Jeffrey visits Apollo Studio Again

Yesterday I was visited by Jeffrey again (AKA Synthex). He bought a Doepfer Dark Energy that didn't track very well, so firstly we calibrated and tuned it. Then Jeffrey finally got to play on the Elke Synthex that worked prefectly yesterday. Unfortunately that is not always the case. After that he recorded some music for a new album on several synths like the Jupiter 8, Minimoog and EMS VCS3. We had a great time as usual and for me it was actually good to have a break from my work finally. When they left I did a little extra work on one track that is taking shape quite well already. Then I exported all the tracks to WAV to Jeffrey can work on it in his own studio. It was nice to be in the studio again and I really must make some music of my own again soon :) Jeffreys father also filmed a bit, so I'm sure there will be a video on youtube soon. I will post it on my blog as well if I see it.

E-Live 2012 Report

On the 27th of October I attended the E-live festival in Oirschot in The Netherlands. This Electronic Music event is organized yearly  by my record company Groove Unlimited. The day started with a nice event. The official release of the first release by Jeffrey Haster aka Synthex. His CD is called Pythagoras and I was glad to see that he sold out the 25 copies he had with him that day. Congratulations on the new album Jeffrey. I think it is quite an accomplishment for a 13 year old. I'm sure he will go a long way. You can get this album on the same place as you can find my music http://www.groove.nl/

After that I had to find Glenn Main. He traveled by plane from Norway and asked me if I could bring my Roland GAIA SH-01 again for him. That was no problem of course, I did the same thing for him when he played in Germany last year. Here you see us both in a very nice pictures taken by Aleksandra Przybylska who came all the way from Poland to visit the E-live festival. Thank you very much Aleksadra for the nice pictures you send me! Oh and the Synth.nl T-shirt you see in the picture was made by my wife and kids. Thank you very much for that as well girls :)

Then I got another nice surprise. The day before E-live I got an E-mail from Rob Papen telling me that his upcoming Book + DVDs about sound design were finished. He filmed for the DVDs in my studio last year and we kept in touch since then. So  I asked if he had plans during E-live and he didn't actually, so I invited him to come. I wasn't sure yet if he could make it he said, but eventually he did :) It was nice to talk to Rob again and a lot of people visiting the festival recognized him from his time in Nova and Peru. I hope it inspired Rob as well to make some music of his own again. My wife took this nice picture of us and Rob insisted in holding my Apollo album since he knew it liked it a lot he said. A nice compliment for sure :)

All in all I had a great day. I watched 3 concerts in total Glenn Main, Ruud Heij & Gert Emmens and Space Art. For the rest I had no time unfortunately. Normally on a day like this I'm very occupied by talking with everyone. I enjoyed myself a lot, but these days always fly by. There was also a set back. I planned to have the new Primitives album that I'm making together with Remy Stroomer ready, but we didn't make the deadline. We are still working on it. It is more work than we anticipated and we are both very busy as well with other things. I will keep you updated on the progress, but there is still no definitive release date set. I guess good things need time. All in all I have a great day and I probably forget a lot of stuff in this post, but one thing I don't want to forget and that is to thank Ron Boots and the rest of the E-live crew for yet another great E-live!

Keyboard Jeff visits Synth.nl Apollo Studio

Just before I went on holiday I had a visitor over in my studio. In the picture on the left you see 'Keyboard Jeff' aka 'Synthex' because of his love of the Elka you see him with. Jeffrey is 13 years old and a very talented keyboard player with a unfamiliar musical taste for a boy of his age. He doesn't play dance or whatever, but he likes 80's synthesizer music. I met him at the E-live festival in Eindhoven were he approached me and told me he knew all my music and my videos from my website. Later it turned out he had read my whole website and knew everything from the top of his head.

 He was telling me all the synthesizers that I had that he never played before and at a certain moment I just stopped him and asked if he wanted to play on them for real and offered him a visit to my studio. In the mean time I also talked to Ron Boots about Jeffrey and Ron knew him very well too, because he visited his studio too and Ron told me also that Jeffrey was working on his own music and he let me hear some stuff. I was very surprised it sounded very well actually :) Quite remarkable.

So a couple of weeks ago he came over together with his father took pictures and also filmed the whole meeting. It was fun to watch that Jeffrey just couldn't chose which synthesizer to play. He wanted to play them all at the same time and jumped around from joy in the studio. He also found his way to the big modular wall and amazingly enough didn't ask any question. He knew how to patch the modular from the top of his head. I know a lot of adult and experienced musicians that don't even know how to do that, let alone get something musically interesting from a modular. But he did :)

Then he asked me a question I wasn't prepared for. He asked if we could play some music together and even record it. Normally I don't do that at all unless I know someone for a while. I just don't feel comfortable with these kind of things. His father was filming the whole thing and I get very nervous from that. Normally I even stop playing when my wife walks in to the studio. But since I had some experience now  with playing together with Ron Boots and Remy Stroomer and I agreed to give it a try. At first it didn't go too well, but that is normal. You have to get used to each others style, especially chords and tempo.

Later on we did play some very nice things together Jeffrey's father told us. I actually never know what I'm playing until I hear it back ;) Most of the recordings didn't work though unfortunately because Jeffrey kept switching synths faster that I could keep up with assigning channels to the recording software. I did manage to record one jam though that turned out quite nice and there are two nice ones on film. I'm planning to put a video on youtube from this. Please keep in mind that these will be fully unprepared improvisations and there are mistakes in there for sure. But it was a lot of fun. Eventually Jeffrey's father had lot of trouble getting him back home, but I think we all enjoyed this day :)