New Album Coming together with Ron Boots

It has been a while since I wrote something, but I have some good news to share. There is a new album coming together with Ron Boots. As you may know Ron and I have become very good friends over the past years and we did two albums together before. Both those albums were created during a holiday were we brought some synthesizers. And we thought it was time to do that again. So we booked a house in the Belgian Ardennes for 4 days and went there together with Monique and Sonja. We did not only make music of course we also visited the Bastogne War museum and we went to the Chouffe shop and brewery. My favorite beer :) We also visited Frank van Bogaert and his wife Pieke and had some of those Chouffes and a lovely dinner with them. All in all we had a great time. 

 It was so much fun working with Ron again. It was way too long ago. It is amazing how quickly we can create a track together. It feels very natural to play with Ron. For me it was a bit harder this time than the previous two times we did this though. The last years I didn't play much unfortunately due to lack of time caused. by both my divorce, moving a couple of times and starting a new company again. So my playing was a bit rusty from time to time. Ron brought his notebook with Cubase to record
everything with a multi track audio interface, so we could do some retakes from time to time. Mistakes mostly on my side :) But in four days time we created a lot of new music.

 I know some of you are gear heads and are always wondering which instruments we brought. Ron brought his UDO Audio Super 6 which is really a power house of a synth. Ron also brought some VST's that we only used for some drums to have some rhythm to go on. I brought the Expressive E Osmose that I recently received after I backed it on Kickstarter long ago, also my Roland Gaia and the Behringer Solina strings. I took me some time to get used to the Osmose keyboard, but it is amazing what you can do with it. The Gaia I brought because it holds my favorite lead sound. The Solina really surprised me, I used to have an Eminent 310 in my studio for those Solina strings, but I think the Behringer actually sounds better and it is a lot easier to carry :) 

So I can hear you ask the question already. When will the album be ready. I don't know for sure. First we will have to listen the tracks back and select which ones will make the album. And then usually we want to do a bit of extra producing and of course mixing and mastering. And in the mean time I'm also still working on my PaleaonTology solo album and time is limited for me at the moment. As you might know I moved to Boxtel now (near Ron's house) and that does make it easier now to work together. And also finally my studio is running in the new house. I will do a separate post about that soon. I will update you on the progress of this album and also PalaeonTology when I have more information. I will try to reserve more time for studio work the coming months, but I'm also quite busy with my new company ArtiLED. Thanks for reading and if you have questions just send me an E-mail. Thanks Ron, Monique and Sonja for a lovely time in the Ardennes!

 

Happy 2023 and Delays

 

Hello Everyone. First of all Happy 2023! All the best wishes from me for this new year. I know some of you are wondering if I'm still alive and yes I am. I have been very very busy. As most of you know I moved to Rotterdam about two years ago to live together with my lovely girlfriend Sonja. But unfortunately I could not get used to this big and crowded city. Too much light, too much noise, just too busy for me. I also started my new company in the apartment in Rotterdam and we also ran out of space over there. In no time the living room was a research and development facility, warehouse and factory. So eventually Sonja and myself decided to go look for a new city and a new house and we ended up in Boxtel in The Netherlands. We bought an old bakery from 1950 with lots of space and started moving there. Unfortunately this has cost a lot of time and I had to postpone a lot of stuff while work had to continue of course. I know some of you are waiting for my new PalaeonTology album and yes that should have been released in 2022, but I didn't make it. Because of the move I simply had no studio. I am currently working on building a new (temporary) studio in the new house, since the room where I planned the studio is not done yet. I will try to get the studio working in the coming months so that I hopefully can get back to producing my music again. My plan is to release it before the end of the year 2023. The nice thing is that our new town is very inspirational. There are even dinosaurs on the roundabouts in our city, since there is a museum in Boxtel having dinosaurs on show, both real size statues as actual fossils.

The biggest reason though that my new studio isn't finished yet is that I promised Ron Boots of Groove Unlimited that I would build a new website for him. The original CD web shop dated from 1996 and was already very outdated. A couple of years ago I build the download web shop next to the old one, but that only gave Ron more work. Every new music title had to be entered 3 times actually. It was just taking to much time for him. I postponed this project a couple of times, but in the end deciding between finishing my studio and album and helping my friend was easy. So we build a completely new website for Groove Unlimited, with the help of my daughter Tamara, where both CD's and download are just an option on most of the albums. We added a lot of categories like labels, music genres and artists so you can (hopefully) find the music you need a lot quicker. The website was just launched today and that is the reason for my late new years message. You can fine the new website here: https://www.groove.nl

So don't worry. I didn't stop producing music. I'm still working on it. It just got delayed for some good reasons. I will try to update you soon on the progress of the new studio.

Michel, Synth.NL