Aiff at Rainbowpark Dordrecht June 15th 2008.

Yes, I do play this thing live occasionally! Very funny to have a soundcrew drooling around a 50euro organ.

More about AIFF here

My new years resolution is becoming true now. I bought this 1963 Hammond organ in January this year . And it took sjaak up until yesterday to finish it. So it was transformed from this lovely sweet lady:

into this beast:

The organ comes in two cases now. One for the tone-generator, and one with the keyboards and amplifier. All the contacts, soldering contacts, wires, -you name it- are brand new. The inside looks shiny, as if I walked into a music store in 1963 and bought this thing off the shelf.
Speakon connections on the back to hook it up to 2 leslie cabinets. All the keys have been painstakingly modified, felt and action has changed.
I’ve been playing it for 10 minutes and I played some lines that I normally never could do. (I swear this is true) The very first chord gave me goosebumps.

Of all the organs I played in my life, this has to be my nr. 1, and the good part of the story is: it is mine!

To clarify this story: this feels like playing a 50$ guitar for 20 years and suddenly you have a Gibson es335 1963 in your hands.

Now comes the funny part: I’ll be having an incredibly busy weekend, doing gigs all over, but I’m not allowed to bring a Hammond organ to those concerts: ‘Rob, we really need a philicorda sound this Sunday’ I couldn’t make this up.

In case anyone was wondering where I have been (and didn’t follow twitter), I was busy writing my next single, and it is nearly finished. I thought I’d give you a sneak peak at me playing it on my trusty Philicorda.

Enjoy, ‘Roll Me Again’

This is a raw mix of the track ‘Boogie Rash’ we did last friday. Phil Martin is responsible for the recording and mixing of this. So, although the composition is mine, I feel a bit reluctant to show off the whole track. I limited this as a one minute fragment. It’s still unclear what is going to happen with this session (45 vinyl limited, or perhaps part of a bigger project), but we all agreed that no matter what, this not the last recording session we did with the philicorda.
Heck I recorded a part with a wah-pedal and that sound instantly gave me goosebumps.
The other tunes we did were even more cheesy, but it’s very hard to pick a fragment. God I love recording with a full band.

Enjoy,

Boogie Rash -fragment- 1:04

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The philicorda project is about to begin. A live recording (organ, guitar, bass, drums). This Friday we have a session planned to record the first few tracks. It’s going to be a funky grungy sounding vinyl single (the plan was, if I’m correct, to release it at first as a vinyl 45 exclusively. If it’s good enough it will appear on a Social Beats compilation in the future. I’m actually on my knees on the same adress to get the Schnauzer-CD released, but that’s a whole other story – and that also depends on my personal workflow

Let’s first see if we could get this danceable and raw enough.
What you have here is a raw pre-production of one of the tunes we are going to do (drums, guitar and bass are fake now), but since I put a bit more time in this one, I figured it might be enoyable on its own.
The final version will be posted here in a few weeks.

Enjoy,

Diagnosis Dance – 3:12

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At last boys and girls. I am so relieved to have this tune in a finished state. Those of you who have read the blog in the last couple of weeks know what I’m talking about. Also the idea to do a zombie tune was really hard.
A monster-tune is easy to do. Just add a church-organ, grunting, bats flapping, girls scream and there you go: a monster-mash!
But a Zombie-tune is something else. Your average zombie has a very limited vocabulary; ‘braaaaiiighnnss!’ And most zombie flicks I watched were musically -to say it gently-: disappointing.
For this tune I didn’t have much reference to get inspiration (apart from Len’s Zombie art). In the end I went for a Philicorda organ, a Ukelele, and a marimba. Together that makes this a very sunny ‘march of the zombies’. Thanks Len for the inspiration and idea.

Enjoy!

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The Sultans of Schwing!

Look what the mailman brought yesterday!
I showed you the organ allready, but that is not the whole story.
A demonstration record from the 60s with the most cheesy arrangements of ‘Besame Mucho’, ‘Mack the knife’ etc.
You can listen to the highlight of the record, the smashing last song: ‘Margie’

Listen at your own risk…

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