Val Serrie
Primarily based in the Dallas, Texas area, Val writes and records original music in private studios in both Dallas, and Victoria, BC, Canada, and has so far created 16 CDs and distributed them to customers in 16 countries. Val was a fulltime touring musician in Toronto, Canada in the 1970's with various bands. From 1980 until today he has dedicated most of his musical efforts to writing and recording his original songs.
VSP
For several years in the 2000's, Val also put together a band to promote the original music. The band was called VSP (the Val Serrie Project) and included Andrew Robinson on bass, Joe Parr on rhythm guitar, Matt Michel on drums, Jason Christenson on drums (prior to Matt), Sonny Snipes on bass (prior to Andrew), Casey Gardner running sound, and Stephanie Gardner providing support. There are pictures in the gallery of concerts in the Dallas Ft Worth area from the years 2005 to 2010. These people appear on live stage performances, but not in the recordings to date.
Serrie
Now, Val has formed a new live performance band with Andrew Robinson on bass and Chuck Melton on Percussion, called "Serrie". This is a 3-piece band for quieter environments like restaurants, coffee houses, wine bars, and private parties to provide ambiance and entertainment, but without completely dominating the room. We've also done weddings to appreciative acclaim.
Collaborations
Andrew Robinson is a bass player and guitar player currently living in the Dallas Texas area. Andrew and I have been playing together for more than 10 years now. We've grown together through this music. I think Andrew has a very tasteful approach to the bass. He not only knows how to play the instrument, but he actually listens to the song itself and knows the exact right note, touch, feel, sound at the right moment in order to enhance the song. I have come to trust his judgement on many things both as a friend, and as a music collaborator. But it's best to hear his story in his own words:
The 70’s were a great time for a young aspiring bass player to be growing up. I was born and raised near Kettering, England and I’d reached the age when a teenage boy starts listening to rock music. While my friends were playing air guitar along with Jimmy Page, I was drawn to the driving and relentlessness force of the bass. I suppose my early inspiration came from bass players in the bands I listened to the most – Burke Shelley from Budgie, Lemmy from Hawkwind, John Entwistle from The Who, Andy Fraser from Free, Greg Lake from ELP, Mike Rutherford from Genesis and Chris Squire from Yes. I think perhaps the songs, more than the players themselves, were my inspiration.
This basic grounding in rock bass, along with other factors and my developing love for funk music, especially the bass playing of Bootsy Collins and Nathan Watts, led to me buying my first bass at age 15. It was a Columbus jazz bass, bolstered by a Sound City tube head and a 4x12 Celestion cabinet. I started a band with my friend, Gary Cox, who was a very talented guitarist. I think we called ourselves No Exit. We practiced for a few months before a couple of things happened that, contrary to our name, resulted in our exit. Firstly, the cones blew out on all four Celestions. It took a while to get together the £50 required to repair them. That was a lot of money in those days (thanks mum and dad for doing that!). Secondly, I started dating a girl that hung-out outside our practice room, achieving one of the other factors mentioned above as a reason for picking up the bass, but itself becoming a major reason for putting it down.
The bass was shelved until my final year of high school, when I joined another school band, Graafian Raker. We had one practice before entering a talent competition. The talent competition also turned out to be the guitarists audition for another band. After his Nigel Tufnel style solo, we lost the competition to a couple of girls who danced and lip-sync’d to Abba songs and he went off to join the other band. The bass was shelved again. I went to college and the whole rig was sold to buy food. It wasn’t until around 15 years later, after I’d moved to the Dallas, Texas area, that my boss at work told me that his band was rehearsing for a party. They needed a bass player. I signed up. We called ourselves The Immigrants and we played the party, after which I promptly once again shelved the cheap bass that I had bought.
It was about ten years later that I met up with Val through my brother-in-law, Joe. Val and Joe had put together a band playing Val’s songs. They had a bass player, but I approached it with a Keith Moon “I can play better than that. I started playing at fifteen” type bravado. Since then the bass has not been put back on the shelf and I have made a concerted effort to improve my playing skills. Even though my musical taste now veers towards classical music and there have been many great bass lines in songs that I’ve enjoyed since, I’ll raise a glass to those originally inspiring songs that set me on my stuttering journey: Budgie “Baby Please Don’t Go”, Hawkwind “Orgone Accumulator”, The Who “The Real Me”, Free “Mr. Big”, Chris Squire “Lucky Seven”, Nathan Watts “I Wish” (Stevie Wonder) and Bootsy Collins “Give Up The Funk” (Parliament). I’ll also add to that list one of Val’s songs “Best Days of Your Life”, which made a great impression on me when I first heard it, and like these earlier songs, inspired me to pick up the bass, join a band and do it all over again.
For more on Andrew and his music click here: https://soundcloud.com/user-636951574
Johannes Pott is a drummer from Bochum, Germany. He played the drums on The Best I've Ever Had, Going To Texas, and They Don't Make 'em Like They Used To, and may also appear on other songs soon.
Musical influences: He began with Eurodance music in Germany in the 90's, but then came German punk-rock (Die Toten Hosen) and then Green Day and The Offspring. Then he progressed into hard rock and true heavy metal (AC/DC, Manowar, Metallica, Iron Maiden, Rage) before moving into progressive Rock (Spock´s Beard, Dream Theater, Transatlantic, Neal Morse). Today the focus is mainly pop, rock, prog.
In His Words:
Playing drums: I started playing drums at the age of 11 at local music school. I was lucky that my old-school jazz teacher didn’t do it anymore after a few years and I got the chance to learn from Bernd Oppel. He taught me what to do in the pop-rock-world. Later I had a few lessons with Hendrik Lensing which totally opened up my mind about technic, posture and a concept of integrating singles and doubles combinations to my play.
Drum-heros: Mike Portnoy, Nick D´Virgilio, Phil Rudd, Benny Greb
Bands I’ve played with: Truestone, Major Leagues (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jy8CSTh7lMw, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eEiTiK4UY4), Buford (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7i-5gAC8zv8), Kings Of Euphoria (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6iQnHIr2SY, finally coming out in 2022!!!), the new „Project: Patchwork" by Gerd Albers (also coming out in 2022 http://www.projectpatchwork.de)
I recorded the drums on almost every release by myself. I also recorded, produced, mixed and mastered most of the stuff. In 2020 I bought a drum booth and built it up in my room. So I can record tracks at my home. I always thought: Do it by yourself instead of spending money for results that you might be dissatisfied with. So I spent plenty of money on the drum booth and in recording gear over the last 10 years but now I’m independent and I can record what I want and when I want.
