At home earlier

The beginning Playing accordion Connection At work S.V.E.M. At home earlier At home now

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.
Click for a bigger picture

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. 

To get off scot-free
(Click the photo to hear the song)

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. 

I don't mind

Reincarnation

Think it over now

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.

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.

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.

Tuesday Evening Session (Wersi) Orion Spaceship (Wersi)

As you can hear, the recordings are in stereo now. The reason is that I recorded four tracks and mixed them in Stereo to an UHER LOGIC I bought. Then I used the stereotrack to add two more tracks, and so on. Below are links to the versions of the PT-band. For Orion Spaceship by the PT-band I also used the ARP-synths and the Synton Vocoder at work.

Tuesday Evening Session by the PT-band Orion Spaceship by the PT-band.