Here is a very scaled down look at my music collection. I’m actually using 23 out of the available 60 gigs on my ipod without video. So as i said, this is a very miniscule favorites list.

.fugazi .repeater
.alanis morissette .so-called chaos
.the postal service .give up
.dinosaur jr .green mind
.bjork .vespertine
.switchfoot .the beautiful letdown
.reeve hunter
.damien rice .o
.jimmy eat world .clarity
.dj hurricane .the hurra
.justin timberlake .justified
.aaron sprinkle .moontraveler
.death cab for cutie .the photo album
.foo fighters .one by one
.athlete .vehicles & animals
.minor threat .complete discography
.the roots .phrenology
.sinead o’connor .gospel oak
.n.e.r.d .in search of…(version 2)
.chili peppers .stadium arcadium
.the killers .hot fuss
.snow patrol .eyes open

a canadian magazine devoted to technology and culture. great articles about the web and links to great new sites. also very environmentally concious. similar to wired in the tech area but a little more web/geek. unfortunately they quit printing the mag last year and it can now only be read on-line.

Shift Magazine

“a modern urban living and culture magazine. i bought my first issue because of a great bjork photo on the cover. you might think that would be a lame reason to buy a magazine, but you would be wrong. i wait very eagerly for this quarterly mag and it never lets me down.”

this is what i had to say about fader a few years ago when i was about halfway into my first year’s subscription. well i never renewed. i still stand by the fact that this is a very cool magazine with a lot of great articles. i just always felt like i was reading someone else’s magazine. someone much more hip than me…

Fader Magazine

I’ve been using the same basic setup live for a couple years now. keith anderson of risen drums made the kit. its the first kit he built for me and it might just be the only kit i’ll ever need for live use. after meeting keith at a show in st. paul, and talking about drums for a while, i was really pumped about letting him build a kit for me. i had wanted to do a wood hoop kit since playing joey parish’s kit on a tour a few years earlier. i had keith build me this kit just in time for the summer tour with “smitty” and friends.

it was perfect. every piece of the kit sounded just as i had hoped. so like i said, i won’t be looking for a new live set anytime soon.

to my right i have a sampler, a metronome, and a mixer. the sampler is a roland spd-s sampling drum pad. it has nine drum pads that allow me to trigger sounds and loops. it will hold about 512mb of data and roland has a really great audio compressor which means plenty of room. we’ve been using roland hardware samplers since we bought our first sp-202 in 2000. they have easily been the most stable part of our band. the metronome is a roland dr beat and the mixer is a beringer rack mixer.

i’m basically just listening to either the loops hogan is running, the loops from the spd-s, or my metronome. sometimes i’m using all three but not very often.

for the past few months the room where i work and listen has been a 11′ x 11′ x 9′ bedroom that my wife and i refer to as our office. basic sheet-rock construction and much need for some acoustic help. after reading for a few weeks on both john sayers forum and a few other sites i decided to build my own treatments. i basically followed the advice most of these guys give and didn’t buy expensive foam absorbers. now i have not installed foam in my room, listened, and then built these and listened again, so i have no real opinion about foam except that most of the guys on the forums think its a waist of money. i know i spent about $300 - $400 building the panels i made and what i’ve been quoted on foam supplier’s sites is easily upwards of $1000. everyone who doesn’t sell foam seems to agree that rigid fiberglas is the way to go.

here is the layout of the room and what i wanted to do.

anyone interested in doing a project like this should spend a good deal of time reading john’s forum and this article by ethan winer. the purpose of the panels i built was basically to make the room good for listening to music. i was not at all concerned with keeping sound out or in, but just sounding good.

i followed this thread from john’s forum pretty much throughout with the exception that my corner bass traps are 4″ thick rockwool (basically the same density and material).

i made the frames out of 8′ sections of 1×4 which is actually .75″ x 3.5″ so the 4″ thick rockwool sticks out the back about half an inch.

the midrange panels on the walls have 2″ thick rigid-wrap fiberglass insulation which is used normally in industrial areas. its basically the same as the owens corning rigid fiberglass but with slits cut in it so it can wrap around cylinders in chemical plants. the only reason i used it was because it was a little cheaper and SPI in austin had it in stock. the 1×2’s on the back are just being used to hold the insulation in place. on the bass traps i used three inch srews all the way around into the insulation to hold it in place.

you want to buy fabric that you can breath through easily (meaning sound can pass through as well) and i wanted it to no show through either. i bought grey and dark red jersey knit (t-shirt material) at hancocks for pretty cheap. it’s stretchy too so it was fairly easy to get tight around the panels. i just used a staple gun.

here is the finished room. this is only the one wall that the studio equipment is on.

i came across an old casio sk-1 keyboard in a waco pawn shop and bought it thinking that an old sampling keyboard would be a helpful tool for getting weird sounds and for programming beats. the keyboard can actually sample about three seconds of audio and play it back at 8 bits.

it didn’t come with a manual, so in order to learn the sampling procedure i went on-line. while searching i started to come across sites talking about the use of an sk-1 keyboard as an experimental instrument. they spoke of how they would pull apart the keyboards and install “shorts” in the circuitry. these short circuits would be wired through custom mounted toggle switches and potentiometers on the frame. being some what electronically minded, i had to try it. i couldn’t believe how cool the finished project sounded (think of a 70’s space movie soundtrack mixed with an 80’s video game). since then i have circuit bent a few other various items and have one other very large project in the works.

circuit bending links:

www.anti-theory.com - this is the home of reed ghazala, the “father” of circuit bending.

www.cementimental.com - this is probably the most comprehensive list of circuit bending links.

this is my most recent project. i think the speak and spell is probably one of the better devices to bend because it sounds so amazing when completed. while the sk-1 has more potential for musical usefulness the speak and spell just sounds cool.

i installed two pitch knobs and two touch sensitive pitch controllers. it also has a glitch switch and two touch sensitive glitch controllers which make it really go nuts. i gave it a power reset button and a quarter inch jack as well.

this is the next circuit bending project i was in anyway successful with. i managed to fry three perfectly good toy keyboards before completing this project. a very simple and small device with very annoying capabilities. i added a volume and pitch knob, a sustain switch and power cutoff (originally you couldn’t turn it off) I had my friend paint it as well and again she named it…

“C’mon Baby, Light My Fire”
(like The Doors’ song) in acrylic and oil.
(All Widsor-Newton brands of both.)

this is the first instrument i circuit bent. it took quite a while to finish and has definately the most bends. i recently had to replace the broken potentiometer with another touch sensitive pitch controller. i also gave it to an art major friend of mine for a new paint job. i asked her if she wanted to give it a name and this was her reply…

“Let Them Eat Cake” (Like the infamous
Marie Antoinette quote) and it’s all acrylics.
(Widsor-Newton and Basic Acrylic brands.)