Yes, my old Raapie.nl website is over. Raapie.nl was a very popular and personal weblog. I kept it up to date daily for almost 5 years. But now it’s time to focus fully on Melodiefabriek, my company and my blog.

Maybe you’re interested in a bit of history? Let’s do that.

2001

Most of you might remember that back in 2001 I started Raapie.nl to write about Propellerhead Reason software.

Reason was the first application that felt easy to use and worked great on PC. After using Cubase for years on a Atari1040st I was never having the same feeling using Cubase VST on a PC. It crashed a lot, something it didn’t do on the Atari. Did the PC suck? Sure, Windows ’98 was half-lame operating system. I hated it! But I soon moved to Windows2000. This was a major step. And Windows2000 and Reason were a rock solid combo.

I bought Reason as soon as it was available. Yes, version 1.0 that is. So I started Raapie.nl. Peff.com, another Reason user, was already online but not many others where doing these kind of things, sharing sounds and information. I started writing about Reason and gave away many sounds for free, including a few Refills.

When I was working for the multi-media company called Madocke, I composed a song for Esa-Estec which was used on a touchscreen presentation at a fair in Paris. For that track I used Reason. Esa loved it.

2001

In 2001 I started a newsgroup at Yahoo, called prop_reason which is still alive today and has many subscribers. With a group of people of that list we created the popular All Sub Refill, a Refill which only includes Subtractor patches. This was an idea of my friend Eric (Reason.Fan), who was one of the first Reason-users who showed me some really cool ideas about what can be done with Reason’s Subtractor and the NN19 sampler.

Sound On Sound magazine mentioned the prop_reason maillist and gave me nice credit for creating my free Acetone Refill. That was nice.

I came in contact with sound designers of powerFX and AMG. They liked my work as a free Refiller and powerFX told me that they got a lot of referrers from the Raapie.nl site. So it was good for everyone! And fun 🙂

2002

A year later Andras (PinkNoise Studio) and Eric (Reason.Fan) asked me if I was interested in starting a new site for Reason. I was. This resulted in ReasonBanks, a sound design website for Reason sounds. ReasonBanks became a huge success. We had lots of visitors from day one. And it’s still very successful among many Reason-users. At ReasonBanks we are not only selling Refills, we give away many Refills for free too! For example the Analogue Monsters series which is extremely popular.

I remember my free Refills being downloaded many, many times. It needed more than 30 gig data traffic each month. So thanks and respect to Jamie of Vocodex and Eric of Reason.Fan for your help with hosting these files.

Dutch artist Spinvis e-mailed me to tell me he loved my free Mellotronic Refill.

2003

In 2003 I started my own company for music and sound design under the Melodiefabriek moniker. At the time I believed that Raapie.nl could be considered as my hobby site and Melodiefabriek to be my professional home. I tried to keep both up to date and interesting for several years.

2004

Obviously one of the best things that happened in 2004 was me being asked to do professional sound design for Reason 3! Together with Andras and Eric we worked really hard to make great sounding patches. I was 100% focussed when doing that job and created some of the best patches I have ever made. We received fantastic reviews from the other sound designers; many A’s and AA’s. We nailed it.

2005

I used a beta version of Reason 3 for my work for Heineken, just at the end of the sound design project for Reason 3. This was a bit tricky, but it was the best test I could imagine. I found some really strange bugs that way and most of them were solved before I finished the composition job for Heineken.

Recently I decided to start using WordPress instead of ASP on Windows2003 server. Open Source felt better, using PHP with MySQL. The Open Source community is very generous and helpful. The .NET counterpart is very much money driven, something which feels a bit strange because open standards like HTML, XHTML, XML and CSS are really making the Internet grow fast and maintain easy access even for people who are using older computers with Linux. Open Source doesn’t prevent innovation, it’s exactly the opposite, it helps innovation.

This also means that Melodiefabriek gets to be updated daily in a way which is more easy to maintain. It is already more interesting than Raapie.nl ever was in my opinion. There are many things which needs to be improved, but I am very happy now being able to focus on Melodiefabriek. For Reason I will write In-Depth articles and I will give away free samples from time to time.

I am not at all only interested in money. I am a big fan of Creative Commons and the general idea of; when someone would like to use my work for non-commercial purposes; use it, share it, tweak it and remix it! But you should give me credit for it. This has resulted in my music being used in many podcasts. Almost daily I receive an email about some track of mine being used in a new podcast show. This is nice promotion and works both nicely for me as a composer as well as for the people looking for music to use in their podcast shows. And this doesn’t prevent my music from being used in commercial podcasts either or commercial usage in general. For commercial usage people simple need to contact me and I will work out a special license for the event.

2013

Maybe one day I will write about the time that lays between 2005 – 2013. In this period I tried to focus a bit more on The Netherlands, the country I live in. I started some new domains and collaborations most of them in Dutch. Now, many years later, some of that stuff feels a bit messy. Since then I’ve done a bit of cleaning and made sure the important data is available at Melodiefabriek once again. It feels a bit like how it all started 13 years ago. Although I’ve learned many things along the way. Being online for such a long time, creating my own stuff and blogging about it, still feels like the best thing I can and should do.