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Rene van der Weyde | Rene van der WeydeArticle from Music Technology, September 1993 |
Holland's top producer on how computer graphics can add that inspirational spark to music making
With technology bringing music and visuals ever closer together on the computer, new possibilities are emerging for creative artists. Dutchman Rene van der Weyde is one musician exploring this new territory - and, he says, it's benefitting his music.
In the old Dutch town of Dordrecht, some 15 kilometres southeast of Rotterdam, there stands a building which dates back to medieval times. Today it houses a cluster of recording studios out of which emanate the electronic sounds of Dutch dance music, but originally it was an insane asylum run by local monks - lending a whole new meaning to the phrase "You don't have to be mad to work here...". Rumour has it there's a secret underground passage connecting the building to a nearby church - so secret, in fact, that no-one can find the entrance to it!
In this building, Rene van der Weyde and his two musical companions Jochem Paap (who, as Speedy J, has an album out on Warp Records in the UK) and Gijs Vroom share an office and have three adjacent MIDI-based studios, collectively known as The Plant studios. As well as being a much-in-demand remixer and recording his own music under such names as TFX and Pegasus, Rene has built up a second business over the past year: designing record company catalogues and record sleeve and label artwork, using his Apple Macintosh computer and a collection of graphics hardware and software that would be the envy of many a graphic designer. He also has plans to extend this side of his work into computer-generated music videos, bringing closer together his musical and visual interests. Rene, who at 28 is the old man of the three musicians, has been making music since the mid '80s, and has his musical roots in hip hop and DJing. Today he has over 100 remixes under his belt, and has released some 50 records of his own on various Dutch independent labels, including Stealth Records in Rotterdam. He has also set up a label with Jochem and Gijs, Beam Me Up, which so far has released the Speedy J album in Germany and the Benelux countries.
"Till a year ago I hadn't much success with making records," Rene admits.
"When I made a record for myself, and released it under my own name, it didn't get into the charts, but when I did a remix for somebody else they always had a club hit or even a Top 40 hit. But that didn't bother me, I always went on doing my own music."
Then his TFX track 'Deep Inside of Me' became a club hit all over Europe, while recently he has been having success with his upbeat, infectious Pegasus tracks. However, this success has only brought more requests for his remixing skills.
"Just today I got three phone calls from guys who wanted remixes from me," he says.
"I still use the 909 for the bass drum and hi-hats, but I always like to make new kits in the S3000, I like to sample bits of drums and edit them together in the sampler or do some waveform editing with it. So for me the S3000 has become very important for drums."
Recently some other equipment has also become very important to Rene: his Apple Macintosh IIci computer and a clutch of accelerator boards ("they make my Mac eight times faster than a Quadra."), together with a heavyweight selection of 3D modelling, rendering and animation software. These are the tools of his other trade, which he refers to as "a real day task".
Rene got into computer graphics more by accident than by, er, design. Starting out a little over a year ago with an Apple Classic, which he bought to do his administration and accounts, he soon discovered through a graphic designer friend that there were more creative uses for an Apple Mac.
"It all happened very, very quickly," he recalls. 'The Macintosh just walked in, and walked all over me, you know!"
He also soon discovered that the modest Classic "wasn't really very fast!", and upgraded to a Mac LC with a 14-inch colour monitor.
"I thought that would be able to handle my graphics work; well, I was wrong!" he recalls. "After two months I really started to get confused, because other people were working a lot faster, but they were working with Apple Quadra machines. That's when I bought a IIci. Well, after a month I thought it was too slow, so I added a graphics accelerator board and a 68040 board, and after that I added another 68040 board and then a Macrageous II board for fast rendering."
And only then was he happy! It was Rene's connections in the music business which provided his earliest source of graphics work.
"My first assignment was making a catalogue for a record company," he recalls. "I had to place a lot of pictures in a large catalogue, so that's when I bought my Microtek scanner. With a little help from my friend with colour separations and stuff, it worked out pretty nice. That's when the record company asked if I could design labels and sleeves for them. Nowadays I have a real day task in designing and in making colour separations, putting things on film and everything. So, it has taken an important place in my whole business, even with money. It changed a lot in my business."
And according to Rene, working with computer graphics as well as music has other benefits beyond the purely financial.
"At first I saw designing more as a hobby, you know, and music more as my real work, but now it's all getting mixed up - which is even better, because now I see the whole thing as a great hobby, so it isn't really work any more! That's the big fun of it, that's the nicest way to run a business. And I started to notice that the combination is very good for your inspiration doing music, because when you don't have inspiration you can walk away from your studio, turn on your Macintosh and go in to design something, and while designing you get the inspiration to do a song, and you can walk back to your studio and make a nice song.
"So, my music has become better, and also my designing has become better in the last months, just because I combine it. It's really a great combination, I can recommend it to every musician who has the possibilities to buy a Macintosh, because you can use it for music but you can also use it for graphics, and it's so good for your inspiration and for your relaxation."
The success of Rene's design business has brought him into contact with the Dutch tax office - designing leaflets and tax forms for them, I should add! He has also been approached by a steel company to design a catalogue for them. In fact, his workload has increased to the extent that he is now bringing his brother Joost into the business, and is about to invest in an Apple Quadra 950 computer, an ISO 19-inch colour monitor and a Harlequin 32-bit colour video framegrabbing board. He's also looking for a board to output from the Quadra to professional video. And he's clear about where he's going on from there:
"Multimedia, that's going to be the next step. That's when we're going to link the hard disk recording system and the music studio to the Macintosh. We recently bought a Macintosh program for the Roland DM80 so now we can edit cuts on the DM80 from the Macintosh. So that's one of the first steps in multimedia. The next step is to put together the audio with Macromind Director; you can do fantastic 3D graphics in it, but you can also make QuickTime movies and make your own music videos. But I do have to have a very fast machine for that, perhaps a Silicon Graphics Indigo II workstation, because a standard Macintosh Quadra can't handle things like that."
For Rene, the definition of multimedia lies as much in the process used to develop the end product as in the end product itself. Describing multimedia as "the perfect balance between music and video", he adds "when it's entirely designed on computer, then I will call it multimedia."
Warp Factor 8 (Speedy J) |
Interview by Simon Trask
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