Walter Lopes

Walter Lopes is one of the founders of Oficina G3, having put the band together in São Paulo in 1987 alongside Juninho Afram and Wagner García. As the drummer of the original line-up, he took part in the period when the group established its existence in a context with no supporting structure at all. Brazilian Christian rock at that moment had no dedicated labels, no touring circuit and no consolidated audience — each band had to build from scratch the material conditions for playing. The repertoire of that phase was straightforward hard rock, with conventional song structures and drumming of a clear function: to hold the tempo and the weight, without the changes of metre and the long sections the band would adopt from the 2000s, when it moved into progressive metal. The founding line-up he belonged to is the starting point of a path now exceeding three and a half decades, which made Oficina G3 the leading reference of the genre in the country.