Myles
My introduction to playing music in a band started out with a big fat lie. A band at my high school needed a bassist. I told them, ‘yeah, man, I play bass. I know exactly what I’m doing when it comes to bass.’ All of a sudden I was a bassist. That weekend, I went out and spent my life savings as a 15 year old on a second hand bass and a little 20 watt practice amp. I think it was the intro to ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ by Metallica, I learnt that on bass. Played that for them, and they were sold.
It didn’t last long.
During that period, I discovered that I liked it and thought I’d be better off learning on my own. I found a YouTube video with some dude playing cool bass songs so I learnt a bunch of songs from that. It sounds stupid now, but at the time, I thought it was very easy. I was like, ‘maybe I should just play guitar?’ So I got rid of the bass, spent my savings on an absolutely tragic electric guitar and a little Marshall 15 watt and started doing the same thing. I found a really cool YouTuber who did songs from Bullet for My Valentine, Parkway Drive, that kind of stuff. He would play a section of the song, then play the section again slowly while showing tab. That’s how I learned everything on guitar.
My mum sent me to St Peter’s College for my last year of high school. It was a requirement to take music as a subject. I had to take two professional lessons with a tutor, one had to be a classical instrument. I picked guitar, and just to spite my mother for sending me to boarding school, I picked the harp as my classical instrument. I was like, ‘there’s no way she’ll buy a harp’. She bought a harp, and once a week I lugged a f**king harp across a rugby field to a 30 minute lesson I didn’t want to do.
I got a trophy for best guitar performance under six months of tuition, which felt really bad. I gave it back. I’d been self taught for four years at this point. I went back to them and said ‘you’ve got to give this to someone who’s actually got under six months of learning under their belt’. I couldn’t live with that guilt.
Study brought me to Christchurch from small-town Katikati. I came to study mechanical engineering. During that Polytechnic arc, I saw an ad on Facebook looking for a guitarist for a band. I was like, why not? That got me into a project at the time called Amortium, which became Hexscape.
We went from a seven piece to a five piece and everything in between, had a keyboardist, and now we don’t have one, lots of changes. Eventually we came to the lineup we are now, I’ve been in Hexscape for about 10 years.
Hexscape is like a cross between funk, hip hop and metal. Imagine if Limp Bizkit and Rage Against the Machine got together, right? Super fun, super vibey, has heavy elements to it, but it’s just a lot of bouncy, funky riffs, very bass driven. I’m really lucky that the people in that band are such good people, it’s just five dudes who want to make some fun music. We come together once a week and we have a great time.
We’ve been going crazy the last couple months, just finishing up and polishing off our very first album. We’ve recently got drum tracking down which was sick, and got heaps of cool videos and photos. Just hearing it come together is one of the best feelings.
One of my side projects is a disco funk duo between me and the vocalist of Hexscape. That’s called Open Field. We ended up getting our first single onto local Wellington radio, we were so stoked, and we had so much fun doing it. I never thought I’d be into that kind of music because I don’t listen to it regularly myself. We have a kazoo solo in a song! When we get in there and write it, it takes our creativity in a completely different direction than where it would normally go.”