OceanoGraphy up for Pre-Order

Last week I signed a new record contract with Groove Unlimited for my upcoming 'OceanoGraphy' album. I'm still working hard on it as we speak by the way. It is nice that Groove Unlimited is going to release my music again. (thank you Ron and Kees). The release date is set final now to October 17th 2009. It will be launched during the E-live festival in Oirshot in The Netherlands. So the album is coming real soon now. Groove Unlimited has already put the album up for pre-order in their web shop. You can be with the first persons to get it when it is release when you pre-order it. The first period it is usually only for sale directly from them anyway and only later other places will follow. Ordering from them is safe and they do deliver World Wide so don't worry about that. You can find the album on this URL:

http://www.groove.nl/jump2.php?attnum=6001

Thanks for your support! I'll do my best to make it even better than the previous ones :)

Interview about my Apollo Project

I got quite some nice reactions on my Apollo 11 track. Also by Jude Calvert-Toulmin. I met Jude through MySpace when I was just on there and was just trying to promote my music. She did my first ever interview actually back then. She liked the Apollo 11 track so much and the idea behind the upcoming album, that she did a second interview with me that she posted on her Blog. You can find it here:

http://judecalverttoulmin.blogspot.com/2009/07/synthnls-apollo-project-album.html

The first interview we did in June of 2007 is also still available. It was also nice to read that back myself. You can find that one on this URL:

http://judecalverttoulmin.blogspot.com/2007/06/synthnl-synthesiser-music-from-holland.html

40th birthday of Apollo 11 Moon Landing

Today it is exactly 40 years ago, July 20th 1969, that the Apollo 11 crew landed their moon lander on the surface of the moon. Neil Armstrong was the first human being to ever set foot on our moon. I have always felt very connected to the NASA missions connected to this event since I was born in 1969 and always related that event to my own birthday. Since I became 40 myself this year I decided to dedicate an album to these missions. I hoped to have it finished this year but unfortunately I didn't make it. I'm even working on another album that still has to be released this year. But to celebrate this event I worked on a track to honor the crew of the Apollo 11 and put it online on my website today.

You can find it here: http://www.synth.nl/Apollo

The track is not finished yet by the way and still unmastered as well, but I think it is nice for now. After I finish my OceanoGraphy album I will resume work on this album. I have already found a nice CD with original live radio broadcast recordings of all the Apollo missions. So I will replace the samples in this track later by better ones. There will be much more tracks about the other less know missions that went up to the moon. This project is very personal for me and I enjoyed working on this track a lot. I also named my current studio after this project as you have probably guessed by now by the way ;) But now I'm going back to the dolphins, sharks and whales in my virtual Ocean :) Happy 40th birthday celebration!

Server Room Leak and Short Circuit

Yesterday I was playing my SY-99 in my studio when suddenly the lights went out. The studio kept on running because it is behind an UPS. I went to my server room because the power distribution for the studio is there and I smelled something burning right away. Closer inspection of the power cabinet showed that there was water running in it from above. So I switched of the power immediately and called the electrician. When opening the power cabinet we found a layer of water in it and we found the two automatic fuses in the picture on the left to be short circuiting because of the water.

We had some water downstairs before coming from the hole were the air conditioning pipes went through, so we suspected something to be wrong there. This morning the constructor came by to tear by a part of the wall. And this is what we found. The 110 mm hole that was drilled in the concreted didn't only go through the concrete but also cut through the rough of the basement. You can see the pipes running here and the black stuff you see was supposed to be the water proof layer of the roof of the basement. Clearly not water proof any more. So problem found for sure.

This afternoon the water proof roof construction was repaired again and we poored some water over it. So far no water came down so I presume this is fixed now. Tomorrow the constructor would come back to repair the wall. All in all a very stressful weekend and I hope we don't encounter problems like this anymore down there. I was happy though that everybody came by so quickly and that we located the problem so quickly. Afterwards they told me that sometimes it takes weeks or even months to find leaks like this. Now I'm going to take a little rest to get over this ;)

First OceanoGraphy Artwork Impression

Hi the last weeks I have been looking for a nice picture for the cover of my upcoming album OceanoGraphy. Eventually my friend Hans came up with this picture and I asked my designer Bart Auceps to negotiate the rights of this picture with the photographer. And we came to a deal. He then made this cover from it. It is not the final version yet, but I like it a lot. I think it represents the theme of the album perfectly. And it is both abstract, artistic and still to the point. I'm still talking to the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) about the correct use of their logo. As I told you before they are officially endorsing this project and part of my revenue from this CD will be directly donated to the WWF.

Here is the preliminary back of the CD. Also still not final. There are even some mistakes still on it, but it will give you a nice idea. You can also see the track names on there already. They are still not all final either though. But most of them won't change I guess. We are still working on the rest of the artwork but I thought it was nice to share it with you in this stage. And I'll also use these preliminary images on my website. The planned release of this album is only a few months ahead and I have still a lot of work to do. So I hope I'll make the deadline. If I want to release on the 17th of October as planned I'll have to finish my work by the end of September. Well as promised I'll update you on the progress. Well I hope you like the artwork so far :)

100,000 MySpace Friends!

I just approved my 100,000 th MySpace friend request! Isn't that amazing? Some other figures: 1,486 people are actively subscribed to my blog, 365,461 times my profile was viewed, in total 268,084 song plays in my MySpace player and 8,918 people left a positive comment on my music. I'm also on some other networking sites but MySpace is somehow the best running for me. Also most CD's I sell are going to people who got in touch with my music on MySpace. It is my number one marketing tool. I do spent a lot of time answering mail also on there, but it is actually quite nice to get feedback this way. Well now I just hope all MySpace friends order a CD somewhere in the future ;) Well if you haven't found my page yet go to http://www.myspace.com/synthnl and add me as a friend there. Looking forward to see you.

Beisbroek Planetarium Project by Synth.nl

I was asked to produce some new music for a Planetarium Show that is going to be featured in the Beisbroek Observatory in Brugge (B) the coming 6 months. The show had is premiere on the 3th of July 2009. The total show lasts 45 minutes but they needed music for the first 13:30 minutes of the show. So I made this music especially for this project. The music had to be in the background and therefore I couldn't use much beats or leads. I tried to create more atmospherically and spacey music for this project that would fit nicely under the voice over and also with the video. Unfortunately I didn't get the video so I had to work with the voice over track only. Actually this is my first documentary and I liked doing it. I hope to do more projects like this in the future.

I will release the music I made somewhere in the future by the way. I made four tracks in total called Eclipse, Meteor, Hubble and Nebula. They are mixed together to form the soundtrack for this show. The video is projected on a special dome by the projector you see in the picture on the right. It is able to create a nice image of how the sky looks like at a certain place on Earth at a certain time. Together with some video they produce a very nice image over your head that is 360 degrees around you. Just like you would be outside. I haven't seen the show myself, but I'm looking forward to it. And of course you can go and see the show yourself as well if you like. Here is more information on the Beisbroek Observatory:

http://www.beisbroek.be/

You should ask them when this show is playing though. I don't know that myself at the moment.

I did place a copy of the audio track on my own website so you can listen to it. And even though the voice over is in Dutch I'm sure you will get the picture if you don't understand Dutch. I used a picture of the 'Whale Galaxy' with kind permission of NASA to stay in the theme of my current OceanoGraphy Project by the way. You can find it here:

http://www.synth.nl/Beisbroek

Please do enjoy it and let me know what you think of it :)

More OceanoGraphy SFX and Percussion Sounds

Last week I made a lot more sound effects and also some percussion sounds for my upcoming OceanoGraphy album. This time I used both an oscillator and filter of the Anywhere Instruments Semtex as a sound source. I made a nice patch using the LFO's of the Semtex itself and the LFO'sof the Red Square and Cwejman S1 to modulate the Oscillator, FM, LFO speeds etc. In the end the machine was generating weird sounds on its own. I left it running for an hour while recorded the output and later I cut out the parts that I liked. Very funny way to do this. Usually I think of the sound upfront, but then I end up with pretty much the same results always. Which is nice to have recognizable sounds, but the weird stuff adds to the atmosphere a lot.

Yesterday I spent the whole day cutting them all lose, saving them., categorizing and finally giving them a name. That last part is actually also the hardest part, thinking of a name for a sound effect so that I can find it back later. It was a long job as well. I started at 10 :00 and was done by 18:00, but I actually ended up with 93 percussion sounds and 384 sound effects. So the result was worth it. I have enough now for a couple of future productions I guess. In the picture you see a part of the listing for the sound effects and the names I gave them. But there is lots more. When I'm finalizing my tracks later on I will search for appropriate ones and add some effects on them like delay and reverb or maybe even some filters to make them sound really spacy :)

Power Upgrade

Recently I wanted to switch everything on at the same time in my studio and found out that it didn't fit into the 16 Ampere group we made for the studio. It was just a bit over 16 Amp I guess. Switching of a few machines made it fit again. So yesterday my electrician upgraded the group for my studio to 25 Ampere. Now it fits just fine. I will also have to upgrade my UPS now though. I get lots of questions about the power usage in my studio by the way. Some people think I have a nuclear power plant next to my studio. Normally I never have everything switched on at the same time. Only what I use. Normally I use about 8 Ampere when I work in my studio. That is equivalent to 1840 Watt. That is a lot less than your washing machine I guess ;) So it really isn't that bad. When everything is on. I pull just a bit over 16 Ampere that is 3680 Watt. So actually our washing machine and dryer together use a lot more power than my whole studio for your idea ;)

Day of OceanoGrapy SFX production

After doing two small in between projects I'm working on my OceanoGraphy album again. I have to be finished by end of September so only 3 months left. Looks like a long time, but I still have lots of work to do. I'll try to update you on the status from time to time on this blog. I use a lot of synthesized sound effects in my music and today I spent a whole day making bleeps, sweeps etc. I always make a lot and then later select the ones that fit in the track I'm working on. I also use different synths to get a good diversity of sound character. Today I used the Moog Minimoog, Roland SH-09 and Roland SH-5. I thought it would be fun to let you hear something of the sounds. So I made a very noisy mix of a couple of tracks of sound effects trough another. I already threw the really bad ones away by the way so this is not all. But it will still give you an idea how much you can do in one day. And more days like this will follow for sure the next months. I never throw them away by the way. If I don't use them on this album, maybe on the next. You never know right :) Well here you can hear the result of today: http://www.synth.nl/samples/OceanoGraphySFX.mp3

Sunday Synth Interview Online

Bruce Gall from the popular UK radio show Sunday Synth did a very nice one hour special on my music last Sunday including an interview. It was broadcasted on AR FM radio and also through their web stream. I made a recording from that do that in case you missed it you can listen to it anyway. (sorry for the sound quality) For you convenience I cut some of the commercials out, so it is a bit shorter now. I hope you will enjoy it. You can find a copy here:

http://www.synth.nl/interviews.php

Apollo Studio Pictures on my Website

I just uploaded some pictures that my friend Chris made last week in my Apollo Studio. He made quite a few of them and last night I sorted out the ones I liked the best and put them in different categories. He used a special wide angle lens to get the most on the pictures. Some pictures can be a bit distorted on the sides because of that. I also photo-shopped myself out of two pictures. I'm curious if you can find them. I'm not that good at it so you should be able to tell ;) We also made some video's by the way. I hope to upload them soon as well. You can find the pictures on this URL:

http://www.synth.nl/studio

I will upload them today as well on some websites that I'm present on like MySpace etc. Well I hope you enjoy the pictures and if you have any question do ask me. I'd be happy to answer them.

Building Apollo Studio (Overview)

I know a lot of you followed the construction of my new Apollo studio, but maybe some of you also missed it. So here is the chance to look at it again. This is an overview post with all articles that I wrote during the work that was done on the construction site. More will follow later on cabling, furniture etc. The articles are in chronological order now for your convenience. I hope you enjoy reading them. It was quite a project all in all. It took about 6 months to build this and I'm very happy that it is finished now. If you have any questions feel free to ask me.

1. Preparation (3D plans and asking permission to the local government)
   
2. 3D Design (3D plan for myself to get an idea of what could fit in)
   
3. Furniture (First ideas how the furniture should look like)
   
4. Drilling (Drilling holes in the backyard for the poles of the foundation)
   
5. Poles (Filling the holes with concrete to form the poles)
   
6. Digging (Digging a big hole for the basement and shortening the pole)
   
7. More digging (Digging even deeper and shortening the poles even more)
   
8. Water (At maximum depth now, just hitting the ground water level)
   
9. Foundation (Construction of the foundation of the basement)
   
10. Steel (Construction of the steel work for the walls)
    
11. Walls (Construction of the walls)
    
12. Roof (Construction of the roof)
    
13. Wiring (Putting electrical wiring in the roof and walls.
    
14. Door (Demolition of the side of our house)
    
15. Ventilation (The basement is ready, and I can breath down there)
    
16. Stairs (Basement finished and the first time we could go down ourselves)
    
17. Isolation (Putting on some isolation and making it waterproof)
    
18. Heating (Putting in the pipes for the floor heating system)
    
19. Demoistering (Getting all the moisture out of the walls)
    
20. Cabling (Installing the cable guiding system)
    
21. Floor (Putting the final layer of the floor)
    
22. Garden (Finished construction and putting our garden back in place)
    

And here are also two video's we shot during construction

1. First Video Tour
2. Second Video Tour

Still Moving Synths Around

My friend Chris was supposed to come by to take pictures of my Apollo studio last Thursday but it was postponed due to circumstances until this Thursday. In the mean time I'm still moving some synthesizers around in the studio. Here you can see a picture of the Roland SH-2000 that I moved above the Yamaha CS-50. I think they make a nice couple like this :) Both are my favorite analog after touch machines. I hope that after coming Thursday I can finally show you around the studio. So have a bit more patience please.

Synth.nl interview on Sunday Synth

Bruce Gall from the popular radio show 'Sunday Synth' will do an radio interview with me on Sunday the 28th of June. His show will broadcasted on AR FM in the UK from 10-12 AM (GMT / UK Time). You can also listen to the web stream on the website http://www.arfm.co.uk. The show will be repeated on Monday the 29th of June. The show is two hours in total and about an hour will be filled with this interview and some of my music. We will talk about several topics, but I will surely talk about ongoing and upcoming projects. I hope you will all tune in and enjoy it :)

Roland SH-09 Fixup Project

Sometimes you order something from E-bay and when it arrives and you open the box full of enthusiasm you get pretty dissapointed by what you see. I had that feeling when I received this Roland SH-09 analog synthesizer. It looked like it really took a serious hit. Like it fell down flat on its top. The pitch bender was broken, most knobs were missing, not original or as bend as could be. And two of the keys of the keyboard had cracks in it. In the add the last thing was stated but it was much worse than I expected. I decided that no way it was going to be in my collection in this state. Not every synthesizer I have is in mint condition, but I haven't got anything looking as bad as this.

So I started looking on E-bay for some spare parts to fix it a bit. I found a pitch bender and a set of new knobs for it. So tonight I started opening up the synth and try to replace the pitch bender. Opening it up is not very hard. You can take of the top by just removing a few screws. The pitchbend is in a seperate panel that can be removed after that with just 4 screws. Replacing the pitchbend was quite easy. It is just a piece of plastic that works like a knob on a potmeter. On each side is a spring to get it back in its normalized position. But just push it in between and you are done. So if you ever break a pitch bender on a SH-09 don't throw it away for that.

After that I removed a lot of dust from the inside and put the new knobs on. After that I tested the synthesizer and it looks like it works fine. A few of the potmeters crackle a bit, but besides that it's fine. Here is a pictures of it after I was done. You can still see the cracks in the keyboard and you can see it is old, but I think it is in a reasonable enough state now. I'm going to sell it and find a new one for myself. I want a nicer one for my collection, but for someone that is interested in the sound it is great and I'll sell it for a lower price than usual. I will record some sound effects on it before I sell it. It has a nice self resonating filter and some nice modulation functions.

New Apollo Studio Pictures Coming Soon

I know a lot of you are waiting for new overview pictures from my new Apollo studio. And I have good news. My friend Chris is coming Thursday to take new pictures and also film a bit in my studio. I guess that they will be online somewhere next week then. So keep an eye on my blog here or my website. I do have one challenge though since it turned out that the UPS I put in front of the studio is not powerful enough. When I tried to put all equipment on last week when Roland was filming here, everything went out instead :( I will have to upgrade this UPS I'm afraid. For the pictures I'll have to take some power from somewhere else Thursday I guess. I did put up one picture here from my 'synth wall' as a teaser. But I'm sure Chris will make nicer ones :)

Building Apollo Studio (Part 22)

I know a lot of you have been following the progress on building my Apollo studio. I'm still working on some stuff and that is why I don't have final pictures yet from the inside. But I do have some picture for you from the outside. I guess you all remember the big hole that was in the ground in our garden, well this is what it looks like now. Here you see our new terrace :) And yes the studio is really below there. Hard to imagine right? In case you wonder if I hear it when someone is walking on top. Well yes sometimes I do hear something. But it is very distant. And they can't hear me on the outside. We tested that. It is a bit like the top neighbors in a flat. But we are happy that the garden is back again since it is becoming nice weather again and we can sit more outside now.

Here is another nice picture I didn't want to keep from you. We have a little waterfall in our garden with a pond in front with some fish in it even. The front shallow part of this pond is actually the roof of my studio. So the fish are swimming literally on top of me. Kind of a nice idea since I'm working on my OceanoGraphy project now. I'm not only under the ground but actually below the water as well. Don't worry there are two separate water proof layers between the water and the concrete so there is not really a risk for leakage or anything. This rounds up the construction of the studio while some other projects like acoustics and cabling are still on going. I will post an overview post in the right time sequence soon for the construction thread so that it is easy to read in case you missed it.

Minimoog Released by Dutch Customs

Quite some time ago I sold my Moog Little Phatty and some other stuff to make place for a classic Moog Minimoog. I found a very nice one on E-bay in the USA. It looked great in the pictures and according to the seller it worked perfectly. So I decided to go for this one. I got a tracking code from the shipping but for a long time I didn't hear anything. Then I got a letter from the Dutch postal services that it was intercepted at Dutch Customs and that the seller didn't fill in (all?) the necessary customs forms. Well I have no idea, but they wanted me to check it in. I had to send proof of the payment as well to determine the value. And then I didn't hear anything again for weeks. I called Dutch Postal Services a couple of times, but every time the same story. They couldn't help me.

And then yesterday suddenly they were at my door asking for cash payment of the import tax :( That was to be expected but still a setback, since it was not cheap. I didn't have the money at the time so I agreed to pick it up today from the post office. And I did that this afternoon, so it finally arrived today. I got it out of the box right away but decided to leave it acclimatize for a while before I would try it on. I found a nice spot for it in my analog corner and doesn't it fit nicely there? After dinner I tried it out and it works perfectly! And how nice it sounds :)

And I really love the look of the wood that is on it. I don't even know if it is original or not by the way. My friend Hanz did tell me that this one has the old type oscillators on it judging from the smooth (not ribbed) modulation and pitch bend wheel. These old oscillators tend to sound a bit warmer than the newer ones I understood from various websites. But since I never played a Minimoog before I can't compare that. What I DO know is that it is so much nicer than the Moog Little Phatty. It sounds very nice and analog indeed and much warmer than the Moog Voyager RME that I still have as well. The only disadvantage is of course that you can't save any presets on it. But that forces you to make unique sounds right :)

And that is exactly what I did the last two hours. Making sounds. I already recorded some nice sound effects. The auto modulation of the filter is really nice on this machine and even the white and pink noise sounds great. The filter is unbelievably smooth and I love that already. The only thing lacking on it for me is Midi, but I understood that it is possible to retro fit it on the Minimoog so I'll probably do that as soon as possible. Another very clever thing on it by the way is the 440 Hz button to tune it easily on hearing. I'm sure this is a synthesizer you will hear a lot on my future productions.

Synth.nl and WWF on OceanoGraphy

I have some exciting news for you. My next album 'OceanoGraphy' will be officially endorsed by the WWF. I'm allowed to use their name and logo on this project since they support the idea behind the concept of the album which is of course about the Earth's Oceans and the creatures living in it. This is quite an honor for me. In return I decided that a part of my revenue from this album will be donated to the WWF. I'm very excited about all of this, because I think this gives the project a lot more body all together from the start. So if you buy this album later you will in fact also support the WWF! I'm currently still working with my designer Bart Auceps on the artwork of the album. I hope you will like it later. I would like to thank the Dutch brand of the WWF (WNF especially Marlou) for making this possible!