A Founders History
Joost Bloemen is ….. eeh, wait, that’s me! I am one of the founders of Technica Del Arte and like to tell you a little bit about my background , what I did, before I founded Technica Del Arte with Andre Schmeets. If it’s not for you, at least I wrote it down for myself 😉
At the age of 4, I was at my grandparents house, my grandfather was a gifted pianist and also a teacher in furniture making. He had a grand piano (the big one) at home and when I touched the first keys I was struck by the beautiful sound of this huge thing. I wanted to play the piano also ! No, my parents said, “no piano in our house”. Sad, but I had lots of other things to do that I liked, no drama.
At the age of around 10, a friend of mine played trombone, I wanted to play trombone also ! No, my parents said again. I loved my parents, lovely parents, no hard feelings. But then at 14, my mother finally bought 2 electric guitars and 1 amplifier for me and my brother, we both loved to play music. One year later I started building a synthesizer ( the famous Elektor Formant) with my best friend Jos Mulders. Sound & Music, that’s the passion.
Here is a picture of us, at a later age, Joost and Jos.
Jos became a shareholder of TDA later and worked from the start on the LUPA mixer , LUCI software and much more.
This is the synthesizer, not completely finished yet, but I think I was experimenting with the guitar connected to a VCF with LFO. Groovy !
Then, I started studying Information/electronic Technology when I was 17 ( my first choice was a professional music career, very funny, couldn’t even play the piano ). And… the last year of my study was at the launch of the CD player , so our teacher had a huge book about Digital Signal Processing which we used in study that year, exactly what I needed !
After my study I started my own company OMT ( Onderzoek aan Muziek en Techniek ), I wanted to develop and sell audio equipment. And… a few years later, the Atari ST computer was released for which you could buy a 20 MB harddisk, wow, I want to record music on that !
So, that is what happened, I made a harddisk recording system ( a “DAW” ) that could record 2 minutes of stereo music and also had lots of effects like filtering, reverb, vocoder, sample-player and more. Even editing and multitrack mixing, which I called “Multilayering” as you layer audio files on top of each other, by adding them. And what you can add, you can also subtract, so you can change the level, remove it and more. As long as the original added piece of sound was still available on the harddisk.
This was called SON , later DAME (Digital Audio Multilayering and Editing) , was sold by a shop in The Netherlands called Mopro and was even presented at the Frankfurter Messe, shows in Rotterdam , Dusseldorf and more.
I met one of the original buyers of the DAME at the 2026 IBC , Mario Bulten, who said it’s still functioning now, almost 40 years later ! Here are some pictures and video’s of it, thank you Mario !
This was also the trigger to write a bit about my history.
And as a musician, playing , and still playing, in all sorts of bands, I was the beta-tester also during the programming. Here are some pieces, all original compositions (which is what we always did, we were never “into” covers), which I recorded with Rob Hodzelmans and more friends in the 80’s. Some pieces were even played on the radio and a cassette tape of us was chosen as “demo of the month” in the dutch music magazine Music Maker. All songs are not longer than 2 minutes of course.
We had lots of fun !
These recordings come from a cassette tape, so the quality is not very good.
Aanvalluh
Made for the radio and victory of the Netherlands at the EC football championship 1988 .
Nic Schoutrop – Solo guitar
Rob Hodzelmans – Keyboards and sounds
Me – Sounds
Babam
Rob Hodzelmans – Piano and other sounds
Me – Guitar, teil and other sounds
Cycling
Rob Hodzelmans – Piano and keyboards, voice
Jeroen Kessels – Flute
Bup Kemp – Solo guitar
Me- Other guitars , Bass guitar, voice and bicycle
Shadows
Karin Hodzelmans – Voice
Rob Hodzelmans – Piano, keyboards , voice, sounds
Me – Guitar , voice , sounds
SuperBock
Inspiration came from a holiday to Portugal and some other songs…
Karin Hodzelmans – Voice
Rob Hodzelmans – Piano, keyboards, voice, sounds
Me – Ukelele , Guitar, voice, sounds, teil
Swim
Song in 2 parts:
Karin Hodzelmans – Voice
Rob Hodzelmans – Piano, keyboards, voice, sounds
Me – Guitar, voice, sounds
Here is a picture of Rob, the piano and me:
And from my studies I had this Casio FX502P calculator, it could play simple melodies with a special adapter and you could also program your own melodies. So I made a rack with many different drum samples and reverse-engineered the communication between the calculator and adapter. So, my calculator was the drumcomputer, the 8 bits of the melody triggered 8 different samples. We also played live with it !
In the meantime, I also invented the ULCC audio compression algorithm. I used my own ears and the CD of “The Nightfly” of Donald Fagen as reference ( I also sampled many drum sounds from it). This compression is now available in all LUCI software and is used by many professional broadcasters, 40 years later. It’s patented.
This also created the opportunity to do free lance work for other companies, so I could earn some real money and I didn’t have to hack another company’s MIDI software to be able to use it. Like many others, I did buy it later. DAME was not a huge success, it received a lot of appreciation, but that doesn’t bring bread to the table.
{Warning:Technical}
The original Atari ST had a 68000 processor inside, DAME was completely programmed in assembly. Since 1983 there were also specialized Digital Signal Processors ( DSP ), made for “Mathematical Physics”. You can use mathemetics to process signals the same way as physics does… For instance, if you put a blanket over your head you hear less high frequencies. The same thing can be done using very simple mathematics, the first time I did this on my Atari ST, I was completely stunned, this actually worked(!) while the audio quality remained perfect ! I still remember it as if it was yesterday.
Besides producing DAME products – I made them myself at home – I started buying DSP’s from Texas Instruments to experiment with. I had to write my own assembler for the Atari ST, as I didn’t have the money to buy the expensive Texas Instruments assembler with a different – boring – computer also, that wasn’t going to happen ! Later TI also released a Graphical Signal Processor. My friend Jos and I were starting to think of creating a 3D Operating System, which never went anywhere. At some point there is just too much to do 😉
But later, in 1999, I released 3DTop ( https://3dtop.com ) that shows your desktop in 3D space. I still support it a bit with new features, but not so much as I used to. Too many hobbies.
Back to audio and DSP’s. I made many algorithms for the DSP in the early 90’s to process audio real-time, the Atari ST couldn’t do that, it was too slow. Every effect had to be calculated which took some time, some more than others. One of the fun things I made was the “space-mouse”. Using 2 ultrasonic receivers and 1 transmitter in a little case , which you could hold, you’d have a mouse in your hand that enabled you to control a pointer on the screen. So basically you wave with your hand and you could draw a picture on screen. Or control the EQ or other effects of some sound, as the measurement was done using a DSP.
Then I met Andre Schmeets who was working freelance for a regional broadcaster and we brainstormed about making a Digital Audio Mixer. I said, “easy, I can have it ready next week”. So I did, it’s not rocket science, I had the DSP’s already and adding signals together with a little level (multiplication) is easy and I had the space mouse as a fader. So we set out to create a company specialized in making digital mixers and more: Technica Del Arte.
Andre had that name already for his company and we used it for the new company.
During the many years after that the team grew, shrunk, grew again and now we have some fantastic products which are used by major broadcasters all over the world. I sometimes say to people that I talk to for support, “tell me, I have time enough, almost nobody calls support, our products are that good” , which is actually true 😉
And to be part of a team – even if it’s small like ours – is fantastic, doing everything by yourself is nice for a while, but, for instance, being able to go on holiday while everything continues is heaven. It’s like playing in a band, a team-effort, that is what it’s all about.