I offer private lessons for drums, vibraphone and piano, as well as coachings covering all aspects of sound engineering, music production and band training. See here for details.
Thomas Leisner
About Beauty and Bright IdeasThe second edition of Wilde 13 Festival is about to come, on 31. of Mai and 1. of June 2019! Andreas and I, who organized the festival this year, too, are pretty mad about it. But this time it’s not only us, but a great deal of helpers from our neighborhood joined us this year.
Summer isn’t really past and the sounds of our open air festival from june still are ringing, yet it’s time for the Unpluggedival again. Autumn is coming, even if summer is still strong. The second edition will present even more locations and artists, so people can move freely from one space to another getting lots of impressions and inspiration.
As the Unpluggedival in autumn of last year has been a great success, we dared to finally realize our original goal, a real Open Air Festival in our hood: Wilde 13 Festival. Two days of live music on a blocked road, directly in front of my house’s door. And where else could it be?
For the first time I am organizing a festival instead of playing with my band at that festival. Together with my good friend Andreas Gerts who is already experienced in organizing events we invented the 1. Unpluggedival 2017 at our neighbourhood in Berlin.
My current band Acrepearls just published their first release “Mikrokosmos” on Lalonova. The album features the band’s first team including Kai Mader – saxophone, Joh Weisgerber – bass and myself on drums. It was recorded in 2014 at Kanin near Potsdam.
Here is a video I made from our last concert with Acrepearls at “Stadt für eine Nacht”, Potsdam. It was a beautiful warm summer night with an outstanding atmosphere.
I am happy to present my first classical recording at Delicious Drums Studio, featuring flute and harp, played by renowned soloists Rebecca Lenton and Nathalie Amstutz. We recorded three pieces from classical over modern to improvised music.
We mixed a short medley of beautiful moments from our public live recording session at Spartacus, Potsdam. The video gives an impression of the band’s concept of playing improvised contemporary music.
It’s a while ago since I did this speech recording at Delicious Drums Studio, but since these fairy tales were meant to welcome refugees over here at Berlin, it’s certainly not too late to welcome them again here at my personal site.
I am happy to announce the recording of Acrepearls‘ second album. The first one is only close to finished and has yet to be published, but we’re on our way for a second album already! This time it will be a live recording session, so you are welcome to drop in and participate in the process by simply listening, watching and enjoying the atmosphere.
For the first time I worked as a live sound technician in charge with my own equipment for a little street festival at the place where I live in Berlin, the Flora-Kiezfest 2015. Over the day we had 15 acts on stage, including four grown-up bands of different styles in the evening.
I recently joined the band of fabulous Jazz singer Anna Margolina for a studio session and some live gigs in Berlin. Here are some very short impressions.
Belarussian guitar player Sviatlana Paklina, better known under her artist name “Lasma“, asked me to join her current live project, an atmospherically dense and intense rock show. The big sound of her music asked for electronic drums with lots of effects on my side.
Here is a demo recording for Julia Toaspern & Band I recently produced at Delicious Drums. It features four original tracks with Julia’s brand new acoustic band.
We met one day in December to record the whole band at once, playing together live in my studio, to capture the most authentic live feeling. Following the new concept of the band we aimed for a clear and acoustic, yet modern sound.
Here is a little recording I did together with my good old friends of Strange Fluid these days in my freshly refurbished little recording studio at Delicious Drums.
Here’s the third part of my series of improvised Drum & Bass recordings I did with Abelha Supersonica. Another day, another sound. We had quite different inspirations in that session compared to the other recordings on day one and two.
I recently had the great pleasure to play with my good friend and saxophone player Kai Mader to check out a new way of recording in my studio. We improvised a little and got some fine results.
The Three-Axis-Model of Hand Position shows the spectrum of possibilities of holding sticks in your hands when playing the drums. There are three essential factors to consider, each one moving on an axis between two extreme points.
This second day we met was probably the most creative and productive of my meetings with Abelha Supersonica. The result is a solid piece of improvised drum and bass, which I split into five tracks afterwards.
The good news is: There will be a new Stoppok studio release coming soon! We just met for a weekend at his house near Bremen, where we played and experimented a little together.
