Arturia Origin Arrived

Last week I also added a new synthesizer to my Apollo studio. It is the first hardware synthesizer that the well known software manufacturer Arturia from France has introduced. They already introduced it in 2007 and I actually ordered it in December 2007, but they kept on postponing and postponing. Probably because it was not ready yet. Well I was quite surprised that last week I was finally able to get my hands on one. It is a lovely machine with lots of controls as you can see and a large display. It also has a multi line step sequences that you can see on the bottom.

What I loved instantly about the concept of this synthesizer is that it is completely modular. It is a virtual analog synthesizer. So emulating analog synthesizers. Arturia put in all the components that they developed in their software the last years and you can combine them as you please. So you can take a Minimoog oscilator and run it through a CS80 filter, but you can add and hookup modules however you want. So you can create very complex sounds with it. And does it sound like a real CS80, Minimoog, Prophet5, ARP2600 or Jupiter 8? No of course not! Nothing beats the real thing but they come pretty close. And it is not emulating these machines that I want to do with it. I want to create unique new sounds. The hands on controls make it very easy to work with.

There is also a nice joystick on there and just like the knobs you can assign it to every parameter you like and that makes it a dream in modulating and thus adding expression to the sounds. It is still running OS 1.00 and there is already 1.06 so I need to upgrade it right away I guess. They will have solved some bugs. I played around with it a bit and I like it a lot. The only thing I'm a bit dissapointed about is the quality of the reverb, but the internal effects are very easy to switch of and you can hook up your best external reverb, chorus or whatever. Programming it is not even that complicated I found out. Everything is layed out very logical and the big display helps a lot. In every screen you have a lot of corresponding controls on the knobs around the screen. It is not a touch screen by the way.

In this picture you can see where I put it in the studio. On my main desk on the right side next to the Virus TI Polar. The wooden sides fit the wood of the studio desk quite nice don't you think? Well I'm sure I will have a lot of fun with this one. I already made some great sounds with four layers or complex sounds on top of each other. It sounded quite powerful. Also some nice arpeggiator loops are easily build. Don't let the internal presets or demos fool you when you try it out. This thing can do much more than that. I'm sure you'll hear this one on some of my future productions.

Apollo Studio Cabling (Part 3)

A lot of cabling was done last week in my new studio. Here you see 4 UTP cables sticking out the cabling guiding system. They are all mounted now on an in internal connector. You can see a lid that I can lift and under there are now 4 UTP connections and two power connections. In total 5 of these connection boxes are distributed through the studio. Very convenient. I'm looking now for stuff to transport over UTP next to normal network connections of course. So far I found KVM, USB, DVI, HDMI, analog audio, SPDIF and ADAT over UTP. So that should be sufficient I guess :)

Here you see where all the UTP cables come together. This is one of the lower cabinets of my main desk. Here I now have 14 UTP cables going to the rack in the server room and also 20 UTP cables going to the connection boxes in the studio. The white patch panel I use to cables stuff that is mounted in the main desk itself. In this cabinet you see also two strips of power switches. They are used to switch also the power in the connection boxes now. I did decide to divide the power on the left and right side of the studio, so I have two of these power strips on the right side of my desk as well.

The power for the whole studio is coming now by the way from an 3000 VA UPS mounted in the server room. It is enough to power the whole studio in case of a power failure. It also protect the studio from wrong power (too high or too low). The power from the server room is mounted now on two of these boxes that are behind my main desk. One is on the right and one on the left. This is basically the main power distribution running to the power strips with switches that are in the previous picture. So by now I'm completely done with the power cabling. Every piece of equipment has power now.

To connect the equipment in the upper cabinets in the main desk I mounted a lot of power strips up side down under the main desk. They all connect to one of the switches. In this way I can switch equipment on and off in groups. Very nice. I tried to divide everything into logical groups that I often use together. The biggest job by the way is that I made all cabled exactly in the right length. I cut of the normal power connector from all the strips and replaced them with female euro connectors that go directly into the power strips with the switches. It has cost me a lot of time, but I'm very happy with the end result.

Meanwhile I started cabling midi in the studio. Quite a hard job since behind the lower cabinets it is quite dark and some connectors are in small places. I have to hold a flashlight in one hand for this and try to put in the connector in with my other hand, usually laying on my back. Ah well that is life ;) As you can see in the picture it can be a bit crowded and then still there has to go audio cabling in as well.

Some of you wonder why the cabling is taking me so long. Well there are two reasons for that. The first is that it is a lot ;) The second is that I still have to do other stuff in between as well. So I cannot work on it constantly. Besides that I usually test everything I connect right away to be sure it is installed correctly and not that I will have to do trouble shooting after wards and maybe not be able to reach the faulty cable as easy anymore. I'll continue with this next week.

AudioRail ADAT rx32tx32

My friend Hanz found a solution for a problem that I had for transporting ADAT over UTP. He found these very nice converters that can transport 4 ADAT inputs and outputs over a single UTP cable. And since I have them around the studio it is very easy to patch and ADAT from my main desk to one of these machines further away. And I think they do this for a reasonable price. If you are interested you can find more information on the AudioRail website at http://www.audiorail.com/
You can order there directly and they do ship World Wide. I haven't tested them yet, but I will start cabling ADAT in the studio very soon and then I will know how they operate. It doesn't look all that diffucult. But this is surely convinient.

Kurzweil K2600R Works

Again a lot has happened last week, I only didn't have much time to update my blog a lot. Besided that my DSL modem broke and I had to get a new one. In the mean time I worked on a ISDN backup connection and I know now that I'm getting spoiled in bandwidth. It was no fun on this slow connection. But well that all works again. I did some testing with the Kurzweil K2600R that I upgraded earlier and everything works like a charm. So it is now fully ADAT and SPDIF capable. I played a bit around with it last week and I'm still amazed about how good it sounds. You can hear that Kurzweil really put in a lot of effort to get the sounds right on those patches. I especially love the Orchestral ROM sounds in it. They have many layers and when you hit them harder they really sound huge.

AtmoSphere for sale in Japan

I know a lot of you following this blog come from Japan. I have good news for you. I just found a link to a Japanese web shop that sells my new AtmoSphere album. So now you can easily get it in Japan as well now.

http://www.doppelganger-records.com/product/3205

For other sales links you can check here:

http://www.synth.nl/AtmoSphere

Thank you for your support :)

Synth.nl Interview on Electroambient Space

Recently Philip Derby from the website Electroambient Space did a very nice interview with me. We talked about a lot of things. I think it is a nice read. You can find the interview by going to this website:

http://www.electroambientspace.com/

Click on 'interviews' and scroll down a bit. I think it is a nice read. I will put a copy on my own website later as well. You should be able to find that here then among some other interviews:

http://www.synth.nl/interviews.php

I would recommend you to take a look on the rest of this very nice website as well. There are also some more nice interviews on there and a lot of interesting CD reviews.

Apollo Studio Furniture (Part 10)

I already wrote that my furniture builder Gerrit mounted a drawer under my main desk. Well here it is :) Very nice to have a keyboard available right in front of me when I'm working in Sonar. I never had that before actually. The only problem was that the desk with the drawer under it is quite low. I already bumped my knees into it several times now. Gerrit is coming over again next Thursday and we will place it further backwards so when I pull it out I can use it but it goes way under the desk when I don't need it and have the extra space for my legs. In that way I have the best of both things I guess. Gerrit already told me it was possible so no worries there.

In the mean time Gerrit also send me the first picture of the other desk he is building. The lower part will basically be the same as the middle part of the main desk with a lower cabinet on the left and the right and also angles 19 inch profile on top on the left and the right. In the center there will be place for my electronics equipment like my oscilloscope, frequency counter and lab power supply. Those tools I use for constructing the big modular synthesizer I'm building. And guess where that is going? Right! On top of this desk in the part you see in the picture. I can mount three rows of modules in there. Isn't that cool? :) I'm sure this will look awesome when it is finished and it will be very convenient to have work bench to work on my electronics projects as well.

Another piece of furniture we got at the local tool store. A very convenient rack that we put into the server room. In the back you can see my electronics equipment in storage now waiting to be put into the new desk and you can see also some of the modules I'm building for the modular synthesizer on top of that. This rack will eventually be used for PC spare parts and stuff I regularly need in the studio and stuff for my electronics projects. It is nice that this way I can also use the server room to keep the mess out of my studio and not only the noise.

The last picture I wanted to share with you today is a view of another synth stand I put in the studio. It holds two of my newest synthesizers that I also want to have available to play on. In this way I created a nice little corner again where I can play on several keyboards on the same time just like I had in my old studio. And there is room enough for this. On the other side I will do that same thing and this way I will be completely surrounded by synthesizers. I love that :) This stand used to be 3 stories high by the way but I decided to remove one for now to make it less massive. Maybe I'll change it back later. I first have to wait and see where all the stuff goes when I install the 4 remaining wall synth mounts. OK enough for today. I think that was quite a lot already for one day. I'm going back to the studio to do some more cabling now.

Mounting synthesizers in the Apollo Studio

If you think I only did some wiring the last weeks you are wrong :) I also mounted some synthesizers in the studio. I found a very neat system for that. You can see it in the picture on the left here. It basically consists of two parts. The first part mounted on the wall. And they are available in two sizes. 1 meters and 2 meters. I mounted two of those over the side parts of my main studio desk where already a synthesizer is on the desk. The second part is a flexible synth rest that is adjustable in angle and you can mount them on any height on the first part. This way you have a very flexible system that can hold quite some synthesizers.

Here you can see how the two parts are interconnected. On the backside there is an imbus type screw that you can use to determine the height of the synthesizer. It is by the way exactly the same type as Ikea uses ;) The only problem I encountered during mounting was my wall. It is 50 centimeters thick steel enforced concrete you have to drill in. And the concrete is not the problem, but the steel actually. I hit the steel after a few holes and thought my drill was strong enough. Well it wasn't ;) So I totally burned the thing :( So that cost me another drill. Ah well. That is life.

Another thing to watch is how angled you can mount the synthesizers. On the front there is a plastic stop that is not very high. So you can only let synthesizers rest on there that are not to heavy and have a straight front. Otherwise they would just shoot off like from a ramp. Ah well but doesn't this look nice from the front? :) These are the synths I have on the left of my main desk now. The bottom two (Andromeda and Prophet '08) will stay in this position for sure. I'm not sure yet about the other two. I still need to think about what goes where, but these were downstairs already and I needed to test the mounting system so why not put them on. And coincidentally they had a straight front. I never noticed before that a lot of synths don't. I can mount them anyway only more straight I guess. There was another reason for this angled mounting and that is that the synthesizers come quite a bit from the wall. I guess about 20 centimeters and I don't want them to overlap the bottom synth of course.

And these are the synthesizers I mounted on the right side of my main desk. Even better looking don't you think so? :) Well some people don't like Nords but I love them. These three Nords (Nord Lead 2, Wave and G2X) are all red, but completely different synthesizers all together. Together with the Korg M3 below they will be in my immediate reach to play on. So now two of these 1 meter synth mounts are installed. Another 1 meter mount will go over my Eminent 310 and then I have 3 mounts of 2 meters that will go on the free wall I have left. But I'll wait with this untill the second desk is installed in the studio. But I have work enough untill then so this is not holding me up or anything at the moment. In the mean time I also connected these synths to the power distribution and hookup up the USB ports of the lower three. The M3 to the main PC since it does midi over USB and the other two to the other PC since they only use an editor over USB and the rest will go over midi.

Apollo Studio Cabling (Part 2)

Last week I spent a lot of time cabling the studio. As I showed before there is a lot of UTP in the studio. Coming from the main rack in the server room there is a bundle of 14 CAT6 UTP cables coming in a bundle to the studio. My electrician mounted this neatly on a patch panel that I mounted in the mean time in one of the lower 19 inch cabinets under my main studio desk. I just have to pay attention because in the main rack they are numbered 11 to 24 and in the studio they are numbered 1 to 14. This is because the first 10 connections in the main rack are going to the power cabinet upstairs. As you can see this is an old picture since here still the aluminum 19 inch profiles is mounted in the cabinet.

In the mean time it looks like this. In the center cabinet you can see a power distributor on top with a build in Volt and Ampere meter. This way I can see if I don't overload the UPS that will be feeding the studio later. I actually have two of these one for the right side and one for the left side of the studio, since they can only run 10 Amps a piece and I have 16 Amps in total. Below that is a keyboard drawer, I'll get back to that later. Below that two strips with power switches. These are also on the left and the right. From here I can centrally switch everything on and off. I divided everything into logical groups for myself. Last week I wired all the power outlets that I mounted in the lower cabinets to these switch panels. Then you see the patch panel that was installed before and shown in the first picture.

There will be another patch panel below that to mount all the blue UTP cable on that is still sticking out there. These cables run to outlets in the cabling guiding system that was installed the floor. This way I can patch stuff over UTP from the central desk to other places in the studio. In the picture on the left you can see the same thing from the back. The gray cable is going to power outlets in the same cabling guiding system. Hopefully my electrician comes tomorrow or the day after to finish this job. This is actually the last thing they need to do. Not that I can't do it myself, but I already payed them to do it ;) And I'm currently very busy with other things. There is a lot of cable that has to go in there.

Here is a picture of the back of my desk. To get behind there I need to crawl under the center part of my desk. And that is quite low now with the extra drawer mounted. But once I'm behind there I can stand up. There is about a meter of space between the desk and the wall. As you can see I mounted some hooks under the upper and lower part of the desk to run the cabling through. And believe me this is only a very small part yet ;) I started hooking up my two PC's in the studio. So what you see there now is some power, DVI, Ethernet, USB and a few audio cables to my monitors. I did hook up some audio because I'm testing out different monitors. This evening I will start hooking up my Word Clock cabling and some digital audio.

I tried to make a picture of the back side of my main studio PC, but it was quite dark there, so it is not very sharp. But I guess you'll get the idea. There is already a lot of USB connections on there. I have a lot of equipment that uses USB, but as far as synthesizers I only connect the ones to this PC that need Midi Clocking for accurate timing. All other machines that only use USB for editing or updating software will be connected to my other PC. There is a limit in the number of stuff you can connect in terms of midi drivers to one PC. And since I had trouble with that in the past I'm trying to avoid this now. Some synthesizer need a separate USB 2.0 port like the Virus TI that does audio streaming over USB, but other only do little data and can do USB 1.1. Most of these I connect through USB hubs. There is actually more USB hubs that you can see in the picture here. Well enough for now. I'll update you later in the week on the progress of this cabling project.

Apollo Studio Furniture (Part 9)

Yesterday my furniture builder Gerrit worked in my studio all day. He replaced all the aluminum 19 inch profiles for steel ones. After that We put all the equipment back in. And now everything fitted like a charm :) So that problem is solved. We also shortened the center profiles from 4 units to 3 units. We did this because then there is more room under the equipment there to shove something under there like the mixing console I tried out before. We also installed a drawer you can see under the main desk. I put my master midi keyboard on there. Very convinient. I can put it away when I don't need it and pull it out when I want to play some lines during working on a track. In the past I always had to leave my working spot for that.

Here you see a closer view of the 19 inch profile. I'm happy with the fact that this new profile is black as well by the way. I think it looks much nicer now. You can also see Gerrit sawing in the main desk. Some of the holes were to small to fit equipment in. It is nice that the equipment is mounted in an angle in the upper cabinets, but this makes it point downwards on the back of course and you need to make room for that. In the end you won't see anything from this because it is behind the equipment. We also set some poles under the upper cabinet. We found that all the weight made it tilt a bit, and just to be sure we put some extra support under that. I would be a disaster if everything came down on there. Also these poles are invisible from the front. So no problem at all. Better safe than sorry.

In the mean time I did some work myself as well. I mounted power outlets in the lower cabinets. I found some nice ones that fit perfectly. Just four screws in the wood and it sits rock solid. All power outlets will be connected to a central place where I can switch them on and off induvidually. That is something I really missed in my previous studio. I think it will be very convinient. So in total I have 12 outlets per cabinet that should be more than sufficient I guess.

Now that Gerrit is finished on the main desk he is working again on the smaller desk. I hope this will arrive next Thursday. I'm very curious how that will fit. In the mean time I'm going to focus now on cabling everything.

Kurzweil K2600R Upgrade

Long time ago I bought a Kurzweil 2600 rack mount version. I got it quite cheap, but when I switched it on it was broken. The disk drive didn't work and also the hard disk was broken. I replaced the hard disk with a SCSI disk I had lying around and that worked right away. I though I could also easily replace the disk drive, but that didn't work. So I opened the exsisting drive and found out that it was very dirty. I cleaned it completely and afterwards it worked like a charm. With this new diskdrive now I could upgrade the OS also to the latest version 4.11. The only thing I thought was a shame is that all the digital inputs and outputs were not present. So I started looking for upgrades and I found that they were still for sale. I ordered two upgrades. The Sampling option which gives extra inputs at the front and also SPDIF, but I also ordered that ADAT upgrade. You can see the upgrade PCB's lying on top of the Kurzweil.

Here you see the inside of the Kurzweil before the upgrade. On the left you see the power supply, in the front is a bracket where the disk drive and hard disk are mounted. In the back are two PCB's on top of each other. Below the CPU and memory board and on top the I/O board. The whole thing looks a lot like a PC actually. Well laid out and very accesible. Both upgrade kits came with very detailed explanations how to mount the options, but I found that my 2600R looked different than the pictures in the manual. So apperantly there are different versions around. Also very confusing was that in order to install the ADAT option you can't install the digital outputs on the back that come with the sampling option. I have to remove that again.

OK here is a picture after I installed all the boards. You can see the sampling PCB in the front left of the unit. The ADAT option comes in between the CPU and IO board. So you have to remove the IO board as well. In the kit was also an extra chip you have to install on the CPU board and on the bottom of the Kurzweil you have to install an extra jumper. Unfortunately that was the only thing not included in the kit. I had to search hard to find a jumper somewhere. But eventually removed one from an old PC card. After installing the board you have to run some tests, but the tests are intended for the sampling option and since I had to remove the SPDIF outputs from this option I couldn't run these tests.

Also I could not really find out if the ADAT board is running since you have to hook it up for that. I decided to reassemble it and mount it in my new studio desk. I will test it later. In this picture you can see the extra inputs on the front. I read on the internet that there is also a live mode where you could use the 2600 as an effects processor and that is nice because it has some very high quality FXs on board. Well I'll see about that later. I don't have much time now to test it anyway. I need to cable the new studio. I did this job yesterday because my furniture builder was working on the desk and I couldn't do work on there myself. I can't imagine though that I did anything wrong. But it is not an easy upgrade. I wouldn't recommend doing it yourself when you are no technician. I'll let you know later if it works.

Apollo Studio Furniture (Part 8)

Today my furniture builder Gerrit will come here to change the aluminum 19" profile in my studio desk for the steel version. As I explained in a previous post, most equipment didn't fit in. So yesterday I started the very frustrating job of removing all the equipment and cabling I already put in. Hopefully by the end of today the new profile will be fitted again and I can start putting the stuff back in and then start cabling stuff permanently. You can clearly see the aluminum profiles in the picture on the left by the way. As you can see it is not straight, but under an angle in some points so it is a lot of work to saw this straight. I feel really sorry for Gerrit who has to do this all over again as well.

Well at least I have some pictures now of the empty desk as well. I forgot to take them before since I started mounting equipment right away when the desk was placed. You can also see that I put power bars in the bottom cabinets here. Actually there are two in both. One below and one upstairs. Both have 6 power outlets so in total I have 12 power outlets per cabinet. That should be sufficient in most cases. You can also see in this picture some new speakers. I'm actually testing out some speakers now that I have on loan. I haven't decided yet which ones to buy, but I'm trying to listen to as many as possible at the moment and of course preferably in my own studio. I will post more about these test in another post later on. It is not really releated to the furniture anyway of course.

I didn't want to hold this view from you as well. It was quite difficult to find a space for all the stuff I took out of the desk. This isn't even all. I moved some stuff to the cinema and server room as well to make space for Gerrit to work today. But it is a big mess now I can tell you. I can't wait to put it all back later this evening. Well at least I know from the previous time now where to put everything back. I will do some minor changes even, since I found out it could be even a little bit more efficient. You will see pictures of that later on.

And here is the last view of the empty desk. You can see on the right here that I already mounted some synthesizers to the wall as well. I found a very nice system to mount my synthesizers that is very flexible and doesn't take up a lot of space. I will show pictures of that later on as well. Today were are first going to focus on getting the equipment back into the desk. Hopefully Gerrit will also take some stuff along with him for the smaller desk that will go on the other side of the room. As always I will keep you posted on the progress :)

Reviews in German Synthesizer Magazine

Both my albums were reviewed in the German Magazine 'Synthesizer Magazine'. It comes out on print every month and it goes to all kinds of synthesizer enthusiasts. I have a subscription to the magazine myself as well and I can recommend it when you can read German. If you click on the picture on the left you can see a big version. I made a scan from the magazine. The quality is not superb but good enough I think. If you can't read German. In short they are saying that AeroDynamics is about speed and Formula 1 and AtmoSphere is about the weather. They can hear influences of Jean Michel Jarre, which is quite OK of course. They like both records and especially the production quality. Well of course I'm very happy with this nice review. And check out the magazine: http://www.synthesizer-magazin.de/

Sonar V-Studio 700 Demonstration

Today Live Music and Roland came to my studio to demonstrate a new remote console especially designed for Cakewalk Sonar. I sold my US-2400 a while ago and I was still searching for a replacement, but I think I found it now. This thing totally integrates with Cakewalk Sonar 8 and that is what I use for my music production. One cool feature is that you can assign a fader to a track and let it stick on that while skipping through the project with the other faders. It also comes with an audio box with about 17 inputs. I will not use that I'm afraid since I have much more channels on my RME MADI setup, but it also comes with a build-in Roland Fantom synthesizer that you can use as a VST inside Sonar. The audio box works as a DSP unit and you can even upgrade the Fantom with an extra ARX board. I was very enthusiastic after this demonstration. It was too bad they had to take the demo model back with them. I would have loved to play a bit more with it.

Apollo Studio Furniture (Part 7)

Last week I moved a lot of equipment downstairs and put it in and on the new studio furniture to find the most ideal place for all of it. Some pieces only fit on a certain spot or don't fit where I hope it would, but that is no problem. The new main desk is so flexible that it is almost impossible for something to be out of reach. In this picture you see the left part where my analog corner will be again. In the third cabinet from the right I put the UPS for the studio, but when I switched it on I heard that it has fans and makes noise, so I will move it to the server room. Not all my analog synthesizers are going here by the way, because in the new setup I will also have a special place for all my modulars. They are going to be all together on the second desk that Gerrit is building at this moment.

Here is a picture of the right side of the desk. This will be the digital corner again just like in my old setup actually. Not much change here only all my synthesizer modules that were in the big rack behind me will be much closer now. In the right cabinet you see the Denon surround setup that I used in the living room. It was supposed to go into the cinema, but we bought a new receiver and bluray player for there, so I decided to use this set in my studio to just listen to music and watch a DVD. The receiver will be used primarily as a Dolby Digital decoder and will feed my active monitors in a surround setup later on.

This is the middle part and that is what changed the most. I have lots of equipment right in front of me and that is really great. On the top desk two new and bigger LCD screen will be put. I'm really looking forward to working on them. As you probably saw I put my old screens on the side. They will have another function soon on that I will explain later on. The only thing that is missing is a drawer that will be mounted in between the two center cabinets. It can put a master midi keyboard on there that I can use from my normal working position. It is nice to be able to play a tune without having to move from my spot. I'm still thinking about what keyboard to use there.

This picture shows a nice overview of the whole main desk. As you can see it is all very ergonomic. I can't wait to really start working here. The 19'' profiles are still not changed so I'm still waiting for that. It is kind off frustrating to know that I can remove everything again. I did hook up some stuff so that I can listen to music at least now while I'm working. I also temporary hooked up some stuff to the new studio PC to test and install drivers. So far everything works like a charm. Gerrit is now building a smaller desk for my modular setup. I hope that will arrive soon, because that will also function as a work bench. So far I'm doing a lot of stuff on the ground and that is not very comfortable of course. More info coming soon ;)

Nice surprise on Official Jarre Blog

Yesterday I was looking on the official Blog of Jean Michel Jarre to see if there was any news on him or his upcoming tour and I found a pleasant surprise there. I spotted my own name on that page! Of course I clicked on the link right away and found it to be a little review done by a website called ElectronicMusic.com. Returning to the page I found that it was an automatic news feed that was added to the blog, but it is still nice to be on the for a while. I will save this picture for sure. Now I just hope that Jean Michel Jarre reads his own blog as well ;) If you never saw the blog before you can find it here: http://aerojarre.blogspot.com/ and the review is here: http://www.electronicmusic.com/review/index.cfm?content=5577

Synth.nl played on Alien Air Music

Synth.nl with the track 'Cirrostratus' was played on the American radio show 'Alien Air Music'. Last time I recorded it live, but now I went to the archive and listened there. There are a lot of shows to listen to on their website. If you want to listen to the latest show you have to scroll all the way down. I found out though that the flash player that is on there only works in Microsofts Internet Explorer. I hope you enjoy the show. You can find it here: http://www.alienairmusic.com/

Apollo Studio Furniture (Part 6)

Last week the new studio furniture arrived. At least the main desk. Gerrit had to drive two times to transport it all. The colors of the wood look very nice I think with the carpet and the walls. This was the first time that I saw this actually. So far it was a bit of guessing how it would look. Also the black contrasts very nicely again with the carpet. Gerrit started assembling right away after everything was in the studio. I helped carrying the stuff down since it are quite large pieces. Also during construction I was there all the time and lended a helping hand here and there.

Assembling was mostly putting the modules back together, but of course everything has to fit very tightly so it was not an easy job at all. Luckily we had room enough to manouvre around with all the parts. I'm glad I didn't move that much stuff down yet. Otherwise I could have carried it all out again. We did the assembly of the furniture in two full days. Here and there some minor adjustments had to be made. Gerrit sawed some holes for equipment to go in and we found quickly that some were to small by trying to put some 19" equipment in there.

Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures of the empty desk. I was so enthusiastic that I started moving equipment while Gerrit was laying the last hand on the furniture. Unfortunately we discovered something really nasty then. All measurements were based on a 2 millimeter thick steel 19'' profile, but Gerrit got 3 millimeter thick aluminum profiles from his supplier. The result being that not all the equipment fits. It is just 2 millimeters of difference, but it is enough to use up the margin you normally have. Gerrit phoned is supplier and we decided that all the profiles will have to be changed. Unfortunately this means that I can't put equipment definitely in place yet. I did start moving though and I started to figure out what has to go where.

I also bought a nice piece of furniture to hold my CD collection. If you think this looks familiar: Yes it is Ikea ;) So not custom build, but it is perfect for what I want. I found a nice spot in the hall between the Studio and the Cinema.

OK now I'm going to move some more stuff. It is quite some work and for every one or two pieces I can carry I have to climb 3 stairs. At this time I can feel every muscle in my body. I have about 50% of the equipment now downstairs. I'll update you soon with more pictures of the main desk with more equipment in it. I hope you enjoy the view as much as I do :)