After 34 years as the trumpet and flugelhorn soloist for the Marine Band of the Royal Netherlands Navy, Nanouck Brassers’ retirement from the band sees him working as a composer, arranger, producer and recording engineer. Much of his work takes place in recently completed personal studio in Den Haag, where a Yamaha Nuage system and Steinberg Cubase make working on big recording projects fast and intuitive.

Brassers and wife Wendy Rijken are both professional musicians – Rijken is a freelance harpist who works with several high-profile Dutch orchestras, while Brassers is in demand as a musician and arranger, as well as co-managing the ESP record label with Frits Landesbergen. Brassers began his production career using Steinberg Cubase running on an Atari computer. He still uses Cubase, the latest version running on Apple Macintosh, and has recently invested in a Yamaha Nuage control solution.

‘I was looking for new ideas to update my home studio and, when I discovered Nuage, Yamaha Music Europe’s Jan Prins put me in contact with Jasper van Eif of Maartens Sound & Vision in Heerenveen,’ he says. ‘Jasper arranged a demo and I immediately liked the analogue feel of Nuage. It was quick, smart and very intuitive to use.’

Brassers is renowned in the Netherlands for his high-quality live recordings, but much of his work is done in his studio, including regular visits from musicians to record overdubs. ‘Although our studio isn’t large, the small footprint of Nuage means I can easily work and mix large projects with hundreds of tracks,’ he says. ‘I hardly use a mouse, because I have created many key commands in Cubase. It is very simple to allocate these to the Nuage control surface, which makes the workflow very personal and extremely fast.

‘The ability to write music notation in Cubase, just using key commands, is also fantastic for me as a composer and arranger, as well as its many fantastic plug-ins.’

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