About Me
ROOPE LATVALA, GUITARS (fanpage, I am not roope)Roope Latvala was born in June of 1970, and started playing guitar at age 13 because it was cool and he wanted to learn it. The first album he bought was Eppu Normaali - Akun Tehdas (a great old Finnish band).At the age of 15, he founded the band Stone together with Janne Joutsenniemi. The band's style was initially focused a more traditional heavy metal, but they soon shifted to a faster and more aggressive sound, which was the key for them to to receive mass recognition. In the year of 1991, the band was dissolved, with a discography of four studio albums, one live album and one compilation album. He is the main influence of many Finnish guitarists, especially Alexi Laiho (from Children of Bodom).excerpt from a Kimberly Goss interview:"Right. I don't have the full booklet for the album yet, I just have the slip case that the label sent, so I wasn't sure exactly who wrote what or how much your newer guitarist Roope contributed to the band in terms of his playing. What kind of contributions resulted from bringing him into the band?Roope Latvala - The "other" guitar god in Sinergy!Oh, he has been sent from heaven...or hell, or wherever, haha. Because he was really a blessing in disguise for this band. Actually it's a shame about Roope because here in Finland he's a legendary guitar player, but outside of Finland people don't know him, except from Sinergy. But in Sinergy when people think of guitars they automatically think "Oh, Alexi Alexi", but the truth is that Roope plays 50% of all guitar solos. On "To Hell and Back" he played more like 40%, but on this album it was definitely an equal share. On every single song each guitar player plays at least one solo. I think there's one song where only Roope plays a solo, and another song where Alexi plays two. Anyway the point is they both played an equal amount of guitar leads on this album. This is actually an interesting fact which I don't know if even you're aware of, but he used to play in a Finnish Thrash/Speed Metal band called Stone together with the current drummer of Amorphis and some other people, and they were huge in Finland. They're kind of Slayer-ish, and I never heard them until I moved here, and now when I hear them I can't believe that the never made it huge. And this is actually one of Alexi's all time favourite guitar players. Roope is ten years older than Alexi. The reason why Alexi plays the guitar that he plays is that's the guitar that Roope plays, and the guitar players from Stone. So everyone thinks about Alexi and his Randy Rhodes Jackson guitar, but he got that from Roope. When people see Sinergy live they automatically assume that Roope got it from Alexi, but it's totally the other way around. I know Alexi is my boyfriend and everything but I don't care about that because I want to speak the truth about the band and that he is equally as talented as Alexi, and I really hope that he starts getting the credit that he deserves."Roope played Jackson guitars for over 15 years untill ESP landed him an endorsement and now he plays his own ESP "random star" guitar. He is one of the biggest guitar heroes in Finland today, slightly overshadowed by Alexi because of Roope's lack of eyeliner I guess.
