Studio

This is where I work, and when I have time, where I write music for fun too. There are three computers in here. A Linux server that runs my web site and mail server, a machine for my contract programming work, and my main music/gaming machine.

• Audio Wiring Overview
• MIDI Wiring Overview

Update 12/30/2005: The current configuration, in its new home, can be seen here.

Update 6/4/2003: Some changes, namely the exodus of a bunch of equipment. I sold off my two Yamaha MV1602 mixers, a couple reverbs, an old MIDI interface, and my Akai S3000XL sampler. All that stuff got replaced (more or less) with a Mark of the Unicorn 24I/O. So now all the analog stuff is mixed in the computer, and it makes using all my analog stuff a lot easier to use in Cubase SX. Also got rid of the old tubes and got a couple ViewSonic VX2000 20" LCDs in there too.

This wide angle shot shows the basic "U" shape of my studio. It's really an almost-closed square, a bit less so since the recent updates that removed about 14 rack-spaces of gear, opening it up a bit. The two racks are at an angle that allows you to get into the square. There's also a little space behind the racks, enough to get back there when I need to hack around with the wiring. It's a basically fixed-wiring setup, so I don't need to mess around back there often, thankfully.

It's a pretty good setup. I run Cubase SX on both screens of my music machine, each at 1600x1200. The MIDI controller keyboard is to my right, so it's pretty convenient for driving the sequencer with my left hand and and playing the T3 with my right hand. Also, I've got a set of wireless headphones that transmit (IR) from behind me.

Another thing I do when I'm writing music is put this giant Excel spreadsheet (Companion.xls) on the right-hand monitor. It's got sort of the full collection of knowledge about my instruments in it, including lists of good patches, sample/bpm/note-time calculators, etc. Having that stuff already worked out helps to keep the creative momentum.

Behind the rack with the keyboards you can see that the wall is covered with 4" think acoustic foam. In fact, pretty much the entire inside of the studio is covered in that stuff, including the ceiling. The room is just a bedroom, so it has a closet with big sliding mirrored doors. I built two giant wood-backed, foam-covered baffles that hook in front of the closet doors. I also built similar smaller baffles for around the computers under the tables.

It's damn quiet in there, even with all the computers. It's absolutely dead flat in there—no room reverberation at all. There are two side effects of all that foam. One is heat. It's like there's an extra layer of insulation in the room, and it's filled with small Intel space heaters. I'm planning to have an HVAC contractor re-route some of the A/C overcapacity I have in another room into the studio, which should help.

The other side effect is that it's pretty dark. I've got a million watts of track lighting on the ceiling, but that's not what I mean. I mean the mood is dark. Technological. I like it. I'm so Goth! Oh wait. No I'm not.

This shot just shows the keyboard rack that's to the right of the computer.

At the top is a Yamaha SU10 sampler. It's a tiny little thing, and it uses some ugly compression mechanism and a low sample rate, so it kinda sounds like shit. But it's fun to play with. I mostly got it because it has a ribbon controller that sends out MIDI. I use it to scratch sounds in the E-Mu boxes, which works surprisingly well.

Next to that is my trusty Roland MC-303. A lot of people complain bitterly about the MC-303's MIDI implementation (and, yes, it is shit), but if you put it into "sound module mode" with a little SysEx it works great from a sequencer. Part of what everyone complains about is that it's really hard to change both cutoff and resonance at the same time with MIDI. Well it's hard unless you've got a Kenton Control Freak, which handles that task easily. I use the MC-303 for drums (at least) on every track.

Speaking of the Control Freak I highly recommended it. I've got it set up to control pretty much everything in my studio, even the ancient Korg DW-8000, which only talks SysEx parameter changes. Next to it is the breakout box for my Creative Labs SoundBlaster Audigy, which I actually mess with much more than I thought I would, especially since I punted Creative's shit drivers and switched to the ultra-bitchin kX Project drivers. Right of that is a Yamaha QY70, which I love the sound of, but hate its sequencer. It's fun to take with you on the train or whatever if you don't want to drag a laptop. Used as a sound module, especially a monotimbral one so you can use all the GX effects in it, it's really great—much more than you'd expect from its diminuitive size. The keyboard is an oldish Korg T3, which I use as a controller for everything else and actually has some decent sounds in it, despite its lack of resonant filters. I'll talk about the nearfield monitors later when I get to the amps.

This rack is where most of the action is. A the top is a Steinberg MIDEX 8 8-in/8-out USB MIDI interface. I've got that thing pretty busy, with seven of its eight inputs and outputs occupied. (Here's how the MIDI is wired.) Next down is the new Mark of the Unicorn 24I/O, which I've used to replace my big analog mixers. The thing has 24 analog inputs, 24 analog outputs, and a DSP card that it hooks up to via a single 4-conductor wire that's just like a FireWire. All those inputs show up as ASIO inputs in Cubase SX and PropellerHead Reason. I've got all the analog sound modules feeding into it in stereo pairs, and two submixers (the two six-channel line mixers near the bottom of the rack) mixing down the really old gear. I've also got two effects send/return loops set up, so in Cubase SX I can send to the two hardware effects boxes and get the returns back as ASIO inputs. It's pretty sweet to be able to painlessly send, say, an a1 soft synth from Cubase through a hardware effect module. Oh yeah, and I can record-enable and record to disk all 24 channels simulateously. Holy shit! You can do that? Yes, you can. So far I'm very impressed with the 24I/O. (Here's how the audio is wired.)

Next is a T.C. Electronic Finalizer, an excellent mastering processor. I monitor through it all the time, but when mastering time comes around, I drive it digitally, usually from a CD of the premaster material. The thing is great. It's really hard to believe what a difference it can make in your final track. I'm also lucky to have engineering and mastering expert Adrian Wong as a friend .

Under that is my beloved Roland JV-2080. It is hella complicated but its UI isn't too bad. I sounds simply wonderful, and it's got great filters. The JV-2080 is the best sound module in my studio, and it has by far the worst manual ever created on Earth. I want to slap the Japanese fucker who wrote the manual with one hand, and the American fucker who tried to translate it into English with the other. Well then. There. I feel better now.

Next down is a Yamaha MU90R. I really like this thing, and it's got pretty good filters too. You can actually get it to do a decent 303-kinda sound (including distortion), and it's got lots of other useful sounds in it as well. Not bad UI too. It does have one particularly Japanese thing about it...this guy scrolls onto the screen every five minutes or so to wave, salute, slick back his hair or whatever. In case you were feeling lonely.

Then there's the E-Mu Orbit V2 and the Planet Phatt. I love both of these modules but they so desperately needed built-in effects. Fortunately, with my new setup, I can just use software effects on them in Cubase which works just great. They have really flexible and fun filters and unique waveform sets. Too bad you can't route one of the ABCD controllers to resonance (duh!). The way they implemented SysEx parameter changes also stumps my Control Freak, so even my usual workaround hasn't solved this problem. Tip: you can get these two units to be a little quieter if you case-ground them to whatever analog equipment they're plugged into.

Rounding it out are three Alesis Nano-guys, NanoPiano, NanoSynth, and NanoBass. They're useful and sound pretty good. The NanoPiano is just great, with it's phase-accurate stereo Bösendorfer grand piano samples.

Below the sound modules is a Digitech Studio Quad V2. A good sounding and flexible device. I used to have a lot of problems with it gaining-up noise on my send channels, but now that it's getting its input from the 24I/O, it's pretty quiet. Plus, now I can just slap a noise gate on it in Cubase. Below that is a Yamaha REV500. A great sounding reverb, but it can't do any other effects without reverb, which limits its flexibility. You can't just do a delay, for instance—you have to reverberate the delay. Hmm. Anyway, I use it for ambience and it does a great job of that—better, I think than the software reverbs that come with Cubase.

Under the REV500 are two ancient Korg KMX-62 6-channel keyboard mixers. They're quiet and work great. I've got the lower one cascaded into the effect returns of the top one. I've got the Yamaha QY70, Alesis SR-16 (there's on in every studio), Yamaha SU10, and the old legacy Korg stuff plugged into these.

At the bottom, to keep the rack from floating into the air, is a Hafler preamp and a 80 pound Hafler 500 amp with a variable-speed fan. Oh yeah.

This second rack used to be twice as tall, but when recently sold that big stack of gear I was able to chop this rack down to half-size, which sort of opens my studio up a bit.

At the top is the IR headphone transmitter/charger and a BK Precision 2120B 30MHz dual-trace scope. I've got the two traces on the scope wired into the studio mixdown output left/right, so I can check waveforms or in X/Y mode see stereo separation.

Under the scope is an Apogee AD 500 A/D converter. I use it to digitize the balanced analog outs from the 24I/O. It's not strictly needed in my new setup, since I can just monitor the analog outs of the 24I/O, but it can do useful things like stripping SCMS out of digital signals, so I keep it around.

Below that is a recently re-acquired Korg NS5R. I bought one of these in 1997, and it was kinda noisy, so I sent it to local engineer Alexander Peychev to have him try to quiet it down. But then I lost track of Alex, and haven't seen the NS5R since. Anyway, I really liked that box, so I bought one used off eBay. Happiness happiness!

Below that is consumer shit—EQ, CD, DAT, cassette, and an amp. I've got two monitoring setups: At the bottom of this rack is a weird Yamaha AST-10 Active Servo amp which has cartridge-matched speakers (on the sides of the MC-303). They're small but because of the bitchin Active Servo thing they're flat to 42Hz. The other monitoring route is the giant Hafler, which is driving a couple of high-quality 6"x9" auto speakers that are attached to the sides of the controller-keyboard rack, and a 15" dual-coil subwoofer nearby. That's for the "lowered Honda with large exhaust tip" mix tests. Actually I find that I need to listen to my music with both of these monitoring setups along with two or three other systems before I feel like I know it's going to sound good everywhere.

There's a few more things sitting around, stood up in the corner, that are controllable by MIDI. First is a Korg Poly-800 II, my first synthesizer. Back in 1985 I wrote a Macintosh patch editor for this synth, sent pictures of it to Korg, and got its successor, a patch editor for the Korg DW-8000, published by Korg. That was the beginning of my software career. Anyway the Poly is great fun, and was one of the first Korg synths from the 80s to have onboard digital delay. It has a single analog filter (that is shared by all four or eight voices!). But if you turn up the resonance all the way, it'll squeal like a pig. I recently wrote up a HOWTO Change a Poly-800II's Battery.

Also I've got a Korg DW-8000, kindly provided by the Korg folks when I was developing ProEdit. It's got one analog filter per voice, and is still a fav in dance music, especially for bass sounds. I also wrote up a similar HOWTO Change a DW-8000's Battery, and I wrote a C# program that allowed me to resurrect hundreds of DW-8000 patches, which you can have for free.

Finally a collector's item: a retrofitted Korg DSS-1 sampler. It's a 12-bit sampler with 16-voice polyphony and one analog filter per voice, switchable between 12dB or 24dB per octave. Mine has been retrofitted with a very rare expansion retrofit package that replaced the CPU, code ROM, adds SCSI, and a bunch of other stuff. I personally installed the retrofit, which was quite a harrowing experience. As part of the retrofit I had to literally cut the old CPU out and clean out all the holes, etc. Anyway, as a result, it's got 2MWords of sample RAM (socketed 18-pin DIP variety). I suspect that there are very few of these still in existence, so I'm sorta happy to have this one. Sasha's Airdrawndagger album has a track called Wavy Gravy that I swear has a sync patch from the DSS-1, but I can't prove it.

If you're interested in hearing a little of the stuff I've produced here, check my Music page.