About me

Welcome and thank you for taking an interest in visiting my website, and wanting to read more about who I am and what I do.

My name is Ivo van Dijk. I was born in the Netherlands, in the city of 's-Hertogenbosch where I still live to this day. Most composers have a story about how they got in touch with music at very young ages... So I guess this is mine!

I do remember having kind of a funny taste in music for a small kid (8-9 years old): Among the first couple of albums I bought were the soundtracks to Jurassic Park and Hook. Off course at that time I had no idea that this was music by the legendary John Williams. I remember mostly buying these albums because... Well, I loved the movies as a kid! And at that age we are all very much attracted to everything that has to do with our favorite franchises, right? And I also had this weird love for the musicals "Phantom of the Opera" and "Les Miserables"...

When I was 13 or 14 I got extremely hooked on heavy metal: Metallica all the way... There was nothing else at that time that caught my interest. At the age of 15 I got my first guitar and a year and a half later I got a drum-kit, kind of neglecting my guitar and became focussed on drumming. I got in touch with different kinds of bands who used a mix of symphonic music and rock, bands like Nightwish, Blind Guardian, Rhapsody, Kamelot etcetera. This was also around the same time I learned to work with MIDI and my first sequencer program; Cakewalk 3! I used to make these very simple arrangements for the band I had formed with my best school buddy Bas :"Xystus". I wrote all the music, he wrote all the lyrics.

I will spare you a long history of things we did with the band, what went wrong and why we quit, but I would like to mention some highlight. We released 3 albums, the second album was "album of the month" in one of the most important Dutch music magazines, we did an amazing European tour with Dutch Gothic Metal band "Epica", we played a lot of shows in the Netherlands with some killer bands (Kamelot, Machine Head, After Forever and many more), we did a lot of cool interviews, in 2008 we did 5 amazing shows with an 80 person orchestra and 30 piece choir called "Equilibrio", made a DVD of that, and got our last album released worldwide. And then the vultures came and we were done for. But I digress...

My collection of soundtrack albums also kept expanding slowly throughout the years, and once I got my first Macbook in 2005, I started making orchestral stuff in Reason. Very basic orchestral stuff... At this time I was doing all sorts of music-related work; recording, producing, making artwork and designing T-shirts, building websites etcetera. But my heart truly lies with creating music. So when my band collapsed and some personal stuff in my live changed, I decided it was time to start focussing 100% on writing music for film and video games. I took on some student films and small video games to work on, and prepared myself to hit the schoolbenches again, starting my first music education (Composition for Media) ever at the HKU (High School of Arts in Hilversum). I also did a lot of selfstudy, watched dozens of tutorials, invested in better equipment, learned to work with more different kinds of sample banks, expended on my knowledge of music theory and so on.

I am truly grateful for being able to sit down behind my computer each day and be able to compose music. I can't imagine what my life would be without it, everything I do revolves around it. I think there is not one composer out there who feels that, when he has finished a composition, he can't do better the next time he sits down to work on something new. There are always new things to learn, sounds to tweak, arrangements to enhance and so on, and the fun part is: this happens by making new stuff, over and over again (besides reading up on your composition techniques off course). That's what makes this line of work so rewarding and uplifting. The organic process you have when collaborating in a team of people who are, for instance, working on a videogame, is so interesting and so fascinating on so many different levels... This is it, this is what makes my life worth every bump in the road I had to take... God I love composing! 

Ivo