Hartmann

Born in Germany on the 28th of June in 1970, Oliver Hartmann started his musical career at the age of 10 by taking his first guitar lessons on his uncle's old acoustic guitar. Influenced by the great rock music of that period, he formed his first band at the age of 13 playing songs by his favourite rock and metal bands. After playing in several local bands he joined the hardrock band HEAT at the age of 19, which was pretty successful and won some German music awards. At the age of 20 Oliver joined a professional rock cover band as singer and guitarist in which he experienced a lot by touring all over Germany for the next few years.



After several other side projects and bands he joined the progressive rock project CENTERS in 1995, which released two albums over the next 3 years. During this time he also started working as a professional studio singer and guitarist doing commercials and composing songs for well known German radio and TV stations. After the project CENTERS was stopped, he and Olaf Lenk formed the new band AT VANCE which became successful world wide. After 4 albums and touring all over Europe with sales of more than 100.000 he left the band due to personal reasons and started to focus more on the song writing for his solo work. Since then, his voice has been heard on many well known and successful productions such as AVANTASIA, GENIUS, AINA, HAMMERFALL, EDGUY, HELLOWEEN, VINDICTIV, LUNATICA and many more.



Joining Frontiers Records in 2004 the first solo album „HARTMANN - Out in the cold" was released in April 2005 and reviewed as „album of the month" in many well known rock magazines all over the world. After playing several shows in Europe as support act for TOTO during last summer HARTMANN released the second album "Home" followed followed by a tour with HOUSE OF LORDS in spring and with THE HOOTERS during July and August 2007. After HARTMANN had recorded two live and unplugged concerts in Germany during September last year a new live DVD was released two months ago called "Handmade" followed by a club tour in spring this year. In summer 2008 Oliver Hartmann was on world wide tour as guitarist and singer with Tobias Sammet's AVANTASIA for the new album Scarecrow. In February 2009 HARTMANN was invited to be support in Europe for EDGUY's Tinnitus Sanctus-Tour. Besides Marc Boals and Goran Edman he also participated on 3 tracks as guest singer on the band project VINDICTIV of swedish guitarist Stefan Lindholm.
After his participation on several other projects, the recordings for the new double album of AVANTASIA and a longer period of songwriting the HARTMANN album named "III" had been released in November 2009 on the new founded record label SONIC11 in co-operation with SAOL and CMM Promotion and again received a bunch of great reviews. During the past two years, the band HARTMANN played numerous shows as support of bands such as MOTHER'S FINEST, URIAH HEEP and Y&T. In January 2012, Oliver Hartmann also joined ROCK MEETS CLASSIC (feat. Ian Gillan/ DEEP PURPLE, Jimi Jamison/ SURVIVOR, Steve Lukather/ TOTO, Chris Thompson/ex-MANNFRED MANN'S EARTH BAND and Robin Beck) on vocals and guitars.
The recordings for the new HARTMANN album "Balance" were completed in April 2012. Once again this fourth album was mixed by Sascha Paeth (Avantasia, Edguy, Epica, Kamelot) at Gate Studios and will be released on 01.06.2012 on the AVENUE OF ALLIES label.
Besides HARTMANN he also performs as guitarist and singer with the Pink Floyd Tribute ECHOES by touring all over Europe.