What is Forty-Forty?

Forty-Forty was founded in 2000 by Eric Schulp and Mark Vermin when they produced their first demo CD.

We’d been friends for thirty years and became forty in the year 2000 so we decided to celebrate our birthdays together in a different way. We came up with the idea of making a demo CD with our own music which we could hand out to friends and relatives at a big party.

We met in 1970 in the fifth grade of our primary school, became friends and both started guitar lessons when we were fifteen. Mark joined a progressive rockband set up by guitarist/ songwriter Ad Neele called EYE and Eric joined them a few years later as well as drummer Ronald van der Zant. EYE had its highlights in the early 1980’s including radio airplay. Although Ad, Mark and Ronald played on through the nineties with other keyboard players and singers, they unfortunately never produced a record.

So we joined our musical forces to produce our first CD, now, of course, helped by the unlimited possibilities of computers. Although our intention was to ask several people to assist us, along the way we decided to finish this project with just the two of us.

After we composed basic versions of the songs on PC, we recorded them on a 16-track digital recorder, substituted and added real instruments and mixed the master. Then we burned the CD’s, designed and printed the booklets and prepared for the party which took place in May 2000.

After the many positive reactions to the demo, we decided to officially release our CD in May 2001.

After the summer of 2000 we started working on our second project, clearly not to become rich and famous (we have busy professional careers and are very happy with them), but to enjoy the pleasure of composing and playing music. Now, there was no time pressure and we invited other people to accompany us, such as a real drummer (yes, Ronald is back) and a singer.
In the summer of 2003 we finished mixing ten new songs. Of course we wanted the new CD to sound better than the first one, so it was mastered in a professional studio. In January 2004 our second album “Forty-Two” was officially released.
After that, we worked on the third project. In June 2010, the new cd “Fifty-Fifty” was released, with great artwork by Jim Jansen.

In 2018 we started rehearsing with a Forty-Forty band (with Ronald on drums, Rolf on bass and Michiel on guitar), which would perform live on the release party of the Sixty-Sixty album. This was released in 2020, but the party and live performance in July 2020 had to be cancelled due to the pandemic.

Instead, the 9 songs on the setlist were (re)recorded in the studio with the band. This resulted in the album The Sixty-Sixty Mini Concert Recordings which was released in March 2022.