Second Apollo Studio Video Tour

Here is another video we took last week. In this video you see a nice view of the cabling guiding system in the studio running to the separate server room next to it. You also see my Eminent 310 that is already down there. When we made this video the machine you see in the middle of the room was still getting the moist out. At this time is is dry now and we are working on the finishing of the room. Ceiling, walls and floor.

Synthtopia.com reviews AtmoSphere

I was pointed out by one of my fans to a very nice review of my AtmoSphere album on the website 'synthtopia.com'

You can find the whole review here:

http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2008/11/18/synthnl-atmosphere/

If you find more reviews for me please let me know.

Apollo Studio Acoustics (Part 1)

Finally things are moving on a bit again. The studio is dry enough now to start working on finishing the wall and ceilings etc. We started today to work on the ceilings of both the studio and the cinema. As I told you before the whole concrete structure of these rooms make them echo a lot. We really need to put some damping materials on there to reduce this. The cinema will need a bit more then the studio in that sense. In the studio I want to keep some natural acoustic, because when that becomes to dead it will be very tiring to work in it. The human ears seem to need that. So what are we going to do? Well to start with we found a special plaster for the ceilings. You can see the buckets with the stuff standing in this picture. All quite heavy. Hard to imagine that this has to stick to the ceiling.

The stuff has to be sprayed to the ceiling. It is not something you can do yourself, we hired a specialized company that has the equipment and experience to do this. As you can see they carefully covered everything in the room to avoid the plaster to stick on places it doesn't belong. They used a lot of plastic and cardboard. They covered all the walls and also my cabling guiding system in the studio. To get the optimum result they need to spray on quite a layer. In total there will be about 1.5 centimeters of this plaster on the ceiling. They can't do that in one time. So on Friday they put on the first layer and let that dry over the weekend. On Monday they will come back and do the second layer.

Here you can see the result of the first layer. It is quite a rough structure as you can see. At first we wanted to buy the stuff in black, since that is the color I want for the walls and ceiling, but our order was to small for the supplier to mix this especially for us. They assured us though that we could just paint over it and that this would not affect the acoustic effect. But now that I see this rough texture I think we need to spray the black paint on there as well. We asked the guy who did the ceiling if he could help us with that as well. He told us that he doesn't do that himself but that he worked together with a painter who does. So he is going to put us in contact with that guy.

In the picture on the right you can also see the first inhabitant of the new studio. We moved the Eminent 310 downstairs already and I can tell you that this was not a funny job to do. It is quite heavy actually. I think only for this reason it will never leave the studio again, I can't imagine getting it back up in one piece again. As you can see it is nicely covered. I hope it won't suffer from this spray job. One other thing I can tell you that this acoustic plaster does smell very bad then it is still wet. The fumes coming from it really irritated my throat the first night after it was sprayed on. But now (a day later) the stuff is dry and that is luckily gone. We can anticipate on that now for coming Monday when they spray on the second layer.

Yamaha Motif XS6

I recently sold some stuff from my current studio to make room for some new stuff. This Motif XS6 was actually on my mind for a while already. I played it several times at Live Music, one of the music stores where I usually buy my things, and liked the sound a lot but I decided two times before to wait until the new studio was finished. But last weekend I visited my friend Qui Robinez, who also designed a lot of sounds for me, and he already bought the Yamaha XS8. He showed me what this synthesizer can do and I was blown away. I thought it was just another good sounding rompler, but don't let that first impression fool you. There is actually a very complex synthesizer underneeth. Lots of modulation posibilities and the arpreggiators alone are to die for :) You don't see that though until you fire up the editor that comes along with it. Really amazing what you can do with it. I learned from my friend also that you can install two regular DDR Dimms in it to give it 1 Gbyte extra memory and after that you can do sampling as well on it and load some pretty amazing extra sound banks. This thing even has an ethernet connection where you can upload samples to it over the network. I heared it last weekend next to the Korg M3, that I already love and I must admit that this Yamaha outperforms it. So when I was at Live Music yesterday and played on it again I couldn't wait any more and took it home. I ended up playing on it all night long :)

Synth.nl interview in English by Terry Hawke

Last weekend I did a very nice interview in English on 'The Hawkes Chill Out Sessions' a very nice radio show hosted by Terry Hawk. It was done live over the telephone. We talked a bit about my current album of course and what inspired me to create the music, but we also talked a bit about what I'm working on at the moment. So if you want to know what is coming in the future you should listen to it for sure. I recorded the interview and with kind permission of Terry Hawke and HFM I was allowed to put a copy for you who missed in on my website. You can find it (among some other interviews) on here: http://www.synth.nl/interviews.php

Apollo Studio Furniture (Part 2)

I'm currently very busy with the guy that is building my studio furniture to work on the final design. We are constantly exchanging Google Sketchup drawings like the one you see on the left. It is a great tool for this purpose. In the mean time we are much further by the way but I intentionally wanted to show you how it was in the beginning of this process. We are trying to fit in as much as 19" equipment as possible but still keep the desk space as big as possible.

At this moment he is building real scale models of the different parts of the furniture. These models are not made of the final material yet that will be used in the end, but it is just to see if the measurements are correct. From this model the final version will be build.

In total 10 of these cabinets will be build. 8 for the big studio desk and 2 for the modular desk that will be on the other side of my studio. As you can see the cabinet is tilted a bit backwards. This way it will be easier to see on the displays of the equipment that will be on there later. I heard by the way that the final 2 studio desks will be constructed out of 256 parts in total! Most of it these parts will be put together on the spot in the studio.

In the picture on the left you see some of the mahony wood that will be used for the finishing of the studio furniture. The big parts will be made of MDF that will be lacked in a black finish. This mahony wood will be lacked in a bit darker brown/reddish color. I think it will look just great in the end :) I can't wait until it will be installed in the studio. The furniture builder promised me to take pictures of the construction process. When this picture was taken the wood was just lying there to dry. I'll update you soon when there are new pictures.

Synth.nl up the Charts on ReverbNation

Yesterday something amazing happened on my ReverbNation page. I went up 2269 places in one day to number 4 :) Actually today I'm on position 3 today! but I wanted to show you this picture. I'm sure the main reason for this was that ReverbNation has some kind of cooperation now with MySpace and now they also count my MySpace friends as fans on their site. And there are a lot of friends on my MySpace page. 77124 at the time of writing!! So if you like my music. Do visit these kind of pages and give me some plays and become my friend on these sites. The more the better! You will help me to promote my music and get it heard out there! There is a list of sites I'm at on my links page here:

http://www.synth.nl/links

Building Apollo Studio (Part 21)

Last week the constructor finished work on the cable guiding system and leveled the floor. The holes in the floor next to the system were filled with concrete. Again a lot of water was put in so this also has to dry as well before we can continue. Here you can see that we moved the de-moisturizer to the studio. Since the most moisture is there now that seemed logical. We still get out several buckets of water every day. And even though it looks quite dry it can't be for this reason. But we hope that this week the ceilings will be sprayed in the studio and cinema. After that we can start on the wall and lay the carpet on the floor. I can't wait to finally move some stuff in there.

Here you can see the cabling guidance system in the server room. It stops were the 19'' cabinet will be positioned. It wont stand against the wall so that I can easily go around it. Work usually has to be done on the back for cabling etc. I have learned from my mistakes in the past ;) There is already some stuff in the cabinet as you can see. In the box is a brand new Cisco gigabit Ethernet switch that will provide networking to all the machines on the lower floor. There will be a couple of servers in the cabinet but also some machines in the studio later on. I'm trying to put as many as possible in the server room to keep the noise level low in the studio of course, but some machines need to be closer to the equipment. There will also be a KVM switch in the cabinet. I'm planning to use KVM extenders over UTP cabling to remotely control the servers in the rack from the studio.

As you can see we also have some light now downstairs. Still temporary but very convenient I can tell you. And you also see we already moved some furniture down. We just didn't have any space any more to temporary store it upstairs. This cabinet was in our living room, but will later on hold the DVD's that go into the cinema. The annoying thing about this stuff now is that we will have to take it out again when they are going to do the ceilings and again when the carpet is laid. A lot of extra work that we are not looking forward too since we are starting to get a bit tired. But I'm afraid that things won't happen on its own so we just have to keep going for a while. I think this will be the last construction post I put up since I'm planning to do a separate thread on cabling and acoustics. And starting from the work on the ceiling and the carpet on we are talking about acoustics actually. So lets consider rough construction done by now and let it dry for a bit. See you in the next thread :)

Dutch interview on Radio Ridderkerk

Last week I did another interview in Dutch. This time it was a dual interview together with Ron Boots in the studio of Radio Ridderkerk. The interview was done by Tim van Veen on his show 'When the nigh falls'. The show was one hour long and he played only Ron's music and my music and interviewed us in between.

It was very special for me to do this interview together with Ron. He is a good friend, a very good musician and he also discovered and signed me since he is also co-owner of 'Groove Unlimited' (my record label) where he also mastered both my Albums. So Ron is really the person that made it possible for me to release my music. I'm very thankful for that.

We arrived early at the radio station. I was there at 21:00 and the show only started at 23:00. We had a great conversation in the cafeteria of the radio station, where Ron Boots and Tim van Veen dug up old memories. Ron had been there a couple of times in the last 20 years. Actually they didn't even know how many times exactly. It was nice that actually some people came to the studio to listen the interview and take pictures. I never had so many pictures taken of me. I think we left there by 0:45 or something having another chat after the show. All in all I had a great time and would go there again any time. Thank you Tim and Ron!

Well if you understand Dutch you can listen to the interview on my website. If you don't listen anyway since they also played some tracks from my 'AtmoSphere' album that you probably didn't hear before and also some nice music from Ron Boots new album 'Mea Culpa' ;)

You can find a copy here: http://www.synth.nl/interviews.php

There are also some other interviews to listen to also in English and German. And don't worry I already have two upcoming interviews planned that will be in English. And of course I will put a copy of those on my website as well.

Synth.nl was played on Echoes Radio

Last week I was played two times on the well know US radio show 'Echoes'. On Tuesday my track 'Troposphere' was played and on 'Thursday' my track 'Altostratus'. I didn't hear it upfront unfortunately and missed it myself. I was pointed out to it Kevin on the EMportal.info website. Thank you very much for the info Kevin!
You can find more information about Echoes Radio on their website http://www.echoes.org/

Building Apollo Studio (Part 20)

Again lots has happened last week. The most important thing for me though was the installation of the cabling guidance system. Earlier you could see the space that was left open in the floor. Well here you can see what it is for. It is only much wider than I expected and it is also further away from the way. The good news is that more cabling will fit in, but my furniture builder has to make some changes now. Also an extra strip of carpet will have to be made behind the cabling guiding system. But I'm very happy with it. On both sides of the metal the constructor will put in concrete to make it equal with the existing floor. The only thing you will see after that is the metal on top.

Another important thing was done as well. We put in a big hose underneath the foundation of the existing part of the house to the new part. Through here all the cabling will go for power and network connectivity between the two parts. I asked the electrician to put in plenty of UTP cabling mounted on a patch panel on both sides so that I can use it for what ever I like. I can tell you that this hose is not very flexible so it took a lot of effort to put it in place. But when I'd need another cable in the future it can easily go trough this as well.

In this picture you can see the other end of the hose as it is now. There is one grey cable coming out that serves as temporary power feed. We already hooked up some light bulbs as well so now we finally have some light downstairs. Also the big heather is connected to this so that our living room fuse stays put :) All together we drew a bit too much amps from that one fuse. On the top right you also see some UTP sticking out on a roll. This is not coming from the other side, but meant for upstairs. The new part will be fed from downstairs as well for power.

As you can see from this picture on the right our current power cabinet is kind off crowded already. And another 5 groups (at least) will have to be made. The electrician and myself agreed quickly that this would not fit any more in a safe way. For this reason we decided that we will make another sub power distributor in the server room downstairs. There is plenty of room there.

If you are wondering what the heck all this stuff is: There is some home automation, alarm, CAI TV, video surveillance stuff, telephony, internet and networking equipment etc. And yes I know that is not normal. You don't have to remind me ;)

In the mean time we are very busy finishing the upstairs part. In the picture on the left you see that the ceiling is being spray painted. In the mean time we did the wall our selves. Also the carpet upstairs was put in last week and actually we are moving the stuff in the this weekend. I'm typing this actually while taking a break from carrying stuff around. It is nice that some stuff is being finished now. The studio is still a bit behind schedule because it is still to moist for some work that has to be done. We still take out about 3-5 big buckets of water from the de-moisturizer. Well we'll see how things are next week.

Synth.nl on Hawkes Chill Out Sessions

Last night I was played with my track 'Stratocumulus' on The Hawkes Chill Out Sessions. This is a radio show that is hosted by Terry Hawke and played on the airwaves through Harborourgh FM a British radio station, but off course also world wide over the web stream.

During this show I talked to Stephen (his right hand) over the mail and we agreed to do an live radio interview on the next show. This will take place the 22th of November from 22:00 - 0:00 GMT (10:00 pm-00:00 pm UK Time). So be sure to tune in the 22th on:

http://www.harboroughfm.co.uk/listen/harborough.m3u

You can read more on Terry's Show on this URL: http://www.hawke-hfm.org.uk/

Yusynth (Part 7)

Last week I also picked up work on my big modular project. Now that I know that we are going to integrate the modular into one of the new studio desks I'm very eager to get stuff done. I received the first front panels I ordered from Bridechamber a while ago. On the left you see a panel that is intended for a Yusynth Fixed Filter Bank. I also ordered the PCB and all the components for this module from Bridechamber since I didn't make that one yet, but I didn't receive it yet. On the right you see a front panel for a Woggle Bug module that I will also build soon. This one is not from Yusynth, but looked so interesting from the Bridechamber page that I couldn't resist ordering it. I will be also build one of these PCB's for my friend Hanz.

Bridechamber also had some new front panels for the Yusynth filter modules. I also ordered them. I actually did make these PCB's in the first run I did at my old employers.

On the right you see two PCB's I'm building for the Minimoog clone VCF's or also called Transistor Ladder Filter on the Bridechamber website. Like the name suggests it is a clone from the famous Minimoog filter. As you can see these PCB's are almost complete. I'm just missing the trimpotmeter. My local electronics shop provided me with 1 turn potmeters in stead of 25 turn. So I need to switch them.

The next filter modules I build are EMS diode ladder filter clones. I hear it has a very special sound. As you can see I'm still missing some components for this PCB. My local electronics shop couldn't suplly them any more, but I'll try to get them somewhere else. This module came in two versions. I chose the discrete versions that uses normal BC547 transistors. I have plenty of those. You just need to hand match them, but with the new multimeter I bought a while ago this is fairly simple. It is just amazing to see how much difference in value there is with a bunch of BC547's from the same production batch. Again I also got the wrong trim potmeters like on the previous modules.

The last modules I'm working on now are a clone of the famous ARP4072 also used in the ARP2600. Again this module came in different variants and I chose to build the discrete version again with a lot of transistors. This time it uses BC557's that again needed to be hand matched. I'm getting quite experienced in this by now ;) Unfortunately again I got some wrong components again. And I need to find two LM3900N's somewhere. Ah well I will try to get them from Farnell first. And if that doens't work I'm sure Bridechamber can provide them, since they are also selling component kits. I'm happy to be back to soldering again. It really takes my mind of the stress of the studio construction going on for a while. I hope the front panels for these modules arrive quickly. It would be nice to finally fully assemble a module. For now I only have bits and pieces lying around. I'll update you soon.

Building Apollo Studio (Part 19)

I'm posting another update since lots of things are happening now in the new studio. This week the central floor heating system was fully installed and since the concrete of the floor is dry enough now, they also switched it on. I asked the plumber if he wasn't afraid of leaks, but he told me that the hole system is one long hose and that is was tested in the factory. So he didn't really worry about it. Well we'll see. At least it will be nice and warm again. He told me that it will take a while to heat up initially, but when it is warm it will stay comfortable a long time.

In the picture on the right you see the machine that gets the moisture out. It is running day and night now. It actually is a combined heater and condenser. We have to check it from time to time now to see if it isn't running over. We have to get the water out with buckets. It is amazing by the way how much water still is coming out of it. And it is hard to believe that all this water was all in the air first. It looks like the studio is drying up well now and the floor heating will only help. So hopefully next week we can start laying the carpet on the floor and paint the walls.

The nicest thing they installed last week were the new stairs. Here you see a picture from downstairs. It looks really nice being all wood and it is so much more comfortable to go up and down now. It is not completely finished yet since the railings on the side are still missing. I hope they will install those next week. Not only for safety but it looks better too.

Since the stairs are closed my wife is talking now to the constructor to make a door under the stairs and use the empty space under it to store some stuff we don't use much. That would be very convenient. We do have quite a big house but we don't have much storage room actually. It was amazing by the way how quickly they installed these stairs. They must have done it before ;)

Before the stairs were installed we moved one of my full height 19" cabinets downstairs. The other one will stay upstairs. We made a separate room in the basement were a lot of the computers for the studio will go. It will become kind of a server room, but I will also use it to store some crates I have with cables and other parts. So it will also be a storage room. This way I can keep the studio nice and tidy. It 1.5 by 4 meters wide so it can hold quite some stuff. I'd like especially the noisy stuff in there so the studio will be as quiet as possible. Unfortunately the electrician didn't show up on Friday so we still have no power or network cabling in there. I'll have to wait until he is finished before I can start moving some stuff in this room. I'll keep you posted on the progress as usual :)

Eminent Theatre 310 Unique arrived

Finally we moved the Eminent Theatre 310 Unique from my office to my house. This Eminent is a Dutch build organ with a String Ensemble on the top layer. It was actually one of the first string synthesizers. It was build in 1972 and it is very well knows as the typical 'Jarre' synthesizer. Actually most sounds on his 'Oxygene' album come from this organ run through some phasers like the Smallstone and Mistress from EHX. I have been looking for a good one for a long time and this one was just fully restored. I like the fact that this is a white version which makes it look a bit more modern.

We will move it downstairs in the studio. But it is still a bit moist down there. It is drying up quickly now though so I guess somewhere next week we will do this. I will probably remove the stand on top that holds sheet music normally so that I can put a synthesizer on top of it. Also I need to hook up my smallstone and mistress of course. But for now I'm happy that it finally arrived after a long stay in the office where it has been used in a synth meeting, but last Sunday also in a Jarre fan club meeting.

There is a very nice article about the Eminent 310 on the website from Sound on Sound. You can read it here if you like:

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/may07/articles/eminent310.htm

Jazzmutant Dexter

One of the things that really impressed me last year when we went to the Musik Messe in Frankfurt was the Jazzmutant Dexter. It is a multi touch controller and I think it is the coolest and most intuitive DAW controller that exists at this moment. I have been itching to buy one for my new studio. I recently sold the Tascam US-2400 I use before and bought this one for the new studio. I'm also looking for something with real motorized faders next to it, but I haven't decided what yet. But since I'm currently tearing down my studio and I am limited in room for a while this is perfect for now. And off course it will get a nice spot in the new studio for sure :)

So what does this baby do? Well the first thing you see when you boot it up looks just like a regular mixer. You have 8 faders for channels and 1 for the main volume control. And since it is multi touch you can actually control multiple faders at the same time with multiple fingers. It is most accurate when you use your nails by the way. It is also very easy to mute and solo channels from this view and even arm recorded tracks. There is also a view that shows all channels grouped by 8 faders at a time and then you can select those to go on your screen.

Another cool view you can select from the main mixer screen is some sort of channel strip. Here you can instantly adjust EQ settings, also with multiple fingers you can control multiple points. You can't do that with a mouse :) There is also a XY controller that lets you set parameters on any of the FX plugins on you channel and a surround panner that is just too cool to be true. I could go on like this for hours, but I'll spare you that. Another nice thing is that is connects through Ethernet which allows you to even let it connect to multiple computers. And since I use a multi computer setup that is like a dream come true. If you are interested take a look at the Jazz Mutant website. http://www.jazzmutant.com/. There are even some movies there. I'll try to make some of my own later as well. I only found on little problem. Integration with Sonar 7 works perfectly, but in Sonar 8 not everything seems to work. But I'm sure they will fix that. The last cool thing is that I installed a dual boot OS now with also the Jazzmutant Lemur software. This is a open platform that lets you design your own controllers. I already found a great midi syncable step sequencer :) Man this is really great. It is not cheap by the way but in my opinion worth every penny!

Yamaha SY99

I recently sold some stuff that wont go in the new studio, but I also acquired some new stuff. One of the synthesizers I bought I was VERY impressed about is the Yamaha SY99. It is huge to start with and has a very nice 76 note keyboard with even two modulation wheels. It has an internal sequencer that I'll probably will never use, but the sounds are so great. I can do FM like the famous DX-7mkII but it can also load samples. And you can fuse these together for really cool sounds. It also has very interesting resonant multi stage Time Variant Filters. That sounds scary right? But they do sound very analog. This machine is in my opinion the best digital synthesizer ever build by Yamaha. Even the internal sound effects are very good. I just love the reverb on it. You can set it very long and it still sounds great :) This is definately a great addition to my collection.

Synth.nl with 3 tracks on Elektroland #76

Last week I was played with three tracks on Elektroland. This is a Danish radio show hosted by Bjørn Jeppesen, who is a very good EM artist himself, performing under the name Nattefrost. He is actually a professional radio presenter and his show is broadcasted on 12 FM radio stations throughout Denmark. He played 'Stratosphere', 'Cirrostratus' and 'Altostratus' from my last album on his show. It is also availble as podcast from this URL:

http://www.nattefrost.dk/elektroland/playlist.htm

Look for show #76. I was also played on previous shows like #72, #61, #55 and #54. They are also still available for you to listen to. I advice you to listen in the player since the download versions are shortened. You won't hear full tracks there.

ASM-2 (Part 7)

It has been a while since I worked on my DIY projects with the deadline stress for the album, but I picked up now where I left. I want to try and finish the ASM-2 first. In the picture on the left you can see the completely finished PolyDAC PCB. I also finished the Raw DC PCB by now. Not very exciting to look at. Basically it is just a rough power converter from AC to DC. It is nice that is a separate PCB so it can be mounted in the cabinet somewhere far away together with a transformer to avoid it from interfering the audio signal.

I also received the front panel for the ASM-2 recently. It was actually way bigger than I expected. From the pictures on the website from Elby I figured it would be 19'' format. But you can see it standing against our couch here so I can guess you can judge the format from it. If not there are some more pictures later on in the post. I also ordered all the knobs from Elby Designs. All I have to do now is find suitable front panel components like potmeters, switches, jacks etc. I will try to find them from my local electronics shop. Elby was very nice to provide a list with all the components they use themselves so I can try to find matching components here.

Since I'm talking a lot to the guy that is going to build my studio furniture, we also talked about modulars. We even agreed to make a very special desk for my electronics/modular corner that will include the Yusynth modular I'm going to build. I'm very excited about that. It will be great for sure. But I also asked him if he maybe could make a cabinet in the same style of wood for the ASM-2 and he agreed that was a good idea :) So I gave him the front panel and he started working on it right away.

As you can see it looks great already :) But he said it needed another two layers of coating. And he was constructing some metal strips to go on the edges since I mentioned to him that I wanted to be able to take this synthesizer along to synth meetings, since I think it will become something very special. It will be put on top of the YuSynth studio furniture that he will build for me and as far as my imagination goes that will look spectacular later on :) I'll keep you posted on this for sure.

Building Apollo Studio (Part 18)

Just before the weekend the floor heating system was put in. On top of a layer of isolation you see a metal grid that hold the hole system in place. On top of that hoses are being mounted where just hot water is running trough. This will slowly heat up the floor that will act as one big radiator. Very clever. The only problem with it is that the floor we initially selected was not suited for floor heating so we had to come up with something else. Luckily we didn't order it yes, so it was no big problem to solve. We chose carpet eventually because it also has better acoustic characteristics.

On top of this floor heating system another layer of concrete was put to form the final top floor. They did this just before the weekend so it could dry out during the weekend. On Monday we could already walk on it. In the bottom of the picture on the right you can just see a bit of the new floor. You can also see the ladder that we use to go up and down now. Hopefully the final stairs will be put in this week. That will make it a lot easier to get stuff in and out of there.

In this picture you can see that it is still very moist downstairs. This week they put in some big heaters and moisture removers to get most of the water out. The drops you see on the ceiling are not coming from outside, but it water that is condensation on the coldest spot in the room which is the top layer of concrete of the basement. But this water has to go out before we can put the carpet on the floor and until it is dry I can't put any equipment in either. It would be a shame if anything gets damaged by the moisture.

In the picture on the right you see a shot of me talking to the furniture builder who came of the take measurements. Since the studio furniture will be custom build it has to fit exactly. You can also see that on the sides the floor is lower. There will be a special cable guiding system fitted there. It runs along all the walls and in this way I can get cabling from any place to any place. Very convenient :) I hope that electrician will come this week so I will have some light and power downstairs. But things are looking better every week :)

I conclude this post with a very nice widescreen picture my friend Chris made of the new studio:

Synth.nl played on Spanish 'Artic Mist'

Synth.nl with the track 'Altocumulus' was played on the Spanish radio show 'Artic Mist'. The show is hosted by Jorge Sergio. I missed the live show myself, but in the playlist I saw that is was also available for download as a podcast. This track wasn't played anywere before so maybe you want to listen to it. You can find the podcast from 1-11-2008 on this URL:

http://www.articmist.org/direct/d_podcast.htm

AtmoSphere CD presentation on Klangwelt

Yesterday Karsten Fuhrmann from the German radio show Klangwelt did a nice presentation of my new 'AtmoSphere' album for his listeners. He played three of my tracks: 'Atmosphere', 'Altostratus' and 'Stratosphere'. This last track is one you can't listen to anywhere else yet. The show is now online for download so if you want to listen to it you can find it here:

http://www.dieklangwelt.de/181.klangwelt-sendung_01.11.08.mp3

I don't know how long it will be there, I thing only for one week. You can find more information on the show on this website: http://www.dieklangwelt.de/

My number one fan from the USA

There are a lot of people supporting my music around the world and I'm very thankful for that. Most of them I met through MySpace. Some are very special to me. Last week I got a message that really got to me. In this picture I received in an E-mail you see Mike from The Cosmic Frequencies holding my CD's wearing a Synth.nl T-shirt. This really made me smile and motivates me enormously to continue on the musical path I took. Thank you very much for this Mike and you really are my number one fan in the USA now :) Do visit Mike's page here: http://www.myspace.com/sehrkosmisch and say hello to him from me :)