Ever since joining Landsemk in 2009, guitarist Marcial Meléndez gradually grew into his role as the main songwriter for the old school power metal band, and even their mixing and mastering engineer. Having recently relocated to the United States, Meléndez has carefully started searching for a more international audience for the band, as well as his solo work.

“I was born in Carora in 1988”, Meléndez says. “But I only lived there for maybe a year. It’s a really small town, and my family on my mother’s side is from there. Carora is like the main city, but we lived in a smaller town nearby called Rio Tocuyo. My grandfather was a farmer, and they found good land over there. My mom, my aunt, and my uncle all grew up there. But if you had to give birth, you had to go to Carora.

After living there for a year, we moved to the main city, which is Barquisimeto. It became known as Barquisimetal after Paul Gillman called it that on his radio show, but I didn’t really listen to music as a kid. I was just playing soccer and being a pain in the neck to my mom. About two years before I graduated high school, I started playing guitar. I think I was about 15 or 16 years old at the time.

I have loved rock music since when I was about 8 years old, which was very strange in Venezuela at the time. We were just by the Caribbean Sea, so it was common to listen to completely different styles of music than rock music. My father had all these records, and I listened to Deep Purple. ‘Perfect Strangers’ was one of my favorites. And I had Judas Priest’s ‘British Steel’ too. That was pretty much my introduction to rock music, and music in general.”

An Important Factor

“Since getting into music, I wanted to be a drummer. But when I was 16 years old, I started playing guitar. But then my parents divorced. That was an important factor in making me want to be a musician, because my father moved to Puerto La Cruz, by the coast, while my mom stayed in Barquisimeto. When I graduated high school, I told her that I wanted to move in with my dad.

Being there is where I met Eduardo (Cárdenas, Landsemk bassist) and Francisco Pagano (former Landsemk drummer), and I started playing in small cover bands. At that time, Landsemk was already doing well. They had started in 2004, and I moved there in 2006 or 2007. I started a band called Rising, which was a heavy metal band with a female singer. Francisco Pagano was the drummer in that band before he joined Landsemk.

We played only two or three shows with Rising, and we recorded two or three songs. The thing is: back in the day, we had a MySpace, and since that went down, we lost everything from that band. But I remember one concert with Rising, because Eduardo was there. Eduardo is the leader in Landsemk. He’s the one who started the band. So I think he saw me at that concert, and he pretty much liked how I played guitar.”

Becoming More Involved with the Band

“In 2009, Landsemk asked me to stand in for them, just for live shows. At that time, Ignacio Rondón, one of the original guitarists, was between Spain and Venezuela. He wanted to move, so he was going back and forth. They needed me to cover for him in that aspect of the band. We played a lot of shows that year. That was new for me. Playing live a lot more often, and with more people, bigger crowds, because Landsemk was a better-known band than Rising was.

Back in 2007, I saw them play at Gillmanfest in Puerto La Cruz, and the audience reacted to them so well. They were from Barcelona, which is a city pretty close to Puerto La Cruz, and I never imagined playing with them in the future. So that was pretty nice.

That’s pretty much how it started: being a substitute for a year, a year and a half. And then they asked me to become a permanent member when Ignacio left definitively, which was awesome for me. That’s when I started becoming more involved with the band, writing songs and stuff like that. That was kind of my true beginning in Landsemk.”

Something Different to Offer

“They never asked me to be a songwriter for them. But I always had my own demos, and stuff that I try to record. Very, very bad quality. You don’t want to hear that. But that was the beginning of it, and it went pretty well. We started doing more and more and more. We played pretty much in every city in Venezuela. And then we realized that we played pretty much everywhere where anyone would actually listen to rock music.

I think the way that I play and the way I write songs matched perfectly with them. Because when you hear the ‘Horizontes Oscuros’ album (2012) – I had nothing to do with that one, they wrote that long before I joined the band – and then you hear ‘La Orden de Acero’ (2021), which is mostly written by me, you can hear that they are different styles, but they go together very well.

Those two albums also have the same singer, which is nice. Because Landsemk changed singers several times. Herdys Fernández sings on ‘Vence Tus Miedos’ (2017). He lives in Peru now. Because of those line-up changes, I think each album has something different to offer. The fact that I love eighties-style rock and heavy metal worked pretty well for us.”

Why You Are Young

“After we played virtually everywhere in Venezuela, we thought the next thing we should do was go and do something maybe in Colombia. So we did a tour there called ‘Somos Latinos’ in 2011. It was pretty cool. We played in Bucaramanga, then in Bogotá, then in Cali, some other cities in Colombia, and that was pretty cool, because we realized that Colombians are very similar to Venezuelans. The only thing that changes is the accent, pretty much.

When we came back, we kept playing, and we went to Spain in 2013. We went to Madrid, to Zaragoza, to Toledo… It was my first time in Europe. It was amazing to see all the medieval structures and castles that they just maintained there. They still had the city walls in Toledo. So that was a pretty cool tour. And next year, in 2014, we went back to Colombia.

We were crazy, man! We did all that in buses. We never took any flights, because we didn’t have the money to do that. So we had to do it the hard way, and travel for sixteen hours. Because the distances between cities in South America can be pretty sizeable. On that next tour, we did Colombia and Ecuador, so one more country over. And if you keep going, you have Peru, Chile, Argentina…

We wanted to do that, but we had to come back. We were at a point in Ecuador where we thought: should we just go to Peru next? We could just go there and contact people who work in rock cafés, and see if they want us to play. But we didn’t think it would be a very good idea to do that without any prior planning. But that’s why we’re young, right? Right now, we wouldn’t do that. Hell no. We would need to organize everything, and we can go from there.”

The More You Want to Change

“My switch from drums to guitars was probably just because it was cheaper. I didn’t have much money, and buying a drum set can be expensive. And the more you learn, the more you want to change your drums. Guitars were more popular, and that’s maybe why they were a little cheaper as well. At high school, I had two or three friends who played guitar as well.

The first guitar I got was a hand-made one from Barquisimeto. They say that state is very musical, for other styles, and you see a lot of luthiers who have their own brands. So the first one I got was built by Pablo Canela. He was a luthier, and at some point, he opened a couple of stores.

Then I got myself a Squier. The triple X. That’s still my main guitar. I bought that one for 180 dollars. Very cheap. Then I put in EMG pickups to improve the sound, and then I did some sanding and stuff. My Jackson JS32 was also only 200 bucks. I never play expensive guitars.

I mean, three thousand bucks? I can buy a car with that money! So what I do: I try to buy cheaper instruments, and then put in good pickups and hardware, and go from there. The red guitar I play in the video of ‘Slave of Love’, my first video clip with me on vocals, is one where I bought the body, and then the neck, the hardware, and the pickguard, and the EMG’s are customized. So I put everything together and put my first name on it.

The Jackson has two humbuckers, and the triple X is one humbucker and two single coils. That’s the same for the red ones. Here in the United States, you can find a lot of options. I try to not go to Guitar Center too often, because you want to buy something every time you go. In Venezuela, it’s hard to find the one you want. You maybe need to import it from the United States, and that is going to cost you.”

Finding the Sound

“As soon as I started playing guitar, I started to make my own demos. And they sounded like shit. But I have friends who were in audio engineering. Ibrahin Chacin, a good friend of mine who plays drums, went to Argentina to study audio engineering, and then came back to Venezuela. I was always asking him for tips. Another very close friend of mine, Isaias Guilarte, who plays in Noctis Imperium, did the same: he went to Caracas and got his degree in audio engineering, then came back to Puerto La Cruz. I was constantly asking him for advice as well.

Paying an engineer was also kind of hard for us. So that’s how I started recording and mixing. I did it on my own, because I wanted to learn, because I wanted to find the sound that was in my head. When I started recording my first solo album ‘No Limits’, I told myself: if I’m going to mix and master something, and promote it, it’s got to be something of my own. Because if I mess it up, at least it’s my own thing.

I started with ‘No Limits’, and I wanted that album to sound very eighties. Like that Def Leppard snare, kind of. Right now, when I listen to that, I hear plenty of things I can fix or that I could have done differently. But it always happens like that. If you keep learning more, you will always find some stuff that you want to do better. But it was meant to be like this, so I don’t care. I don’t want to think: what if? Just keep going.”

Not Being in the Same Room

“After that, I started working on ‘Vence Tus Miedos’, the Landsemk album with Herdys on vocals. That was pretty much my second big thing as far as music engineering is concerned. I wrote and recorded that album. And it’s easy for me to write and record, because I’ve got my computer, I’ve got my guitars, I’ve got my pedalboard, so if I’m writing a riff, I can record it right away.

So it’s there, and then I do the mix and stuff. I was constantly learning more and more, and I found out I really liked doing it. It’s not just because we don’t have the money to pay an actual audio engineer; I really enjoyed it. That was enough of an incentive to keep going and keep learning.

The next one was ‘La Orden de Acero’. That was a pretty cool one, because a lot of ideas came from José Bárcenas (Landsemk keyboard player). He would come up with an intro, for example, and that would inspire me to build on that with my guitar, and a song would evolve from that. A lot of songs started with an idea like that, and we would just keep going, and then Eduardo might come up with a cool bass line to put on it.

It was a challenge, because that was the first album we did with Landsemk where we were everywhere. I was in the United States – I lived in Texas at the time – while Daniel (Lagoa, singer) was in Maracaibo, Eduardo I think was in Peru or Venezuela, José Barcenas was in Colombia… Thank god for the internet, because it did make things easier. But it’s a little bit harder not being in the same room with them. It takes a little bit longer, but it works, and it’s way better than doing nothing.

I left Venezuela in 2017. I lived in Peru for one year, because my father is Peruvian, and he lived there at the time. That’s when I noticed there are a lot of tribute bands there. I didn’t see too many bands doing original songs, but that was what I wanted to do. Then I moved to the United States in August 2018. I lived in Texas first, then moved to Utah right before covid. I became a citizen just in May of this year.”

Changing Words to Make Sense

“The reception for ‘La Orden de Acero’ was very, very good. After ‘Horizontes Oscuros’, Daniel left the band, and a lot of people love him, and they didn’t like the other singers as much. For that album, we asked him to be part of the band again. When he said yes, we had this vision: let’s do this power metal sound, but with Daniel’s voice. I really like that album. I think it was made in the right moment with the right people, the right songs, the right lyrics, everything. I remember writing six songs in two or three months. We were on fire.

We didn’t have any material before we approached Daniel. Daniel and Herdys had completely different ranges. For me as a songwriter, it gave me some different places to go. I wrote a lot of music and lyrics on that album, and I’m glad it came out the way that I did. And the response to it motivates me a lot as well.

Right now, we are recording new songs, and we’re trying to do everything in English. It’s a little bit difficult for Daniel, but he’s trying very hard to learn. It would be easier if I was in the same room with him, because then I can tell him: no, it’s pronounced like this. So we can work a little bit faster.

The other guys wanted to grab the old songs and record the vocals with English lyrics. We could have done that, but I would rather do something completely new. Something fresh. When you translate the lyrics from Spanish to English, sometimes it doesn’t sound right. You have to change the words. And if I’m going to be changing words to make it make sense, I would rather just write something from scratch.”

A Way of Finding Something Different

“My first solo album was released in 2017, so I guess I started working on it in 2015. When I was playing with Landsemk and writing songs for them, I had a lot of ideas that don’t match the style of the band, and I didn’t want to change Landsemk’s style too much. But I also didn’t want to keep those songs on my computer, so I thought: I think I can just record an instrumental solo album for electric guitar!

That’s pretty much how I started working on ‘No Limits’. I started creating songs, and some ideas that didn’t work for Landsemk, I used for my project. It was really just a cool way of finding something different to do. Like some of my favorite eighties guitar players, like Vinnie Moore or Reb Beach: they were in bands, but they had their solo projects too.

My plan was to release it, and then maybe kind of doing a tour in Venezuela, guitar clinics and playing my own stuff. But I left the country because living there was getting increasingly difficult, so I never did that. Maybe in the future. After it was released, though, I started working on another one, which would later be called ‘Elements’.

For ‘Elements’, I wanted to do the same: instrumental hard rock for electric guitar, but a bit more modern. So modern drum sounds, a lot of synthesizer sounds. That one was released in 2024, and I think it worked out pretty well.”

Done Releasing Instrumental Albums

“After releasing ‘Elements’, I was done releasing instrumental albums. Two is enough. If I do another one, it has to be something different. Maybe with an orchestra or something, who knows? But at the same time, I thought: maybe I should do something with me on vocals. What I really wanted was to work with a singer, but I don’t know too many musicians here in Utah. But I do want to play live, so I need to find people to join me. Maybe a small band; four members.

One of my heroes, Paul Sabu, was pretty famous in the United States back in the late seventies for being a producer, a guitarist, and a singer. So he was everything that I would like to do. And I really like his music. Also, I have my studio here, so I can spend six hours singing until something good will finally come out, and that’s pretty much what happened.

What helped me back when I went to college in Puerto La Cruz is that I learned more about music theory, and they have a choir there at the university. I wanted to join the choir, and properly learn to sing, and breathing and the whole thing. A little bit of technique. So I learned a little bit with them, and that helps me sing the stuff that I’m doing now. Learning about orchestral arrangements and harmony also helped me a lot with my compositions.

Also, I thought my music would be more interesting if I put lyrics on it, so it was really something different than the instrumental stuff. I could do everything myself, and I had the time to do it. So let’s go, and let’s see if people like it. Maybe my career path is on that way. Who knows? You don’t know until you try it.

Writing the lyrics in English also really helped me in learning the language. My girlfriend also helped me a lot. I write the lyrics, and then I give them to her. That helped me, and I learned a lot that way.”

Music to Suit the Images

“I’m also lucky that Orlando Rivera (video director who also worked with Resistencia) is in the United States. He’s in Florida, so I do have to fly down there, but at least he’s here. I can take a four-hour flight and catch him over there. So I’m very lucky with that.

I sent him the first song, ‘Slave of Love’, and I told him: listen to the song, and let me know if you would like to do a video clip for me, if you don’t like it, don’t worry. But he said: yeah, let’s do it! You can come here, and we can go to the Keys in South Florida, which is very beautiful. That’s how we started the whole thing.

Orlando and I have known each other for a long time, because he used to film the Landsemk video clips, and he likes eighties rock, so he likes my music. He said that makes it easier to edit the videos. The process is more enjoyable because he likes the music. That helped me a lot. So I’ve been working on this with him since last year.

People ask me how I can do so many videos, but that’s all Orlando. There is an animated video clip that he did. It’s called ‘I Feel Alive’, and it’s on YouTube right now. That one was different, because he had the video clip done, all animated, but he didn’t have any music. So he told me: I have this video, I’m going to give it to you, if you write a song and record it for me. So I wrote a song based on the video clip, and he liked it.

That was different for me. Usually you write a song, and then do the video clip. In this case, it was the opposite. I was watching the video clip, and I wrote something to suit the images. And it worked out great!”