The music is created in a small home studio.
It’s made up of a standard lap top computer, an inexpensive but professional grade stereo sound card, a stage condenser microphone, a pre-amplifier, acoustic foam, monitor speakers and cables.
The Computer
The computer is an ordinary lap top computer that runs Ubuntu Linux. It drives the Ardour hard disk recorder, and the SuperCollider sound synthesis programming language. It has a 2GHz dual core processor and 2MB of RAM. It’s also relatively quiet.
The Sound Card
The sound card is an Echo Audio IO PCMCIA sound card. (A PCI-Express version for more modern lap tops is also available). It has a mini jack stereo input and a mini jack stereo output, like portable CD players do.
The Microphone setup
A Sennheiser e865 condensor stage microphone is used and hopefully gives enough detail to the vocals while being more tolerant to room imperfections than a studio condensor. It is driven by an ART Studio V3 tube pre-amp using the flat setting.
The Room
The most important aspect in recording is the room, and mine is a 2.5m by 5m with an L-shaped extension on the far side. On the side where the monitors are set up and recordings are made, the walls and ceiling are treated with a total of 12 panels of 5″ Auralex Studiofoam wedges, and 4 Lenrd bass traps. This leads to a setup resembling LEDE (Live End Dead End). The primary reason for this setup were practical considerations, the sound seems good enough though, flutter echo and room modes seem to be taken care of quite well.
The Monitors
The studio monitors are a pair of Yamaha HS80s. Time will tell if Yamaha was able to create a worthy successor to the NS10s. They seemed to offer the best value In the available price range, the reviews were decent, and they seemed to be a good match for the level of the other gear.
Thoughts
The setup seems to be adequate for its purpose and on par with what other electronic music producers are using. The signal chain is made up of components of a similar quality level, and the room is treated. There is plenty of room for improvement, but let it be the current challenge to make the most of it.