Born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, his father was an engineer and his mother pianist and teacher. Since his young age he was surrounded by music, and one of his greatest joy as a kid was to listen to his father's old LP's.
His first contact with an instrument was at the age 7 with the piano. But that didn't last long…
At the age of 14 we won his first (electric) guitar and since then the love for the instrument and for the music were always with him.
It was around 1993 as he began playing Rock and Metal and forming his first Band. With his own compositions he was able to get some recognition in the Belo Horizonte underground scene.
In 2000 he had a stupid accident - slipped and fell through a glass door leading to lost all the movements of his left hand, being unable to play guitar…
After an year of fighting and physiotherapy he got back to playing, drop out the Journalism College and decided to move out to another city.
In Vitória he formally began his classical studies, where at the Music College (FAMES - Faculdade de Music do ES)he began a flirt with Jazz - for the horror of his classical teacher. In parallel to his classical studies he takes jazz and improvisation courses and private classes.
In these period attempted many different workshops and masterclasses, between classical, jazz, Brazilian music and rock guitar.
In 2006 he graduated Bachelor in Classical Guitar by the Faculty of Music of Espírito Santo.
In 2007 he moves to Germany, where he still lives, in the city of Offenbach am Main, near Frankfurt a.M..
During all this time Rod worked as a guitar teacher - He began teaching friends and younger people as he was just 16.
In 2014 recorded his first CD, Rod Mancebo, a Jazz instrumental Trio with his own compositional work. The album was recorded live in Studio in only one day.
In 2017 release his Second Album, Electrified Hope, now with his rock influences at sight. This CD was all made by himself at home with drum programming supervision by Christoph Czech (DE) and Fernando Yokota playing Bass on a couple of tracks. The CD starts with an energetic power-rock song and morphs towards some fusion influences at the end, where you can hear the art of composition from his previous album coming out.
In 2018 Rod Mancebo made a ambitious project: The Project Song Diary - from January 1st to December 31st - every day of the year - he recorded audio and video and posted it daily on his social media. One song per day. 365 Songs. 363 original songs and 2 covers on the first week. The project can be completely found on YouTube.
In 2019 he was selected for a Mentoring program with Kiko Loureiro (Angra, Megadeth) where during six months they meet twice a month to discuss music business and career.
Also in 2019 he formed the Duo FerRo, a instrumental duo with Fernando Yokota on Contrabass. The duo had a meteoric start, playing some big events, but unfortunately came the Pandemic and put everything on ice.
In 2020, in the middle of the Corona-pandemic he made a Online-Project with two other Brazilians: Andrey Goncalves (USA) and Douglas Helmer (BR) and recorded 3 Songs remotely. The project was called Three-O
In 2021 he decided to remix and remaster the 2017 album, Electrified Hope, to correct some mixing problems ate the first edition. For that he turned to Igor Comerio in Brazil (ES) and the album sounded like it supposed to from the beginning. That’s Electrified Hope 2021.
In 2022 he released the last 7 songs of the Project Song Diary as an EP: Suite For An End. That’s the first time outside the project that he publishes songs with vocals.
On April 2022 a new EP recording was finished, this time with 4 songs with vocals, singing in Portuguese and playing for the first time piano, in addition to bass and guitar (drums were programmed). This EP is yet to be released and will be called Rodrigo Mancebo - Vox.
August 2022 marks his first time in the USA, to record an Album with Andrey Gonçalves.