Meet Mentor Amit: “The Adult Stays Outside the Room”

“No matter what an adult does during their day,” says Amit, one of our mentors at BandsBerlin, “the moment they come to play, the adult stays outside the room.”

It's the kind of line you only say if you've watched it happen a hundred times. A lawyer walks in with a briefcase, sits down at the desk, and within twenty minutes is laughing at a fill the way he laughed at something at age nine. A consultant who spent her morning in back-to-back meetings picks up a bass, plays one wrong note, fixes it, and starts grinning. Amit sees this every week. It's part of the job, he says, but it never stops surprising him. This is the second in our Mentor Spotlight series — a closer look at the people running the room at BandsBerlin. The first was Liad. This is Amit.

From Kiryat Ono to the Shotei HaNevua Comeback.

Amit grew up in Kiryat Ono, in central Israel. He picked up his first guitar at ten — “the school came round at the start of the year with a list of activities, and electric guitar looked the coolest of the lot.” Two years later, he switched to bass. At fifteen, he started playing keys — initially because he was trying to put a groove and funk band together and couldn't find a keyboardist who could carry the feel he wanted. “When I couldn't find one, I started teaching myself,” he says. Keys has been his main instrument ever since. Over the next two decades, he played in dozens of ensembles, from small indie outfits to large Israeli touring projects — mostly in the world of groove and funk. “Worlds of fun,” he calls them.

📷 [IMAGE 2 → Amit with a band mid-rehearsal — wide shot, room visible, full-width]

The circle closed when he joined "Shotei HaNevua" as their permanent keyboardist for their comeback tour. Shotei HaNevua was the first live concert he ever saw, at age eight. “I think the journey started right there, at that show,” he says. “It just took thirty years to come back around.”

The Jerusalem Pub With One Person in the Audience

Ask Amit about a turning point, and the story he tells you isn't about a record deal or a big show. It's about a pub in Jerusalem, and one person. “We had a gig in a pub, and one guy showed up. The whole night he shouted at us to stop playing, or at least to play Bob Marley.” The band kept going. At the end of the set, they invited him onto the stage. He sang with them. He left grinning. “It made me realize you give your all, no matter how many people are in the audience. They came for an experience, even if it's not the experience they expected.” That instinct, meet the audience where they are, give the room what it asks for even when it didn't ask for what you've got, is the same instinct he brings into a rehearsal room with five returning musicians on a Tuesday evening in Berlin.

Listening First. Always.

Ask Amit what he pays attention to most in a rehearsal, and the word he comes back to is “listening.” “Listening to the other person's ideas. Listening to the other's playing. Making sure every player has space to express themselves. The moment people start listening, suddenly there's a unity. The playing rises.” In the first few sessions with a new band, he says, his job isn't to teach. It's to listen. “I listen to the players. What they need. What they want. Before I come in and impose my way of doing things, I want to be attentive to them. My goal is to help them take their own ideas and make them better.” There's something deliberately humble about that — a mentor whose first move is to shut up and pay attention. It's also exactly the move most ambitious players never make.

“There's No Such Thing as a Wasted Rehearsal”

Most musicians measure a rehearsal by whether the song gets tighter. Amit measures it differently. “Even if we don't play at all — even if we just talk and listen to music together — it's worth everything. Human connection feeds musical connection.” Which is why one of the first things he asks any new band he's producing is: “Have you been out for a beer together yet, outside the rehearsal context?” If the answer is no, he sees it. “Human connection is the key to band connection,” he says. “You hear it in the playing.” There's a moment from a recent rehearsal that captures this exactly. The band was struggling with a chorus — a bass-and-two-guitars unison that had to be very tight, and wasn't. “I could feel there was a lack of chemistry,” he says. “A lack of listening between them.” So he stopped them. He didn't talk about the part. He had them clap together, look each other in the eyes, and feel the rhythm. Then they played it again. “After that exercise, the chorus already sounded much more together. Much more musically danceable.” The chemistry came first. The tight chorus followed.

On Working with Returning Musicians (a.k.a. Why He Doesn't Treat You Like a Hobbyist)

Here's the thing about Amit that quietly changes how a rehearsal feels: he doesn't make adjustments for the fact that you're not a professional. “I don't see a difference. I don't make concessions because the players in the room aren't ‘pros.’ It's important to me to meet them at eye level. Every player who enters the room is a pro in their own field at that moment.” That stance lands hard with returning musicians — people who've been told for years they're “just a hobbyist” and have started to half-believe it. Amit doesn't ask you to prove anything. He treats you the way he treats the players he tours with. What he sees adults worry about that doesn't actually matter: “The fear of making mistakes. Mistakes are part of being human. We're not machines. We're definitely not brain surgeons. If a G♯ slips out in the middle of a G-minor solo, no one's getting hurt.” And what surprises him most about teaching adults, after years of doing it: “How inside every one of them is still the little kid who's excited by music. No matter what they did during the day, the moment they came to play, the adult stayed outside the room.”

If You're Thinking About Booking an Audition But Haven't

We asked Amit what he'd say to someone who's been thinking about joining a band but hasn't booked the audition yet. He didn't pitch. He said this: “Go for it. Don't overthink it. Give the inner child inside you some space. And remember — it's going to be fun.”

Want to Play in a Room Amit Runs?

Amit mentors several BandsBerlin groups — and he's also the person who runs most of our auditions, so he's probably who you'll meet first. Book a 20-minute audition slot here. It's a short matching session where we figure out your level, your availability, and your taste. From there, we match you with three or four other musicians who fit, and you start rehearsing weekly with a mentor in the room. Membership details and what's included sit on the pricing page. And if you want to put more music in your week before committing, here's where Berlin's musicians actually go to hear live music, a good way to remember why you used to play.

📷 [IMAGE 3 → Bandsters mid-rehearsal in a Amit session — guitarist and bassist in foreground, full-width] Most adult musicians stop here because they overthink it. Amit's advice is the same as ours: don't. Inner child's been waiting long enough.