Some studio changes

It has been a few days that I wrote something here. I know :) I have been extremely busy, especially at work. Well that happens sometimes. Music is still just a hobby for me so sometimes it is difficult to find time for it. It did change some stuff in the studio though. I'm still trying to be as efficient as possible. On of the things I did is to move the two PAIA synthesizers together with the Cwejman S1 MK2 in one rack. These fit very well together I think. The fatman was in a rack below my desk at first, but since it is a synthesizer with knobs I would like to fiddle around with it is better to have it on top.

I also added the remote for my central station monitoring controller. When I bought that one last year there I had to fill out a form to get this remote for free. So I did off course, but it took a long time before it was sent to me. Well now it is there. It is very convenient. There is a long cable on it, and now I can put the remote in the corner of my studio that I'm working at that moment. The only downside is that when the remote is attached the volume controller knob on the central station itself doesn't work anymore. All the other mute and select buttons are simply doubled. It would have been nice as well if the switch to enable or disable the remote would have been on the remote or the front. Now it is on the back of there central station, where you cannot reach it easily. Well you can't have it all right? :)

An addition to the studio is a Behringer FBQ2496. It is a feedback destroyer, that basically is a very precise small band equalizer. My good friend Hanz is very into acoustics and he heard some nasty peeks in my studio. He will bring his measuring software soon so we can measure the acoustic response of the room and this software can automatically load a profile into the FBQ to filter out the biggest problems. If you ask yourself if that never bothered me before. Well no it didn't since I work most of the time at night on my headphones. And my monitors are not so good anyway. I'm talking to Hanz as well to change all this for the better in the future. But it has never been a priority for me since I'm used to working on my headphones after all this time. But off course it will be great to have a decent sound in the end :) I will tell you more about this project when we are done with it. You can see in this rack also that I moved the VariOS to the same rack below. I use it mainly as an FX processor and not as a synthesizer, so that is why it is going into the FX rack.

Cwejman S1 MK2 Arrived

Finally the Cwejman S1 MK2 arrived. I ordered it a long time ago and this is my first serious go at modular synthesizers. Actually the S1 is a semi-modular which means that without patching you can already use it. Without patching it just acts as an analog synthesizer with a predetermined signal path, but you have the ability to change this. You can also hook it up to other modulars. It uses mini jacks so I can hook it up already to the PAIA 9700S. I tried it out and I must say it sounds great! One of the first things I noticed is that you can put both of the filters in self oscillating mode by turning the knobs all the way to the right. I had never seen that before on a synthesizer.

As you can see in the picture on the right I found a nice spot for the S1 in my analog corner. Doesn't it look great next to the Moogs? I will have to study this synthesizer a bit more than I'm used to do though. I might even have to read the manual :) Usually that is only in last resort, but I really want to understand what all the inputs and outputs do before I start patching. I will use this semi-modular especially for nice space and ambient effects. You will hear a lot of them on coming albums. Maybe I will post some sounds examples later. If I can find some time.