From the keyboard… to the guitar

Mehdi Douss was born in Tunis in 1979. Son of a Tunisian father and a French mother, he was very soon in contact with two worlds of a very different culture. He discovered the joys of the synthesizer when he was six years old by composing tiny rock-n’-roll pieces, then decided to take Piano courses when he was eight. During three years, Mehdi appreciated all the pieces of classical music he learnt as a way to acquire the technique and the basis for piano, but one thing had not changed: his crush on Rock music. So Rock music finally won after his piano teacher gave up, since she had tried all the pieces of classical and jazz music that she had … in vain!  But there was a new instrument that seemed more likely to suit our young musician who was seeking a sound better adapted to the Rock music he newly discovered and was willing to know better: the guitar. That’s how Mehdi starts the guitar when he is ten, on the old acoustic guitar that his mother played. He then began enhancing his skills on that instrument as a self-taught guitar player before he decides to take guitar courses with two Jazz guitar players who were well known on the Tunisian musical scene: Adel Jouini (son of the famous Tunisian singer Hedi Jouini) and Fawzi Chekili.

As a teenager, Mehdi starts playing Metal music in several bands and already takes part with them in many concerts. At that time he is keen on bands such as Scorpions, Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, Wasp, etc. After taking to guitar players as Slash and Joe Satriani for sometime, he once discovered a Swedish guitar player named Yngwie Malmsteen: it was a revelation. This musician’s way in allying Rock to classical music, his virtuosity and his expressiveness transported Mehdi in a world that changed his life for ever. He went then divided between the desire to keep on playing Rock music only and his will to innovate through combining different styles. The second path will finally become the ideal he tends to as various musical leanings start to live in him: Latin jazz, which he discovered by playing Tico tico, the come back to classical European music with Yngwie Malmsteen, as well as the Rock and Metal music that  greatly influenced him.