it’s been a bit since we updated the site. look for pretty much every audio file to get updated over the weekend. to say the least we’ve been pretty busy. between my own day job (which for about a week or two has been basicly 6 days a week for at least 12 hours a day), doing some recording sessions for the sweet meat love and holy cult, the wonderful on going additions of gear (which at this point now requires another midi interface), not to mention i’m also tackling building up a collection of remixes, and well, on those down nights a movie is far more appealing than posting. i’ll try and be more proactive in updating.

but all is well. i’ll likely be updating the design on the site soon as well. this one was suppose to be temporary until i could get up the larger vision of an interactive design. unfortunately there just hasn’t been time to tackle that so rather than allow it to stagnantly just hang here, i’m going to at least update it.

- mosquito

not that anyone has actually asked us outside of a couple close friends (and they’ve been here), but i figured it’s worth posting what we are currently using in terms of gear:

guitar/bass:

• yamaha guitar
• peavy guitar
• accoustic guitar
• ibanez 5 string fretless bass

synths:

• roland jp8000
• emu proteus keys 6
• emu mo’phatt
• emu turbo phatt
• emu extreme lead 1
• alesis qsr
• nord rack

drums:

• emu procussion
• akai s3000
• alesis dm5 kit

cpu and interfaces:

• b&w g3 running cubase 5
• motu midi express xt
• motu 828 mk2

controllers:

• m-audio oxygen 8
• akai mpd16

mixers:

signal processors:

• bbe 882i
• 2 x behringer deq2496
• 3 x alesis 3630
• behringer mdx4600
• akai hv01 decabuddy
• 2 x alesis quadraverb 2
• alesis quadraverb
• 2 x lexicon mpx1
• 2 x line 6 pod xt live

monitors:

• 2 x event aps8s
• 1 x krk 10″ sub

- mosquito

i’m well beyond open that i am a hardware junkie. if asked, i’d likely say it heads into to the realm of fetishism. i’m not ashamed of it at all, because the movement towards the all software world of music makes me cringe. it is nice to know that people are dumping their hardware left and right. makes it much easier to find and buy. there is some software that i am drawn to of course, that being steinberg’s cubase, ableton’s live, and cycling ’74’s max/msp.

so this morning while reading the create digital music blog, i came across this post about a diy commodore 64 beatbox/bass synth box. needless to say, my interest was more than piqued. i’m finding myself researching these types of devices more and more, not to mention how to create them. for some reason i’m starting to see the circuit bending being in my not so distant future as well.

now, this was after i spent about thirty minutes drooling over the monodeck ii, a custom ableton live controller by monolake. maybe it’s the number of buttons and lights, or maybe it’s the construction of it, but to see that many controls with visual feedback on one control surface is just beautiful. makes me want to start using the soldering iron for more than just reparing our gear when it fails. there’s also the monome control surface that is an 8×8 grid of backlit buttons.

and speaking of control surfaces, this talk by jeff han from february of this year showcases a conceptual surface that is under development within the educational sector. it sure would be nice to see such a device at a price point that wouldn’t make me shudder, though it will likley be quite some time before it’s on the street. right now the much smaller and compact lemur from jazzmutant is over $2k. i have to give it to the lemur for it’s flexibility as a control surface. it makes the price point “bearable” if the money was available.

but while all these devices are just great, something has to be done about all the wires required to connect it all. the studio is essentially our live show rig as well (for now until we start adding studio specific gear), and it is no small undertaking to wire it all together. we do have the drums and synths submixed through two 16 channel line mixers, but that was really out of neccesity since we ran out of channels on the board. i’m not super comfortable about the idea of sending any audio wirelessly other than live guitar, bass, and any in-ear/headphone monitor mixes. midi though, well it appears that cme makes the widi-x8 wireless midi interface. that might help out tremendously on the midi snake front. we already have to pick up another midi interface as we’ve filled one.

seems like there is always something new coming out in the hardware market, it just doesn’t seem to be heavy in the realm of audio generation. thankfully we still have some, and most of them seem to be of the digilog synth variety (which are my favorites of course).

- mosquito

for some reason i neglected to post these when i uploaded them to the site. I’m pretty sure i meant to, but what can i say?

Dragon Droppings
Simulation vs Stimulation
Early Earthlings
Travelers and Tourists

we’ve been spending a lot of time putting the final touches on about half the tracks as well as redoing the eq on the tracks. we are lacking a sub presently, so we were jacking the bass to high. so now we’re doing the eq under studio headphones to get the right mix.i’ve also been doing some recording work for others. which is nice as i’m a studio techie like that. however i discovered last night when doing the last dump from a recording session over last weekend that sometime between leaving the studio sunday and returning yesterday that the left monitor refuses to produce sound. joy. maybe it will magically heal itself by the weekend? if not i may end up getting a pair of behringer truths to hold us over until we can pick up a set of mackie’s or replacement events. we shall see.

- mosquito

Over last weekend I went through and restandardized all the audio channels in cubase. it’s basicly the first phase of better isolation for specific tracks. somehow we managed to have two pairs of channels coming out that were entirely dry, so those were combined to make room for bass. I also started to bounce down some tracks (while keeping an archive of the pre-mixdown version). Prior to the process, Dragon Droppings was seeing quite a bit of disk access for all the recorded parts, but that dropped to almost nothing after i was finished. I’m trying to get every track into a standard format so that as we finish them (which in reality we have with four but they need to be converted to this new format and remixed), I can start migrating them into the live set, and assembling the arrangements.

This coming weekend we’ll be adding another 16 channel line mixer to submix drums through which should free up at least four channels on the console. We’ll also be using the aux outs on the alesis qsr and emu pk-6 for drum patches. So even though we are adding another 16 channels (that brings us to 64 channels mind you) this one will instantly have at least 8 channels used for drums. At some point I’ll have to post the current gear list as it grows almost weekly with at least something.

- mosquito