So this morning I was playing around with my camera, and a lens i borrowed, a nice 17mm that lets you take a quite wide angle on your images.
Well anyway, I took some pictures of my little studio and published them on my facebook, which was a big mistake as now I’m flooded with questions about my setup.
So I decided to take a little time to write on my dusty and unupdated blog, and talk about how I make all that stuff work.
So the core of the whole studio is of course my MacBook Pro and Logic Pro 9.
Whoevers following me on facebook or twitter has surely read about my huge excitement a few days ago when I upgraded to my current Mac, a powerful i7 2.66ghz with 4 gb of RAM. Someone (and I was one of them) might find it odd using a laptop to produce music (it’s not the easiest thing I admit that) but I had to deal with it when it was the only thing I had to produce was a laptop and now (after 4 tracks on Anjunabeats produced on a MacBook pro) I can assure that even laptops do the job in a brilliant way.
There is another great feature on my MacBook pro that I didn’t intentionally mention yet, which is the display….damn laptop and those 15″ you will say (I do)…. a single plugin interface can barely fit sometimes, I’ll let you just imagine how i was working with over 100 channels during the making of caffeine or any other track/remix released in 2009/10.  Well that ammmmmazing machine which is my new Mac has a hi-res display which gives me 30% of extra space in the same 15″, now, I might be anal with computers but believe me, spending that extra 100 bucks on such a display was a hell of a good choice!!!!  i can see something like 10-15 more channels on a logic project, plugins do not take 80% of my space, and even if you would never say it a spacey area will drastically speed up your workflow.

But let’s get back to my whole setup (watching the amount of txt I already wrote just talking about my Mac I’m seriously thinking of splitting this thing in a few parts), audio inputs and outputs are managed by the excellent  apogee duet, a small yet powerful audio interface, features 2 outputs and 4 inputs + headphones monitoring.
Apogee is well known for the quality of its converters, they are indeed some of the highest standard in the market and I can confirm whether recording or playback, the sound is awesome.
As you can see from the various pictures of my studio, I have a few magic boxes, also known as hardware synthesizers, precisely i own : Roland JP 8000 (the blue keyboard on the left of the mac), Clavia Nordlead 2 (the red one) and an Access Virus Ti Snow (the white little one).
This last one has its own usb to plug in the mac and a plugin that works in logic (and any other sequencer) that makes it easy to play and control from the mac, while the other 2  synth need a MIDI device that will allow data swap between the instruments and the computer.
In my case it’s just a small m-audio midisport 2 ins and 2 outs connected with the mac thru usb.
Another very important thing is of course the midi keyboard, in my case midi keyboard and midi controller, what I have in the studio is a massive M-Audio Axiom-61, heaps of keys (you guessed it, their are 61) and plenty of midi assignable faders and knobs, great to control logic and plugin parameters straight from the keyboard and by touching them with hands instead of by mouse (that I can assure you, makes a little difference).

Now of course all this stuff has to be plugged in somehow, every synth (apart from the Virus TI in USB mode where the USB cable does both, communication and audio streaming job) has a minimum of 3 cables, 2 audio going out from the Output of the synthesizer to the Input of the Apogee duet, and a midi cable, going out from the Output port of the m-audio midisport into the input of the synth so the audio cables will let recording our synth into logic, and the midi cable will let us control the synth from logic.
There is even the possibility to connect the MIDI output of the synthesizer into the MIDI input of our interface, this is useful when we want to save patches from our hardware to the computer or when we want to know which MIDI control is assigned to a specific parameter (cutoff, release, adsr etc…).
So this is how the mac gets and sends various signals to all the external devices, I hope it’s clear for all those who were confused seeing the pictures I posted.
Now since this post has become a couple of kilometers long I decided to split the studio talk in a few parts that way I can get into details with each specified thing, next time I will talk about the various instruments I use and what’s the difference between them, and later on I will talk about my workflow, what kind of shortcuts I use and how their approached to productions.
I won’t deny that it might (it will) take a while as I’m busy as, but stay tuned or just subscribe to my FEEDS or Newsletter if you don’t wont to bother checking the website every 5 hours.
Till next time bye bye!
D.