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!

Synth.nl Soundbank in Rob Papen's Predator 1.6.2 update

I have some nice news for you. In the latest update of the Predator synthesizer made by Rob Papen you'll find a nice surprise. I made a complete bank with 103 sounds for Rob. All the sounds are in the traditional classic synthesizer music style that I also use in my own music. So now you can play with those Synth.nl sounds yourself :) The update is free if you already have a license and if you don't I would suggest you to check Predator out because it is really good in my opinion. You can find more information about the 1.6.2 update here: http://www.robpapen.com/nl/15Dec2011.htm and more information on Rob Papen's Predator here: http://www.robpapen.com/predator.html. If you download the update do let me know what you think of the sound bank. It is the first time I did something like this and I'd like to hear if you appreciate it.

Rob Papen visits Synth.nl Apollo Studio Video

A while ago Rob Papen visited my Apollo studio. Together with his crew he was filming some footage for his upcoming book and DVD about sound design on synthesizers. While they were filming in my studio I filmed them with my own camera. So this short movie is sort of a 'making of'. More info about the DVD will follow on http://www.robpapen.com. I made all the 3D animations in this movie with Cinema 4D. You can watch it here:

Rob Papen filming in the Apollo Studio for his DVD

Today I had some special visitors in my studio. Rob Papen and his crew (producer Jeroen and cameraman Jochem) came over to film in my studio. Rob is a well know synthesizer musician in the Netherlands from playing in bands like Nova and Peru, but he is also well know sound designer and maybe even famous for his very good software synthesizers like Predator, Blue, SubBoomBass and recently Punch. As you might know Rob also gives courses in synthesizer sound design and he is now working with his crew on a book and DVD about sound design.

 Rob filmed quite some material for the DVD in his own studio where he has a Moog Minimoog and a Jupiter 8, but he wanted to show the layout of some other synthesizers as well to explain where they differ from each other, but also what the similarities are. Here you see Rob playing with my Yamaha CS-50 where Rob especially focused on the Ring Modulation and the other features that make the typical sound of this synth.

Rob also had a lot of fun with my DIY modular and one of the dotcom sequencers. Here he explained how patching works and that you can use the sequencer to control the pitch of an oscillator but also to control the cutoff of a filter. He also showed some other examples of sample and hold on the ARP 2600. From time to time we did have to move some synths around to get a good shot and it is a good thing they brought some extra lighting since it is quite dark in my studio which is great for atmosphere shots, but not to explain stuff on synths of course.

Rob also used the Moog Memorymoog and Roland SH-101, but didn't want to stick with only vintage synthesizers. He also did some shoots with the DSI Prophet '08 and seemed to have fun with the D-beam on the Jupiter-80. The problem with filming this synth though is the touch screen so Rob explained that there were 10 Roland GAIA's in there and did some more in depth explanation on the Roland GAIA itself. There were many more things Rob wanted to do I think, but after about 10 of shooting hours we called it a day.

All in all we had a very nice day and I think it was very productive for Rob and his crew. They actually did a little introduction shot with me on it as well, so maybe I'll appear on the DVD as well. Judging from what I heard about what they did so far and what they did today I think it will be a great product to see if you are into synthesizers. I also filmed a bit with my own camera when they were shooting and Rob gave me permission to put it online, so I'll try to make a little compilation to give you an impression of what to expect. I'm really looking forward to the DVD. You can find more information about Rob Papen's software on http://www.robpapen.com btw. And  I guess the DVD will be for sale on there later on as well.

Punch, Rob Papen and Synth.nl

This evening I visited I4 Muzique in Eindhoven where Rob Papen introduced his new Punch plugin. Rob gave a nice demonstration of the product for quite some people that showed up there. It is a drum / percussion oriented plugin that uses samples, but also synthesized drum and percussion sounds. I liked it very much. It was nice that by accident by the way that I read about his demonstration on Facebook today and I happened to have nothing else planned this evening. Of course I took a copy of his product home to support Rob, since I like both the person as his work. All his plugins are top notch. It was nice to talk to Rob again and Marc from I4 took this picture. I tried to smile I guess ;) Well it was very late already and I was quite tired. As you can see I even pulled my Rob Papen T-shirt from the shelve for the occasion ;) If you don't know Rob's plugins yet I would say go check them out on his website http://www.robpapen.com