Recently I was played on the Spanish Radio show ArticMist. I listened to it live, but later found out that it is also available as a podcast. The show is hosted by Jorge Sergio who is a musician playing synthesizers himself as well. And he has a good taste in music. If you do understand Spanish you can download and listen to the show here:
Today a very special Syndae podcast was put online. It is a Christmas special with Christmas tracks from several artists especially made for this show. A great idea by the shows host Stefan Schulze. I also made a track for this special. I'm proud to actually open the show :)
Last week I was played on a very well known US radio show called 'Alien Air Music'. It has been running since 1984 and has a lot of listeners in the Los Angeles area. You can find the website here: http://www.alienairmusic.com/. It is broadcasted over the internet but also through the ether on XKLU. I got a heads up notice in the morning and luckily was able to record it since I couldn't listen to it live. I just ended up with a 500 Mbyte Mp3 file the day after that I could open for edit. Today I found a nice tool to split the MP3 in smaller portions and I could cut out my piece for my radio archive. I also got some airplay last week on Spanish radio show 'A Ultima Fronteira' and German podcast 'Syndae'. These are both podcasts and you can still download them to listen whenever you like. Next week Syndae will do a very nice Christmas special with a nice surprise from me by the way. So be sure not to miss that one :)
Last year I visited an Electronic Music festival in Wuppertal. It was actually the first time I visited an event like that. I was quite surprised that I was immediately recognized by someone there. That someone was a very nice German guy called Holger who also makes music himself under the name MC Honert. He seems to like my music a lot and I gave him a T-shirt back then. We had a nice chat and later on we went to a bar and we seemed to sleep in the same hotel. We ended up in the hotel bar and when we were kicked out there we took some beers up to the room. It was a very nice time. Since then we have contact over the E-mail. Recently he send me this very nice picture after he bought my new 'AtmoSphere' album. He seems to like it a lot. Holger wrote this very nice review on his own blog:Hello all! Now I have the new album AtmoSphere from SYNTH.NL and I will like to give an opinion to this:
and in the booklet you will find a description of the spheres, clouds and weather around our planet, which in this album the song-titles are. Great idea! You can find also some specifications about SYNTH.NL and this album.
Last week we did a lot of cabling. I decided to make a series of postings on this as well since it will be quite some work ;) All cabling from the power cabinet upstairs to the server room are in place now. The most important for me was to get network downstairs so I could start moving and installing servers in the rack. Here you see the top part of the rack with two 19'' UTP patch panels on top. From the top panel 10 UTP cables go upstairs and the remaining 14 are going to my studio desk. This way I can easily patch stuff back and forth. You see different colors of patch cables. I do this to seperate different signals. I use blue for network, yellow for ISDN, white for PSTN and green for serial cabling. Below the patch panels you see a 24 port Cisco Gigabit switch and below that a power distributor that also has and Volt and Amp meter integrated. In total my rack uses 3 Ampere and the moment. Below that is an 8 port KVM switch and under that you see three NAS devices that each hold about a Terebyte of storage.
Here you can see the backside of this rack. As you can see the on the backside of the KVM switch two sets of keyboard and monitors can be attached. Through a key combination you can select any machines from the remote location. I will later on extend these console to the studio. For this reason we also put in a lot of UTP cabling because you an transport a lot of stuff like video, audio, USB, KVM over UTP and this makes it very flexible in this way. I already bought two KVM over UTP extenders that will take these consoles to my main studio desk later on. On of them also has a local remote switch so I can add another set of keyboard and monitor in the rack itself. Of course that is very convinient when I'm working in the server room.
All these cables run through the cabling guiding system that we installed before. I'm already very happy with it. A lot of cabling already is in there and there is still plenty of room for more :) Next to the blue UTP cabling you also see some gray cabling. These are power cables. One is coming from the server room and hold a separate power group for the studio and the other ones go back to all the power outlets that will be installed in the cable guiding system. In this way I can switch all these outlets separately from my main studio desk and also everything has one central earth to prevent ground loops. So basicly it is a star topology. We did the same for UTP. In the cabling guiding system are also 4 UTP outlets with every of the 5 power outlets in there. So in total 20 UTP outlets. When the studio desk is in place we will also put everything on 19" patch panels on that side.
The last thing I want to show you is the sub power cabinet that is also in the server room. This cabinet holds all the power groups for downstairs. There is a seperate group for all lights, the studio, the cinema, the 19" rack in the server room and also some extra airco groups. There is also some room to expand if necessary. From here a very big cable runs to the power cabinet upstairs. It will be more than sufficient for sure. The splitter you see left from the power cabinet is for cable TV and radio. So it is a passive CAI splitter. This way we can also watch TV and listen to radio downstairs. For the cinema I also put a Satellite cable downstairs to watch the HD channels on the Astra satellites later on :) And I'm planning to also watch the Formula 1 races next season down there :) OK enough for now. I will update you with more later
I received another update from my furniture builder Gerrit. Here you can see more 19" modules that are already finished. Currently he is applying multiple layers of lack on they and that has to dry, so that is a lengthy process. It will ensure though later that the furniture will be very rigid. I still like this combination of black and mahony a lot. I'm sure it will look great later on. I heard yesterday that he is planning to bring the first pieces between Christmas and New Year. I'm excited about that, because then I can finally see the stuff in place and I can finish the cabling job in the studio.
Here you can see two of the modules that will go on top of the desk. There will be six of those in total. Three on the left and three on the right. As you can see the equipment will hang placed in it in an angle that will make it easier to use in my opinion. It is all about ergonomics. But I'll have to see how it works later on in practice. But for sure it looks better than the 19" desk racks I have now. We still had some discussion yesterday about the exact placements of these units to make sure there will be as much room as possible. But the racks that will be on the far left and right sides will have to be sawed of because of the wall. So I will have to make sure I put equipment there that isn't too deep.
This last picture show some of Gerrit's workshop. He told me yesterday that the black finish layet is glued onto the wood with a glue that smelled quite bad. He got some kind of gas mask to make sure he didn't inhale all that bad fumes. He also didn't dare to light up his oil heater because he thought these fumes would be flamable. It is nice to hear that he is as enthousiastic about this project as I am. And I'm getting more and more impatient to see the final result :) The last weeks I only got these pictures and that is always a bit different than the real stuff. But in a few weeks hopefully I can show you some pictures coming from the studio itself :)
I recently ordered a new Studio PC to function as the main recording machine in my new Apollo Studio. It is a Quad Core Intel machine with 4 Gbyte of RAM that will be running Vista. I decided to switch to Vista since Cakewalk is supporting this very well. And in the mean time I sold most of the stuff that didn't run on Vista. I also ordered a UAD2 duo card to go into this PC right away, and I will transfer my current UAD1 to this PC as well since not all UAD plugins are ported yet to the new UAD2 card. There are some pretty amazing new plugins though that use much more power than the old plugins like the new Moog Filter. I'm very curious about that. I also got a nice voucher with the card to buy some new plugins. I just have to transfer my excisting plugins to the new card before the end of the year and it is still very busy here, so I didn't do that yet.
Here you can see the interface itself. I chose the Duo Flexi variant that holds 2 Sharc DSP's. It has a lot more power than the UAD1 that I started using more and more. I love especially the Roland plugins that I used a lot on my AtmoSphere album, like the Space Echo emulation and the Dimension D. The nice thing about using them in this way is that you can run multiple instances at once and on the Space Echo the tapes don't break ;) And it actually sounds quite authentic in my opinion. If you never heard it I can recommend you to check it out.
Today there was another Synth.nl special on TDFZ radio. TDFZ stands for Tangerine Dream FanZone Radio and this show is hosted by Chris Newman. He played several tracks from my brand new AtmoSphere album and he also did an interview with me in between those tracks. We talked about my current AtmoSphere album, my new Apollo Studio but also about forthcoming projects. The show lasts about an hour.
Last week we had another very busy week. To start with we though last weekend we were finished painting, but when we looked closer not everything was covered entirely. So we actually had to paint everything again which was kind off a set back. But now it looks all nice and tidy. As you can see all the walls are black. And in the picture you can also see that the carpet has been laid. This worked out nicely in terms of color and acoustics. I looks and sounds really nice already in the studio now. Actually all echo is gone already. So that is a good basis to work with later on. My wife picked the carpet by the way and at first I was quite skeptical about it, but now I'm glad she did this after all.
In this picture you see the studio from a different angle. I can't really capture the feel in a picture. You should really see it in real live. It looks much better then. I also started to move some more stuff downstairs already that was standing in the way on other places in the house. I can't bring to much down yet though since my furniture builder will need room too to assemble the studio furniture on the spot as well. I'll be so glad when I finally can put stuff on their final position. But I'm afraid it will be January the earliest.
I also started moving the first computers into the server room. The first thing I put on the bottom in the rack was a UPS. These machines will hold critical data for me and I don't want to loose data over a power problem. And we had our share of those during construction for all kinds of reasons, but I have learned from that. Not all computers will go in here by the way. My main recording machine will be in the studio itself, because otherwise it would result in a cabling nightmare. This computer is super silent so probably I won't even notice it too much. But the machines that go in here make plenty of noise and I'm glad that there are here. So eventually I will have to place a UPS too in the studio to hook up the recording PC.
While we are very busy working in the studio my furniture builder is also very busy on his side. We have regular contact over the project and he E-mails me some pictures once in a while. It is nice to see the progress in this way. In the picture on the left you see some of the wood that is roughly sawed to the right size. All the material arrived in his workshop by now. In this workshop some modules will be build together that will be transported to my studio and there the whole thing will be assembled on the spot eventually. Hopefully just before the end of the year.
A lot of the work on the furniture is done by hand and it is a very precise job I can tell you. What I loved right away from the first time we talked is the passion that Gerrit (my furniture builder) has for his work. He already had in his head as well how it should look eventually, but for me that is still hard to imagine. We did the 3D drawings of course, but that still is not very touchable. I can't wait until I can see the final result. But I trust it will be great. I will try to update more often with pictures on this blog, but the problem is that last week we were so busy that I didn't really have time to write on here.
This picture I just saw when I opened my mail and that motivated my to write on here since it gives a nice picture of how it will eventually look. As you can see the sides are nicely done with real mahony wood. I think it looks just great :) It will be a bit darker eventually I understood because it will be lacked a couple of times like the ASM-2 cabinet he build for me. But now I'm starting to get a feel how it will look in the studio later on. What you see here by the way is one of the 19" modules that will be under my desk. In total 10 of these modules will be build. OK more later :)
The German online 'Musik Zirkus Magazine' did a review on my 'AtmoSphere album'. They were very positive about the CD and mentioned some tracks they really liked, but in the end note it seems they liked my first album 'AeroDynamics' a bit better. I don't hear this often, usually it is the other way around, but that is a matter of taste I guess. If you can read German you can find the whole review here:
Yesterday my friend Hanz came by and we went down in the new studio. He hadn't seen it at all. I noticed right away now that the acousticly treated ceiling was dry and we put a layer of Fiberglas coating and the first layer paint on the wall that a lot of the echoing was already gone. Probaly the ceiling had the most effect on this already. We decided to start doing an acoustics measurement in the studio for a first impression. I brought an active monitor downstairs, my notebook and the measurement microphone and we fired up the Room EQ software that we used before in my current studio.
In the diagram on the right you can see the results of that first measurement. We only measured from 20-500 Hz since that is where you can do the most compensation with acoustic treatment. As you can see there is a nasty peak at around 25 Hz, one at 50 Hz and two very close to each other between 80 and 90 Hz. These last two amplify each other and will be the most difficult to compensate. Probably some are harmonics of each other so when one is canceled out another will disappear as well. But that is difficult to predict.
Here you see another diagram showing also the dy-out time of the different frequencies. As you can see on the low frequencies they don't even fit in the graph which mean the dy-out time is over 1000 mS. On the higher frequencies it is more like 500 mS. For optimum result it would all have to go down to 200 mS or so. Not more because it will sound echo-like but not less because otherwise the room becomes to dead. But we are first going to focus on the problems in the low frequencies. We are going to put Bass traps in all 4 corners of the studio to see what happens after that. We decided to not try and fix everything at the same time but do it step by step. I just ordered the corner traps from AIX foam and took the largest one because of the peak in the very low frequencies. When they are in place we will do the next measurement.
We are also very busy painting at the moment. My wife did the most part in that actually, but as you can see in the picture our youngest daughter also 'helped' (ahum) a bit. The ceiling still isn't painted. The painter did arrive but left again, because we both agreed it would be better to spray paint the ceiling because of the very rough structure. Hopefully that will be done now on Friday. After that we can add the second layer on the walls ourselves and then on Monday finally the carpet can be laid (we hope). That will really be a relief since when the carpet is laid we can put more stuff downstairs that belongs there and it can stay there. Now I feel like we picked up everything already six times to much just to move it to another spot. But it feels good to get some things going again after a long period of waiting for the moisture to get out. Today we even removed the de-moisterizer.
I just added quite a rare synthesizer to my collection: The Siel Kiwi. It is an Italian build 6 voice polyphonic analog synthesizer with two DCO's per voice. It has quite good filers with nice resonance. For that Siel used SSM chips. And it also has 3 LFO's. Actually quite a nice machine. It sounds a bit like a Roland JX3P only a bit better even I think. It is quite nice for bass sounds. And it looks quite different from what I have seen before as well.
My first impression from the looks of it was a bit Russian like actually. As you can see on the back it has Midi build in by default which is quite nice of course. And they made sure you would see what it is called since it has Kiwi written quite large on the front and on the back.
I was quite lucky to acquire this one. It was actually in repair for someone else that didn't want to get it repaired anymore. So I acquired it for a nice price and let the repair guy do its work. It took some time before I actually got it, but now it arrived. I haven't played much on it yet since we are a bit busy with the new studio now, but I will find a nice spot for it in the new studio later and try it out some more. I heard it is a lot similar to the Siel Opera 6 and the repair guy actually put the factory presets from that synthesizer in the Kiwi since he didn't have the Kiwi factory presets. If you know more about this synthesizer feel free to comment on this post then :)
Today the second layer of acoustic material was sprayed on the ceiling. It is drying now overnight and we just hired a painter that will paint it black tomorrow. I got some questions what material I used on the ceiling. Here you can see it in the picture. It is called Relius Hoeka Akoestikpleister. Don't expect miracles from this because this stuff on its own doesn't do much. And I don't want the room to be dead right away. But it will help better than the concrete ceiling I had before. And the structure makes it look nice as well. But that structure makes it also difficult to paint it over and that is why we decided to hire a painter to do this job. He thought he would need two layers of paint as well to get it covered.
In the picture on the right you see the material being sprayed on. It is a nasty job I can tell you. The smell is not so nice and down in the basement there is not much ventilation yet. The second layer still was not as thick as we thought it would be. It seems that the 1.5 centimeters we anticipated actually was based on a different kind of material than was initially planned. Ah well we will see how things turn out. We can't change it anymore now that it is already applied. The sprayer had a little set back this morning. It turned out that the plastic he put on the wall to prevent the material to get on the wall had fallen down. So he needed to put new plastic on in the studio before he could get to work. This took him about an hour extra I think. Ah well I'm glad this is done now. I think this is the last time you will see a white color on the walls and ceiling :)
I already bought some acoustic panels as well that we can use to filter out reflections in the studio. I bought these panels from a German company named AIXFOAM. You can find their website here if you are interested:
Another thing you might have seen in the movie I recently uploaded is the separate server room located next to the studio. It is about 1.5 by 4 meters and holds the power distribution, but also a 19" cabinet that will hold the noisy equipment later on. Most PC's and switches have fans that make a lot of noise and I want to try and keep them out of the studio as much as possible. So in this way the server room is a bit related to this acoustics thread as well by keeping the noise level lower in the studio. But it wont return anymore in this thread of posts since I will be opening a new one soon about the cabling project of the new studio. That will be a completely different story all togheter. OK enough for today. We are going to prepare for some days of painting.
I was pointed to another nice review about my AtmoSphere album on the website Electro Ambient Space Here is the full review:
I know that some of you are following my blog for my DIY electronics projects. Not much is happening at this moment since I'm very busy with the new studio, so I though it would be nice to do an overview post of the PAIA 9700S project I did a while ago.
In the picture on top you see the finished result. It is quite a nice but simple modular synthesizer. It is pretty straight forward. It was a lot of fun building and it was actually my first experience with a modular at all. And after building this I just wanted to build more. The kit supplied by PAIA is very complete and the instructions in the manual are very clear. I do think though that you need a bit of electronics experience to build this one. Below the 9700S in the picture you see the Fatman. Maybe it is better to start with that when you are new to DIY.
PAIA 9700S (Part 1)
I was pointed out by one of my fans to a very nice review of my AtmoSphere album on the website 'synthtopia.com'
Finally things are moving on a bit again. The studio is dry enough now to start working on finishing the wall and ceilings etc. We started today to work on the ceilings of both the studio and the cinema. As I told you before the whole concrete structure of these rooms make them echo a lot. We really need to put some damping materials on there to reduce this. The cinema will need a bit more then the studio in that sense. In the studio I want to keep some natural acoustic, because when that becomes to dead it will be very tiring to work in it. The human ears seem to need that. So what are we going to do? Well to start with we found a special plaster for the ceilings. You can see the buckets with the stuff standing in this picture. All quite heavy. Hard to imagine that this has to stick to the ceiling.
The stuff has to be sprayed to the ceiling. It is not something you can do yourself, we hired a specialized company that has the equipment and experience to do this. As you can see they carefully covered everything in the room to avoid the plaster to stick on places it doesn't belong. They used a lot of plastic and cardboard. They covered all the walls and also my cabling guiding system in the studio. To get the optimum result they need to spray on quite a layer. In total there will be about 1.5 centimeters of this plaster on the ceiling. They can't do that in one time. So on Friday they put on the first layer and let that dry over the weekend. On Monday they will come back and do the second layer.
Here you can see the result of the first layer. It is quite a rough structure as you can see. At first we wanted to buy the stuff in black, since that is the color I want for the walls and ceiling, but our order was to small for the supplier to mix this especially for us. They assured us though that we could just paint over it and that this would not affect the acoustic effect. But now that I see this rough texture I think we need to spray the black paint on there as well. We asked the guy who did the ceiling if he could help us with that as well. He told us that he doesn't do that himself but that he worked together with a painter who does. So he is going to put us in contact with that guy.
In the picture on the right you can also see the first inhabitant of the new studio. We moved the Eminent 310 downstairs already and I can tell you that this was not a funny job to do. It is quite heavy actually. I think only for this reason it will never leave the studio again, I can't imagine getting it back up in one piece again. As you can see it is nicely covered. I hope it won't suffer from this spray job. One other thing I can tell you that this acoustic plaster does smell very bad then it is still wet. The fumes coming from it really irritated my throat the first night after it was sprayed on. But now (a day later) the stuff is dry and that is luckily gone. We can anticipate on that now for coming Monday when they spray on the second layer.
I recently sold some stuff from my current studio to make room for some new stuff. This Motif XS6 was actually on my mind for a while already. I played it several times at Live Music, one of the music stores where I usually buy my things, and liked the sound a lot but I decided two times before to wait until the new studio was finished. But last weekend I visited my friend Qui Robinez, who also designed a lot of sounds for me, and he already bought the Yamaha XS8. He showed me what this synthesizer can do and I was blown away. I thought it was just another good sounding rompler, but don't let that first impression fool you. There is actually a very complex synthesizer underneeth. Lots of modulation posibilities and the arpreggiators alone are to die for :) You don't see that though until you fire up the editor that comes along with it. Really amazing what you can do with it. I learned from my friend also that you can install two regular DDR Dimms in it to give it 1 Gbyte extra memory and after that you can do sampling as well on it and load some pretty amazing extra sound banks. This thing even has an ethernet connection where you can upload samples to it over the network. I heared it last weekend next to the Korg M3, that I already love and I must admit that this Yamaha outperforms it. So when I was at Live Music yesterday and played on it again I couldn't wait any more and took it home. I ended up playing on it all night long :)
Last weekend I did a very nice interview in English on 'The Hawkes Chill Out Sessions' a very nice radio show hosted by Terry Hawk. It was done live over the telephone. We talked a bit about my current album of course and what inspired me to create the music, but we also talked a bit about what I'm working on at the moment. So if you want to know what is coming in the future you should listen to it for sure. I recorded the interview and with kind permission of Terry Hawke and HFM I was allowed to put a copy for you who missed in on my website. You can find it (among some other interviews) on here: http://www.synth.nl/interviews.php
I'm currently very busy with the guy that is building my studio furniture to work on the final design. We are constantly exchanging Google Sketchup drawings like the one you see on the left. It is a great tool for this purpose. In the mean time we are much further by the way but I intentionally wanted to show you how it was in the beginning of this process. We are trying to fit in as much as 19" equipment as possible but still keep the desk space as big as possible.
At this moment he is building real scale models of the different parts of the furniture. These models are not made of the final material yet that will be used in the end, but it is just to see if the measurements are correct. From this model the final version will be build.
In the picture on the left you see some of the mahony wood that will be used for the finishing of the studio furniture. The big parts will be made of MDF that will be lacked in a black finish. This mahony wood will be lacked in a bit darker brown/reddish color. I think it will look just great in the end :) I can't wait until it will be installed in the studio. The furniture builder promised me to take pictures of the construction process. When this picture was taken the wood was just lying there to dry. I'll update you soon when there are new pictures.
Yesterday something amazing happened on my ReverbNation page. I went up 2269 places in one day to number 4 :) Actually today I'm on position 3 today! but I wanted to show you this picture. I'm sure the main reason for this was that ReverbNation has some kind of cooperation now with MySpace and now they also count my MySpace friends as fans on their site. And there are a lot of friends on my MySpace page. 77124 at the time of writing!! So if you like my music. Do visit these kind of pages and give me some plays and become my friend on these sites. The more the better! You will help me to promote my music and get it heard out there! There is a list of sites I'm at on my links page here:
Last week the constructor finished work on the cable guiding system and leveled the floor. The holes in the floor next to the system were filled with concrete. Again a lot of water was put in so this also has to dry as well before we can continue. Here you can see that we moved the de-moisturizer to the studio. Since the most moisture is there now that seemed logical. We still get out several buckets of water every day. And even though it looks quite dry it can't be for this reason. But we hope that this week the ceilings will be sprayed in the studio and cinema. After that we can start on the wall and lay the carpet on the floor. I can't wait to finally move some stuff in there.
Here you can see the cabling guidance system in the server room. It stops were the 19'' cabinet will be positioned. It wont stand against the wall so that I can easily go around it. Work usually has to be done on the back for cabling etc. I have learned from my mistakes in the past ;) There is already some stuff in the cabinet as you can see. In the box is a brand new Cisco gigabit Ethernet switch that will provide networking to all the machines on the lower floor. There will be a couple of servers in the cabinet but also some machines in the studio later on. I'm trying to put as many as possible in the server room to keep the noise level low in the studio of course, but some machines need to be closer to the equipment. There will also be a KVM switch in the cabinet. I'm planning to use KVM extenders over UTP cabling to remotely control the servers in the rack from the studio.
As you can see we also have some light now downstairs. Still temporary but very convenient I can tell you. And you also see we already moved some furniture down. We just didn't have any space any more to temporary store it upstairs. This cabinet was in our living room, but will later on hold the DVD's that go into the cinema. The annoying thing about this stuff now is that we will have to take it out again when they are going to do the ceilings and again when the carpet is laid. A lot of extra work that we are not looking forward too since we are starting to get a bit tired. But I'm afraid that things won't happen on its own so we just have to keep going for a while. I think this will be the last construction post I put up since I'm planning to do a separate thread on cabling and acoustics. And starting from the work on the ceiling and the carpet on we are talking about acoustics actually. So lets consider rough construction done by now and let it dry for a bit. See you in the next thread :)
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