Nibras Bin Sayed tells the fascinating story of young Bangladeshi musician Zayed Hassan, who knows how to play 32 instruments and won a worldwide musical contest to spend an entire day with Linkin Park at their LA studio
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As a musician, it’s not every day that you get the opportunity of spending an entire day, doing workshop, sharing ideas and thoughts with the band that you’ve been idolizing from the very childhood, the band responsible for inspiring and molding your musical depth. And what if the band, was as big as Linkin Park? It does sound surreal, it does sound like a far-stretched dream of millions of music lovers and musicians; however, 24 year old, Zayed Hassan, from Bangladesh, has lived that dream this year by experiencing an enlightening session with his favourite band, Linkin Park. And for now, Zayed who is musician himself is geared up to create music that can exceed all kinds of boundaries and spread throughout the globe.
‘I actually never sat down and decided to do music. Music was always there in me naturally. It all happened to me very instinctively. According to my mother, I started out as a percussionist at the age of three when my instruments were the bowls and pots in the kitchen! It was at the age of 10 when I bought my first instrument, guitar, and realised from within that I wanted to become a musician,’ says Zayed says.
While he was learning guitar on his own with the help of online tutorials, he did try out forming bands with his friends in school and college, but, it never clicked for Zayed. He always found something missing which made him to explore electronic interfaces where he can play all the instruments by himself and more importantly, experiment with various kinds of sounds in a solo jamming session. By then, he already managed to learn four instruments and loved the notion of adding more layers to his compositions using interfaces. ‘When I figured out how different instruments can give different sense of emotion and meaning to compositions, I knew I had to explore and experiment more and more. Thanks to audio interfaces, I had the liberty of composing songs in my signature style. Since I was never taught music academically, I had to use a trial and error method for every sound production and I think that has helped me a lot to train my ears to good vibrations and evolve as a musician,’ Zayed adds. For the record, he can currently play 30 plus instruments, 32 to be exact, from flute to piano to drums to what not, and according to him, the numbers would just keep on rising.
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Zayed Hassan (second from left) with members of Linkin Park at their studio in Los Angeles
Zayed has been sharing his compositions for free listening on online platforms like SoundCloud for a long time and doing so, he was actively involved with many artistes from different parts of the world.
But, his first major break in music came last year through a year-long contest called Stagelight Monthly Music Contest which was organised by Open Labs, LLC and Linkin Park with other partners like Guitar Center, Audio-Technica USA, ARTURIA and many more. The yearly contest started from July 2014 and in every month, one musician was elected to be the best among the monthly entries of original compositions provided by musicians all over the world. A monthly genre of music was setup and the votes were given by the members of Linkin Park Underground, a community for die-hard fans of the legendary band. Once the 12 monthly winners were elected, it was up to Linkin Park to pick up the best among them. Zayed failed to make it to the top in the first three months, but he never gave up. He took some time and got elected in the last month of the competition with a song called ‘I way I love’ where Zayed collaborated with an Indonesian artiste, Hana, whom he met on SoundCloud. As a monthly winner, he was gifted an array of studio instruments worth more than USD 3,000 and once Linkin Park selected him as the grand prize winner, he won something priceless, a sea of knowledge regarding anything and everything related to music, compositions and sound production, that too from the legends of rock at their Red Ball Studios in Los Angeles.
‘I still, at times, go through the video of my reaction when they gave me the news, it was explosive. It was the most mind boggling thing that ever happened to me. Their music always connected to me spiritually and I could easily relate my life to their songs. My love for piano began after listening to their track ‘My December’. I got to learn a lot from the maestros of rock; one of the most essential things they taught me was the basic structure of sound and how it fits into songs. I have been very lucky that Rob actually played a bit of percussion in one of my songs that I’ve been working on for five years. They even mastered the track for me, although I would publish it later on because I still think I need to work a bit more on that track,’ says a jubilant Zayed.
‘I want to collaborate with artistes from every corner of the world through music. I really dream of a worldwide music community, where everyone can share their own bits of knowledge. Our country has a lot of talented musicians and I think we need to all come together under one umbrella and work for something global. I’ve already started working on my dream and I am willing to go the furthest,’ shares Zayed Hassan, a young talent, who loves to experiment with vibrations of all kinds, and is especially fond of African and Native American musical culture.