2005 Alex joined Dynamedion, Germany’s leading music and sound design company for video games.

In late 2005, Alex moved to Hamburg, Germany.

In 2009 Alex met german producer Frank Peterson (Sarah Brightman, Andrea Bocelli, Gregorian and many others) and started arranging and co-writing for him.

Until today he has been working on award winning video games, movie and game trailers, sample library demos and lots of other multimedia projects.

## **Hitesh Ceon**

**Hitesh Ceon** (or Helgi Már Hübner) born 17 April 1974 in Iceland, he is an Icelandic songwriter, producer and composer. He was a part of the production duo Element before it was disbanded in 2016. Hitesh has produced and written songs for artists like Madcon, CeeLo Green, Musiq Soulchild, Alexandra Burke, Snoop Dogg, Daley, Rick Ross, and reproduced two tracks with Michael Jackson for Motown Records.

He announced on a new website the release of an album that he has done with cinematic trailer music company Two Steps from Hell called "**Open Conspiracy**" in 2014 and "**Mind Tracer**" in June of 2020.

Hitesh produced the song "Beautiful" with Taylor Dayne, and wrote the song together with Taylor. The song was released in 2007 and became a nr.1 on the Billboard Club Chart.

Hitesh produced and co-wrote the song "It's Ok" with Cee Lo Green, which was the second single form the album "Lady Killer". The album received a grammy nomination.

## **Troels Folmann** (or Troels Brun Folmann)

**Troels Brun Folmann** (born 10 January 1974 in Copenhagen) is a Danish composer specialized in epic orchestral music featured in TV shows, trailers, and video games, such as the *Tomb Raider* series, and commercials/trailers for films such as *Spider-Man 3*, *X-Men: The Last Stand*, *The Illusionist* and *10,000 BC*, and the fourth season of TV series *America's Got Talent*. He has worked on the *Tomb Raider* series with Crystal Dynamics for *Tomb Raider: Legend*, *Tomb Raider: Anniversary* and *Tomb Raider: Underworld*, and the spin-off *Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light*, refreshing for the first time the classical music style of the old series coming with a new way of perceiving Lara's scores, a much more electronic approach and trailer modern orchestral feeling.

He has done several tracks for Two Steps From Hell in some industry albums, such as ***Volume One (2006), Dynasty (2007),* *Legend (2008)****,* etc.

Troels co-owned a music sampling company called Tonehammer, a developer of premium virtual instruments for composers and producers...

As of August 2011, Tonehammer had come to an end. The music sampling company was split into two separate companies with Troels leading a new music-sampling company, along with partner Tawnia Knox, called 8Dio Productions. The virtual instruments of 8Dio range from epic choirs and epic percussion ensembles to solo vocals and next-generation hybrid scoring tools, with over 250 products serving every genre worldwide.

In May 2018, Troels Folmann launched the Sequential Prophet X with Dave Smith (inventor of MIDI). The Prophet X is a true analog hybrid sample synthesizer with >150 GB of sample content.

Folmann has won multiple international awards, including the British Academy Award (BAFTA) for *Best Original Score*, the Mix Foundation TEC Award for the *Best Interactive Entertainment Sound Production* at his composing debut for *Tomb Raider* with *Tomb Raider: Legend*. In addition, Troels Folmann has been awarded the GDC/G.A.N.G award for his soundtrack work.[5] Troels is also a Ph.D. scholar in Adaptive Music Systems and Artificial Intelligence.

 **Regular Vocalists**
Inana Bold • Felicia Farerre • Asja Kadric • Aya Peard • Merethe Soltvedt • C.C. White