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This chapter is about the music I made at home.
Recording of the music my brother and I made started when my father bought a
small taperecorder, I think the brand was Aristona. I still have the
tapes, but it is hard to find out when these recordings were made. They are mainly
interesting for my brother and me so I will not put these old recordings on the site.
It got more interesting after a visit to my uncle.
My uncle had a much nicer recorder and I liked it very much and so
did my father, so he bought the same one, an Uher Royal, a great machine with
four speeds and possibilities to make sound-on-sound recordings. It was
much better than our old recorder, but with
sound-on-sound recordings the quality got bad quickly. I could live with that
though. It was the way many musicians started recording themselves and made demos,
and so did I. I
still have the Uher, so here's a picture of it. |
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It must have been around 1965 when we bought it. We also used
it to add
sound to my fathers 8mm movies. I made a project of his movie he made in
London, and I used soundeffects and music. When I applied to go to the
Film Academy in 1968 I took the film with me. The Film Academy
didn't accept me though, because I was more interested in sound, and they
didn't care for sound in those days - if you see a Dutch movie from the 60's
and 70's, you will find the sound is terrible.
But the sound of my demos were even worse, but of course that
is understandable.
I have loads of recordings, both on the Uher and the TEAC I got myself later, and
if I look at the quality of the sound most (maybe all) of them are not really
suitable to put on this site. And not only the sound, but also my performance
is far from professional. But while I was listening to the tapes I found
some interesting musical ideas. Some compositions are daring and ... I really still like
them - something I didn't anticipate when I started this site. Here are three
of my compositions I recorded with the Uher.
| Canon d'Écosse |
Simple tune |
Completion |
| As a study I wrote a short piece and
played it three times. The first accordion starts, the second
follows, then the third (a
catch). |
Here I play rhythm guitar, organ and a
guitarsolo. I don't remember how this song came to be, but I think it is
a funny tune. |
I assure you I wasn't on drugs, but this
strange song was based on 6/9 chords and a changing time signature. Guitars and
voice. |
There are many more compositions, but it will take too much
space on the site.
| The next phase was when I had work (from february
1973), and bought myself a TEAC 4-track
machine and a TEAC mixer. |
Probably not very long after that, I organised a
recording session at my parents house (where I still lived). I invited Chris
Schuchard, our drummer from The Soul Connection and my brother Gerard
de Boer to play
a composition I made. Chris on drums of course and my brother on guitar. They
are on the photo left, but this was taken about 10 years earlier at our
home when we
still played in the band.
I
recorded Chris and Gerard and later did the rest by myself. I think I took it
just a bit too far with bass, organ, accordion, and many singing voices. But I
think it is a fine song. The title is "To Get Off Scot-free". The lyrics are not mine, but from a someone I met
through my brother. |
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(Click
the photo to hear the song)
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He is a painter and called himself Michèl Clement. I don't
know where he is at the moment, if he still paints or what his real name is. I
know I liked his own paintings, because I once visited his studio. But
he made his money with import-export paintings. ( "a man's got to
eat, you know!")
Michèl Clement was the singer of a band my brother played in at the
time. The band was called Charles Neal, after a guy that lend
them a PA-system and who's real name was Kees Spijker. |
Anyway I recorded this song on the Teac and mixed it. I wanted
to record many songs, but I couldn't ask my brother and Chris to come for
every song. Many songs I did with just guitar, my voice and sometimes
accordion and/or the organ. You also hear a bassguitar, I lend from my brother
for some time.
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I
don't mind |
Reincarnation |
Think it over now
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I like the idea behind this song. Perhaps it was
written earlier, but I decided to write lyrics to it in 1975 in order to
record it. Because it had a Scottish flavour to it, I decided to sing it
with an accent. Sorry, if I haven't got it right. |
It is a topic I am interested in, so I decided to
write lyrics about reincarnation to this melody I made. When I sang it I
had to do it softly because it was late already. It gives the song a special
atmosphere though. I mixed it to Mono. Or is it Uher? |
This song I have recorded several times, with the Uher as
well as with the TEAC. I like the song very much and for a change I do
not feel ashamed of the lyrics.
I used one version I made on the TEAC, but added two fragments of one of
the UHER version. |
Like the Uher period there are many more songs, but there is
not enough room to put them all online.
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But I missed drums and thought of buying a rhythm unit. I sometimes used the organ in the room
(you see it on the photo). This was not what I wanted. Besides I always forgot to
silence the clock, so sometimes you hear a strike of the clock.
I had already sold the
organ I played with in the Soul Connection, so I decided to buy a Wersi
organ, one with a rhythm unit.
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| On the photo the house-organ I sometimes used for
recordings. |
It was very much cheaper to build it and to buy
the several boxes I needed in Germany. It was still a LOT of money, more than I would pay now for the most expensive Yamaha keyboard.
And if I didn't build it, it
would even cost me twice that much, the price of a small car. Rediculous, really.
It was between 1977 and 1983 when I bought the Wersi Orion
(W1T), a tranportable model. Two keyboards and a rhythm unit. It took me 8
months to build it. The sound of the
rhythm box wasn't very good though. And the organ was too big, so when I moved out of my parents
house in 1985 and worked in the SVEM I took it to the VARA-studio. I tried to
sell it, but nobody wanted it...........
Well, someone wanted it alright, because it
was stolen in 1989 when the VARA left their building and moved to a new
building across the same street. Now all I have are photo's and the recordings. I keep the manuals and other stuf as a momento.
But here the photo's of better times with the Wersi Orion. I
composed a lot of songs with it, mainly instrumental - you will be happy to hear that, I'm sure ;-)
Every photo has a tune behind it. You will notice that the first of them
is a demo of the tune I arranged for the PT-band,
and it is called Tuesday Evening Session. The second
one is called ORION (of course after the Wersi Orion) and we also played it
with the PT-band. Both the PT-band
versions are also reachable from this page. Below the photos.
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