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Studio
So many people send e-mail asking how I produce music, what gear I use, and so on and so forth, that I've prepared this page to show off the technical aspects of my productions.
Actually, at the moment I have pared down my studio to just a few items. I'm keeping the description below because it looks cool. :-) But at the moment the only musical instruments I have are the Alesis QS6 keyboard synth, the Oberheim Matrix 6R, and Big Briar Etherwave therermin, and the little Behringer mixer. I've upgraded to a custom-built ASUS C90P laptop computer with 4GB of RAM, a 320GB 7200 RPM hard drive, and a Pentium 4 Core 2 Duo 3.0GHz CPU. The purple computer has been passed down to my son.
I also still have the alphaSyntauri system (at top right in the picture), but it's been put in storage for now. The Grado headphones and Shure mic are still in service, along with a very nice R0de NT1 that I bought from Brian Hazard (of Color Theory fame). And that tiny HP printer has been replaced by a lovely Epson R260 printer that can print on CDs, and a giant Lexmark C532n color laser printer for creating CD package prototypes.
I still have Maggie, but she's 5 years old now.
One of the quirky aspects of Purple Note Studio is that I only buy gear from American companies. This means you won't see a single Yamaha, Korg, or Roland in the place. Why? Because I feel it's important to support our own music equipment industry, and so many fine companies have gone out of business over the decades. American companies represented in my studio include Alesis, Ensoniq, E-Mu, Peavey, Oberheim, PAiA, M-Audio, Mackie, Syntauri, Grado Labs, Shure, Fender, and Big Briar.
This first photo is a wide angle shot of the entire studio. That's my daughter Maggie at bottom center. She's 8 months old.
Fred the Big Purple Rack appears at lower left. My alphaSyntauri collection appears at top left. More on those below.
My master controller is an Alesis QS6 synthesizer (right), one of the few instruments I've bought new. The purple computer is a custom built system based on a nicely outfitted Pentium 4 2.66GHz CPU. A half gig of RAM and 10k RPM hard drives pretty much take on whatever I throw at it. On my 21" HP monitor are my two main software packages, Cakewalk Sonar 3 and Adobe Audition. The Behringer UB502 mixer is the sole non-American component of the studio, but there simply isn't an American counterpart for this little wonder. It mixes the signals from my two sound cards (Echo Audio Mia and Soundblaster Live, another foreigner) and connects them to the Alesis RA-100 reference amplifier and Alesis Point Seven studio monitors. Featured on the desk are a Shure SM-57 microphone and Grado Labs SR-125 headphones. Front and center is my Big Briar Etherwave theremin.
Most of my noisemakers are in Fred, the Big Purple Rack. Sitting atop is a Mackie CR-1604 16-channel mixer, followed by an ETA power conditioner and Midiman (now M-Audio) MIDISport 8x8 USB MIDI interface, with 8 independent MIDI interfaces. Then the synths: A PAiA Fatman analog monosynth, a Peavey Spectrum Synth, An Ensoniq ESQ-M, an Oberheim Matrix 6R, and an E-Mu Morpheus.
Nearly as important as all of this, but hidden away, is David's computer, which is the glue that holds it all together. Presently running a Pentium III Celeron 1.1GHz CPU with 256MB of RAM, the computer sports twin 20 GB hard drives, plus an Echo Audio Darla 24 audio encoding card, which digitizes the sound from David's synths at better than CD quality. David uses Cakewalk Sonar 3 to digitally record each synth track, as well as to process them, add effects, and overlay vocals. David uses a variety of DX-format plugins to process audio before mixing down to stereo master tracks. Finally, David uses Adobe Audition 1.0 to master the tracks and prepare them either for burning to CD or conversion to MP3 format for the Web.
One of the unique items in my studio is a complete alphaSyntauri system, an old soft synth from 1980 that uses an Apple II as its processing unit. Included in that collection is a specimen of a competing instrument, the Passport Soundchaser (bottom). You can find out much more about both synths from the web site I created for them called proximaSyntauri.
