Joep, pleased to meet you. Here’s one history of me—I’ll stick to the music story here :)

After the obligatory classical piano lessons as a child, my amazing piano teacher explored songwriting with me (thanks forever, Anke). After detours through voice, drum and guitar lessons, and experimenting with synthesizers, I realized my true passion is in performance. Understanding what makes or breaks whatever happens on stage, designing a performance, and then taking it on stage.

It had me study how communication (artistic or otherwise) happened in (art) history and global cultures as well as in brains and bodies everywhere. After a Bachelor in Musicology and a Master’s in Digital Media, I felt confident I knew why we value stuff in vocal communication and performances.

That left one question open: How anyone, once they’d figured out what their performance should be, could do it. I decided to focus on the voice (speaking and singing) and took private lessons with the amazing Anja Kwakkestijn, followed by a postgraduate 3-year program to become a Certified Teacher in the most up-to-date voice technique I know, by the Universal Voice Institute. If you know what you want, they have what it takes to be able to do it yourself.

So that’s where I’m at as a voice trainer. I can use my academic background to help you figure out what your performance should be and why (or what it lacks or why you feel you’re not using your voice or why you, as a music professional, lost touch with your initial love for vocal performance), and then I can help you actually deliver that amazing performance yourself. That’s what I do 1:1 in my singing lessons (and for corporate speakers too, by the way, but that’s a different version of my story).

When I opened my first studio in Berlin (yes I’m in Amsterdam now, sorry for the confusion) in 2013, my singers there urged me to start a choir. So I did, but after long hesitation, because I really really don’t like the kind of choir singing where one soloist does the song and everyone else just oooohs and aaaahs in the background. So yes, I do choir projects now, but I always insist in using my double background as a voice professional to arrange the material: By having the lead melody travel through the arrangement, with a lot of integrations with other voices, singers truly get to feel they sing the “song” (no matter if that means Lady Gaga or early Baroque opera) together.

And that’s it! For now. Just explore what’s here, and if you have questions, just drop me a line.