Born and raised in Madrid, he has been musical since an early age. At seven he learnt to play the guitar and, at twelve, he and his brother formed a band and composed, sang and performed their own songs.
He attended the Madrid Royal Conservatory, where he studied piano, orchestration and composition, and he graduated in 1996 with the Flora Prieto Award in harmony and composition.
Interested in discovering new musical languages, he entered the field of electroacoustic music. In 1993 he co-founded the Laboratory of Electroacoustic Music at the Conservatorio Padre Soler, where he worked as a composer until 1996. That same year, the CDMC (Center for the Diffusion of Contemporary Music) granted Alex a scholarship that allowed him to research and work in the laboratories of the center.
In 1996 he became the director of the Conservatorio Maestro Alonso, in San Lorenzo del Escorial, Spain, and held this position until 2004.
Parallel to his activity as a classic musician, and as his interest for film music grew stronger, he spent four years studying under film music composers of Spain, such as Antón García Abril, Carmelo Bernaola and José Nieto.
One of his first approaches to film music has been with Pedro Almodóvar’s film La Flor de mi Secreto (1996), in which he worked as an assistant for composer Alberto Iglesias.
In 2002, he created the course "Techniques for Film Music Composition," taught at the Conservatorio Virtual.[2] This programme has graduated nearly two hundred students from all around the globe.
His first commissioned full-length film came in 2004 with the movie Cinemart, directed by Jordi Mollá.
A year later, he created the music score for the film Viure sense por[3] (A Life Without Fear), directed by Carlos Perez Ferré and produced by In Vitro Films, for which he was awarded the Best Film Soundtrack Award at the Mostra Cinema Valencia.[4] Since then, Alex has worked regularly for In Vitro Films and his scores can be found in many of the company's productions.
^Ondacero interview (Spanish)Archived 2013-07-01 at archive.today 2012 1 27 "Semanas después del estreno de una de las series más esperadas del año, Toledo, hablamos con Álex Conrado, compositor de la banda sonora.."
