BeatMaker

BeatMaker wasn't created for a client - I developed this little Flash application a couple years ago to help a friend's five-year-old daughter, who was then starting to play the drums, understand the basics of rhythm and counting time.

The interface is simple - the screen contains on measure of music, broken down into eighth notes, with three instruments - closed hi hat, snare drum and bass drum. It was tempting to add more drum sounds, but the idea here was to allow simple beats to be created - not to make a virtual drum machine or anything so complex that it would get in the way of learning.

Each note is clickable - clicking toggles the note on or off. There are four speeds ("Slow", "Medium", "Fast", and "Crazy Fast") and there's a voice (my own) that counts each note in the measure. It can be turned off so the child can try counting on their own. A vertical line scrolls in sync with the counter, so kids can connect the counting to the current position in the measure.

I've included sixteen sample beats to help give kids an idea of how each note can be arranged. There's also a Clear function so they can wipe the slate clear and start from scratch (rather than manually turning each note on or off), a Random feature that creates a totally random beat, and there's a Print function so favorite beats can be saved and practiced later - even if there's not a computer around.

That's it - nice and simple. Check out BeatMaker.

Make the Load Lighter: Indie Rock for Haiti

My band cuppa joe was fortunate enough to have been asked to contribute a song to the Dromedary Records compilation "Make the Load Lighter: Indie Rock For Haiti". The digital-only release was put together in a startlingly fast two week period, and features contributions from fantastic bands all over the world.


Taniqua, the song we contributed, was recorded in 1995 and was never widely available - so all the better to have it included on this special project. We were proud to be included - especially considering that all proceeds are going directly to the volunteer organization The Voice of Haiti to benefit earthquake victims.

Here's the full track listing:
1. Footstone: “For the Boss”
2. Boss Jim Gettys: “With a Smile”
3. Cuppa Joe: “Taniqua”
4. Moviola: “Calling on the Line”
5. Three Blind Wolves: “Sex is for Losers”
6. Paula Carino: “The Great Depression”
7. Wallendas: “Adrianne”
8. The Neutron Drivers: “All Around the Sun”
9. The Dark Brothers: “Knee Deep in Sin”
10. There Will Be Fireworks: “Foreign Thoughts”
11. Gena Rowlands Band: “F*ckups of the World Unite”
12. The Mommyheads: “Spiders”
13. Farewell Singapore: “Blue”
14. Jenifer Convertible: “St. Pete”
15. lions.chase.tigers: “To Their Blood”
16. Stuyvesant: “Salieri”

"Make rhe Load Lighter: Indie Rock For Haiti" is available for $9.99 from iTunes, Amazon and directly from the Dromedary Records website. You can preview the full album on Dromedary's website, and individual songs are available for $.99. Check it out.

Premium Music Solutions - Interactive City

The Premium Music Solutions home page - an interactive city with each building representing a different genre of music being promoted. Click to launch website.

After about four months of development, www.PremiumMusicSolutions.com has launched. I'm excited. It's been some time since I did the first proof of concept of the Christmas village at the center of the city, with its blinking lights and falling snow. The rest of the city was finalized months ago, but the client decided to hold off on the site going live until the second phase - building the interiors of each venue, which house the full song information - so everything would go live at once.


One of the six venue interiors - this is Club T, featuring disco, club, and other dance-friendly music. Click to launch website.

The song data is all XML-driven so they client can make changes and updates on their own, without my intervention. As always, the handshake between Flash and XML - making the information flexible enough to accomodate, say, multiple pages of of songs - is always the most difficult technical piece, but it pays off in the end. Now the client can maintain all of their own content - an efficiency and cost-savings.

Another minor technical feat: the interiors of the venues all use one Flash file. Each venue has its own HTML page with a single FlashVar, "venue", passing down a value of 1 through 6 to the .swf file. The .swf then goes to the appropriate background image for the venue, and pulls in the appropriate XML file based on that value, which then propagates all the song data. This is also an efficiency issue - I only have one file to maintain - and also helps the site load quickly, since once the first interior is loaded, all subsequent interiors load near-instantly, as they're really just opening the same .swf.

One other "trick" I tried, which I've seen before but hadn't attempted - actually a trick in two parts: The interiors of each venue show large text buttons for the other five venues, but not a link for the venue you're currently in. A small thing, perhaps, but it's nice to only present the user with the options other than the one they're seeing. And part two - instead of having an off/over state for those buttons (they all seemed to important to keep "dimmed" when they're off), instead, when the user rolls over one of them, the other five temporarily dim.

Now go check out the traffic lights and cars on the home page. Yes, they really work. Now it's time to add in some pedestrians.

Me Make Monster - Story Contest

In an effort to spread the word about my project, Me Make Monster (which lets you make a monster, then get it printed on t-shirts, mugs, and other Zazzle products) I've just launched a Story Contest.

The way it works is, you visit the site and make a monster, giving it a name. Then click the "Enter Our Story Contest" button. This takes you to a new page, where you enter a little info (including the name of your monster), and then write or paste in your story.

The contest will run for a month, and I really have no idea what to expect. As far as the stories themselves, anything goes - though I'm suggesting people write about a few specific things regarding their monster, if they're not sure what to cover:

• its origins
• powers
• allies
• enemies
• weaknesses
• secret lair/domain
• how it feeds

I'll be awarding one $50 Zazzle Gift Certificate and two $25 Zazzle Gift Certificates in each of four age groups, so feel free to spread the word and try it out for yourself. The link to the contest is right here:
http://www.memakemonster.com/contest.html

Winners will be announced on December 15th - I may even read the winning stories aloud, accompanied by some simple monster animation. That seems like it would be cool.

Me Make Monster Animated Commercial and Theme Song

The first Me Make Monster commercial has launched, complete with a retro 80's-style theme song! Click below to check it out!

Or check it out at:
www.memakemonster.com

The theme song, 34 seconds long, was composed in GarageBand, using all MIDI instruments except for the voice, which I tripled to thicken it up. The song's feel was modeled after the early- to mid-80's Saturday morning commercials of my youth - very aggressive, filled with attitude, Eddie Van Halen-inspired guitar noodlings and heavy beats.

I kept the lyrics as streamlined as I could, conveying the customized monster-making functionality of the site, and the ability to get those monsters printed on producsts, in as few words as possible.

I developed the commercial all in Flash, and kept it free of gradients so there wouldn't be any nastiness when the piece went from Flash to Quicktime to Flash Video, or whatever other compressed format it'll be converted to.

The piece has been integrated into the site itself, and should set the tone for the site as being edgy, cool and fun - especially for the 8 to 12 year old boys I'm targeting. I hope they enjoy the sixteenth note guitar triplets. I'm sure they will.

Me Make Monster! Launches

Click to make some monster stuff.

I've launched a new project - a new venture, if you will - and it's called Me Make Monster! I'll create a more detailed blog post in the future, but for now I invite you to check it out and play around with it. And hey, if you have a kid - especially boys 7-10 - and you get them to check it out, I'd be especially interested in what they have to say.

I've kept the purpose of the site very simple - you make a monster out of various parts, name it, and then you apply your finished monster to a variety of products on Zazzle. The products are created on the fly using Zazzle's API, which imposes a high-res image (generated from the vector monster parts in Flash) and adds it to templates. That was certainly not the fun part of this project, but working it out meant a very smooth handoff from the MMM site to Zazzle, which will hopefully entice customers to make a purchase.

As far as the monster is concerned, you can select pieces for the head, eye brows, eyes, nose, mouth, ears, body (really the torso), arms, legs, and "extra", which can be a tail, wings, and other stuff that appears behind the monster - essentially attached to its back. For some parts (eyes, brows, nose, mouth, ears) there is a blank option - essential for creating some specific monsters, like a Mummy - Mummys don't have noses, in case you didn't know.

You can also select the color (one color per monster only) and a texture (which can also be blank). For each piece except the body/torso, you can enlarge or shrink that piece, and move it up and down - all within certain tolerances. There's also a Reset button that brings it back to its base position and size, and a Random button that selects a random body part, size, and position. I've also added Reset and Random buttons for the full monster - clicking the Random All button is a great place to start - you can keep going until you see a monster you like, then jump in and start tweaking it.

Something I wrestled with was hair and clothes. At first I was going to exclude both because of technical resasons - I wanted the body parts to be varied, so I knew Frankenstein's Monster hair wouldn't fit on a Dracula-style head. Same thing with clothes. But I eventually I decided I really wanted to add those features - I couldn't make all the kinds of monsters I wanted to without them. So I created those functions, but as purely on/off options - each head and body part has one discrete hairstyle and clothing option. That way I don't have to worry about elements fitting - or not fitting.

I thought about going with a sequential setup - like Mad Men Yourself, where you select one body part at a time, and move forward and back. This may have been easier for the core demographic I'm targeting (boys 7-10) but it also slows things down, and because it doesn't present all of your options at once, it can be less satisfying to use. We'll see - I've got some beta testers playing with the site now - hopefully their feedback on the interface is encouraging. I trust 'em.

There were some technical hurdles to overcome (and some I'm still overcoming) but I wanted to get the site up and running first, then start cleaning things up. So - it's up! Check it out if you're into monsters (is anyone not into monsters?!) and let me know what you think.

www.MeMakeMonster.com

Xipwire - Informational Chart

Informational graphic. Click for larger image.

I'm in the process of finalizing my work for Xipwire, which I've mentioned in a previous post covering the logo design phase of the project. Xipwire is a startup service that allows its users to text funds to each other. So you go out to lunch with a friend, you wind up owing him $13 but neither of you have change - no problem, if you're both signed up on this service. You text him the $13, it comes directly out of your (very secure) bank account, and the next time your friend logs in, it's desposited into his account. Very simple, very safe, and very efficient - and that's what I needed to convey in this graphic.

The client created a rough version of the chart as a way to get his thoughts together, and to guide me as I recreated and refined it:

He'd used a combination of clip art and found graphics to work this out, and it certainly got the basic information and ideas in place. I started from scratch, using Freehand (they'll have to kill me to stop me from using that program) and strictly adhering to the same color scheme and gradient effects I'd created for the basic website structure. I'm hardcore when it comes to that, and I really feel that when most people who aren't designers work on these kinds of charts and graphs for themselves, the strong tendency to use a variety of colors is what makes them look unprofessional and non-cohesive. Using one font in one color/size/style is always going to look better than varying each sentence and element. Don't even get me started on the overuse of bold and italic!

It was fairly straightforward, though as I told my client, there are always infinite ways to go when representing a human form. Here is the first pass on Violet and Dash, the two avatars he wanted to represent the Xipwire process:


Dig that soul patch on Dash, eh? My client liked the fun, cartoony look, but feared it might be a little too lighthearted, so he asked me to represent the characters in a more (but not totally) realistic style. I took another pass and came up with the current version, which he liked even more, and approved with no changes:



The two characters are almost perfect mirror images of each other, to keep the feel of the chart more iconic and less like a cartoony illustration. I did shrink Violet's nose and chin (women universally have smaller noses than men, right?), darkened her upper lip and gave her a bottom one, thinned out her eyebrows, and added the cliché female adornments of long hair, earrings and eyelashes. A part of me always struggles with these kinds of elements, but in the world of icons, there's no room for subtlety. I really hope I never have to redesign those bathroom door icons, because I know the idea of the skirt-wearing woman icon would drive me batty.

What else? Besides the text, boxes and lines, there are three main icons. The wallets, which needed to convey security (I used a lock - not quite groundbreaking) and also had to show that multiple credit and debit cards can be linked to Xipwire for a single user:



And the bank/credit card icons, which had to indicate Visa and MasterCard logos without getting too close for comfort (or lawsuits). I visited seventeen banks and financial institutions for research on the bank icon. Not really. I just made it up.



If a real bank ever looked like that, it would be pretty freaky, wouldn't it?

And, I needed to render a laptop icon. If I were just drawing a laptop on its own, I'd almost definitely have showed it from a more interesting 3/4 view, but because of the symmetry in this chart, I kept the angle dead-on straight. I toyed with the idea of adding keys, but you can't really add all the keys on a laptop in an icon only 70 or so pixels wide, and it would bother me if Ionly showed a dozen or so keys. I had a hard enough time using only 12 buttons on the cell phone. So I made a keyless keyboard - maybe it's a future Apple innovation. It seems to work, though:



And that was it. It's approved and going on the page of the site that explains the process, hopefully making the service ultra-clear to potential users, persuading them to sign up. That's called "conversion", and it worked on me. I signed up - now I just need to wait for Xipwire to get to its Beta stage so I can start texting money to people. That'll be fun. I can't wait until I owe someone $13.

Blog Problems and a Bonus Music Video

This is my first newsy kind of post - and unfortunately, it's not a positive one - though it could be worse.

I had a problem with my server over the holiday weekend - the server that hosts most of the images for this blog. Unfortunately (man, I hate that word) most of the old files were deleted from the server.

However, it's not a huge deal - the main images on each post are embedded in Blogger - but if you go to play a song, watch a Flash movie, or view a larger version of an image, that probably won't work.

Don't fret - I have the files stored locally - it's just a matter of restoring them to their proper online locations, one by one, and testing - which I'm doing now, starting at the most recent posts.

So if you see anything weird, my apologies - it's only temporary.

In the meantime, you can check out this music video - that's me on drums. Long story, but I recently reconnected (via Facebook) with a guy named Al, who was the owner of the record label, Dromedary Records, a small label that put out music by my band cuppa joe in the early 90's. It was his 40th birthday this week, and so Doug (that's him with the guitar there) wrote this song about the number Forty, in honor of Al. The video was a surprise for him at the party. Enjoy - and please don't mind the inside jokes.

Slippage

When I started writing Attract Mode, I'd planned to keep that screenplay short - maybe 12 to 15 pages, with only 3 or 4 locations, lots of dialogue, and a few props, so I could shoot it myself. Ha! It grew to over 30 pages, and at some point I let the reins loose and wrote a couple sequences in a large arcade game repair/sales/rental/party venue - based on a real place somewhat near me. I thought I could approach them about shooting on their premises, maybe bartering in some free commercial work for them.

All that was pretty ambitious - really, too ambitious, since I haven't nearly done the quantity of shooting and editing that would give me the confidence to round up a full cast and even a small crew, and secure location shooting. I needed to go way, way smaller - and shorter. Some people say for your first "real" short film, anything longer than three minutes is too long. That sounded ridiculous to me, until I shot Robot Roundup, devoting about 30 hours to the project - and it featured a baby (my son) who doesn't have any lines, an overdubbed horse and robot - all fairly controllable elements.

And yet, though I was mostly happy with the final outcome from a technical point of view, there were compromises galore along the way. I definitely needed something much more modest, that I could conceivably shoot in one or two locations in my own house, with minimal characters and camera angles. Something that warm me up from a technical point of view, forcing me to work with a people who were performing, existing settings and getting the sound, lighting, and camera work right.

So, I wrote Slippage. I had just watched Primer (see the trailer below) for a second time, so time travel was on my mind. I kept the story very dialogue-heavy, inserting lots of science-specific terminology - some readers said too much, but I wanted an authentic feel, like Primer has. And there's a little twist at the end, or really a payoff - probably expected, or the story would be a little too dry.



Interestingly enough, I saw a documentary on the Higgs Boson - the MacGuffin of the story (if a five-page screenplay can have a MacGuffin), only after finishing the screenplay. It was really interesting and filled in a ton of information I didn't know about that subject, but I didn't change the script to reflect that newfound knowledge. I thought it was tech-heavy enough, and I didn't want to overload it with even more jargon.

And I still haven't shot it, sadly - having a baby does not add to one's available free time (not that anyone ever said it would). Hopefully that'll happen this fall, before it gets too cold - that's important, since almost all of the story would take place in my back yard.

Slippage

Bond Opening Parody

Oh yeah - this project. Another one that I forgot about, for the most part, until I found it in my hard drive.

This animation was created for a large corporate client who does a lot of fun internal projects like this. I don't think I ever got the full story, but they had an executive who they wanted to mock (always a good thing) and there was some connection between "Agent 007" and "Agent 88.00" (some kind of nickname for the guy), so they wanted to James Bond-ize him, and asked me to help.

It wasn't a complex project, which was good because the turnaround time was either two or three days from when they called me - the animation was to be shown at a large departmental meeting. The client sent me a photo of the executive, and I was happy to see that his expression was nice and grim - it really fit the Bond mood, especially when I stuck his head on a tuxedoed body holding a gun in Photoshop.

I studied a few openings from different Bond films on YouTube. They were all similar, with some minor variations between them. I boiled it down to the basic elements, created them in Freehand, and animated them in Flash - adding a classic version of the song. I think the only change the client requested upon seeing the first version was that I add an actual bullet flying at the viewer. I don't know how well that registers, but it's in there for a few frames.

I finished just in time for the deadline, and the client was happy. I'm not sure how the executive who was the subject of this lampooning took it, but hopefully he had a good sense of humor about it. It's not like we made him into Austin Powers or anything. James Bond is always cool.


Click the "Play Movie" button above to view the animation.


Watch the first 30 seconds of the clip above for a comparison.

Balloon Buster

Balloon Buster game. Click to play in a new window.

I decided to create this game purely as a self-promotional piece. I was getting more Flash game work around 2005, and I wanted to have an example of a simple online game that I created to show potential or existing clients, as a way to demonstrate my abilities. I decided to leverage an existing animated version of myself that I'd already been using on my www.stevespatucci.com website, so as to give myself a little head start on the game.

This pea-soupy green is my favorite color, and as it was already the color of my animated self's shirt, I decided to stick with it and let it dictate the color scheme of the game. That may sound lazy, but with an open-ended project like this, every limitation helps move things along.

I worked out the concept - a retro-style shooting game where you throw water balloons at me, Steve, disguised (in some cases, poorly) as different characters - real people, archetypes and fictional characters - in the windows of a building. You have to hit the Steves while the windows are open. And, you get a bonus if you hit the floating slice of key lime pie (a prize also determined by the color scheme).

I made up a couple more rules: I couldn't alter the cartoon of me lying underneath the disguises - I could only elements on top of it. And, I would only work in the existing color palette. I just started brainstorming, and worked out way more characters than I expected - I actually had to add more levels to the building to accommodate them. Since there are four characters on each level of the building, sometimes I'd think I was done... then I'd realize there was one more character I just had to include, and I'd add that character in... then I'd have to add three more to fill out the level. It should go without saying that the game took longer to complete than I anticipated because of this pattern - maybe a month total.

Here are all the characters, from top left to bottom right:
• magician
• party guest
• spaceman
• beatnik
• clown
• Indiana Jones
• Peter Criss (from Kiss)
• generic superhero
• Roman gladiator
• redneck trucker
• 1920's accountant
• soldier
• Robin Hood
• Fidel Castro
• Frankenstein's Monster
• pirate
• old-timey aviator
• devil
• Hannibal Lecter (from The Silence of the Lambs)
• Tin Man (from The Wizard of Oz)
• Rebel fighter pilot (from Star Wars)
• Kermit the Frog
• Amish guy
• The Pope
• chef
• Jason Voorhees (from Friday the 13th)
• Mickey Mouse
• Austin Powers
• Albert Einstein
• pilgrim
• Storm Shadow (from G.I. Joe)
• The Statue of Liberty
• Salvador Dali
• Batman (Christian Bale movie version)
• Chinese man
• The Cat in the Hat
• nun
• viking
• Napoleon Bonaparte
• Alex (from A Clockwork Orange)
• Sherlock Holmes
• George Washington
• old timey bowler-wearing guy
• late 60's John Lennon
• 50's greaser
• Marvin Martian
• Rorschach (from Watchmen)
• Andy Warhol
• Harry Potter
• Rastafarian
• court jester
• Willie Nelson


Closeup of the game. That's me as Indiana Jones, Peter Criss
from Kiss, a redneck trucker and a 1920's accountant.

I developed the basic game engine in Flash fairly quickly. At first the fact that the balloon you're throwing covers up the screen briefly (as it's a first-person view) felt wrong or confusing, but after a little test-playing I liked it - it only blocks your view for a brief moment, and it adds to the challenge - if you just keep shooting, you won't see where the characters are on the board.

Someone who played it asked me once where "you" (the player") are - it's not shown (since you're in "your" head) but in the instructions, it says you're in a hot air balloon. I guess I was really into balloons when I developed the game.

I created three levels - the harder the level, the quicker the descent, and the more the building moves side-to-side. The theme song, created in GarageBand, is meant to emulate early 80's game songs - simple, repetitive, and low-fidelity.

Oh, and there's a little bonus - if you hit every character you get a little surprise at the end of the game. I'm not telling what it is - you'll have to complete it (at any level) to see it.

After developing Flying Spaghetti Monster - The Game, I knew that if I posted the game file to one of the online gaming sites (that all "share" the game file generously), it would be all over the Internet in days. And it was - which is what I wanted (all part of my master plan). When I track hits to my websites, I get a few hundred a week from Balloon Buster - and mostly from all the other sites that host it (and not my own). Granted, I believe they're mostly from people looking for more free games, but occasionally someone does inquire about my game design services. There's no such thing as a bad link, I always say (not really, though I do believe it).

As with all of these games, some people said it was fun, some said it was boring, and some people cursed me out and called for my death... anonymously, of course. Ho-hum. If I created a game featuring 25 levels with different gameplay on each level, and hundreds of characters, weapons, backgrounds - people would say it's too complex to play online. I may sound jaded, but feedback for online games is some of the most pointless feedback you'll ever read. Here are some of the highlights from one of the many online sites that host the game:

"wow, that game was good.............NOT!!"

#6 anonymous (3 weeks ago)

"this a effin bullshit this game is"

#5 anonymous (8 months ago)

"this is really bad"

#4 anonymous (8 months ago)

"gay"

#3 anonymous (8 months ago)

"ur a f*kin pleb"

#2 anonymous (2 years ago)

"this the the gayest sh*t i have ever seen"

#1 anonymous (3 years ago)

I just wish the #2 anonymous person would have been more clear - am I the pleb, or one of the other comment-givers? It really bothers me.............NOT!!

And a few positive pieces of feedback, not surprisingly from NewGrounds, probably the best (and maybe the oldest) online gaming portal, where people usually try to be constructive in their feedback:

"Nice job on the art, your use of green is really nice. The controls were great too, which made the game more addicting than it really is. Music went nice with the theme. You definitely have talent. Keep up the great work =]"[delete]

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"Fun game you have here, the 'CONTROLS' were nice and smooth, and the shooting was good, the color tone could have had a mixture and more color but it was still cool, a fun and addictive game, so nice work, keep it up..."

"it was a neat little game. a bit easy and repetitive, but it was fun to play and it had a good concept to it and your efforts in this one were good too."

I know. It's more fun to read the negative stuff. I agree.

After all that fantastic feedback, click here to play Balloon Buster.

GarageBand Two-Track Recording Setup Diagram

My old, pre-Logic, two-track mixer/GarageBand recording setup. Click for larger view.

This is more of an example of an informational graphic than an explanation of my audio recording setup (I've since upgraded), but it really works as both.

I started recording with GarageBand around 2005, when version 2.0 came out. At first I used a crappy USB mic, just plugged directly in the the computer, but the results there weren't really worthy of using a professional multi-track recording program, so I bought a small, cheap two-track mixer and worked out a simple set up.

GarageBand can record up to eight simultaneous tracks - but to do that, you need a real mixer with a Firewire interface - if you're only going into the 1/8" audio jack, as I was with this setup, you can only get two separate tracks into the computer at once (using kind of a trick that I'll explain below) - and as I started to ask questions on audio recording forums, I got a lot of non-helpful answers (and that's being kind) - because anyone with an 8- or more channel mixing board is not using GarageBand - they're using Logic, Reason, ProTools or other more high-end multi-track recorders at that level, so they couldn't really help me out with my setup.

What I eventually learned was that, using a two-channel mixer like I had, you could pan one track to the extreme left, the other to the extreme right, and they would then come into GarageBand as two separate tracks, recorded at the same time, that I could then mix as I pleased. So I could record a simple drum/cymbal setup with brushes using two mics in different positions, or two guitars, or bass and guitar, or vocals and guitar - all using two tracks. That's all I wanted, and it worked well.

The image above is actually the second version of my setup - eventually I figured out a bit more in terms of monitoring the recording (either with headphones or a small amp - or both) and how I could could control the output, and add in MIDI instruments. It got pretty elaborate, though I hope it's easy enough to follow - especially for anyone looking to emulate it. I used FreeHand for all the elements and layout, keeping it simple with only black and white outlines - very "technical drawing"-style.

I posted the link on a few audio forums, where some people found it helpful, and others were surprised at the level of detail I went into - but I wanted it to be totally clear, especially when dealing with audio, where the lack of a single adapter can throw everything off and cause confusion, a trip to a store, and delays. I did receive a couple "thank you"'s from people just getting into recording, who wanted to create a similar setup who couldn't find much help elsewhere. That made me happy.

When my wife and I bought a house in 2006, the basement became mine, and I started setting up a recording studio, which is far from complete - I'll have to detail that in a future post. When I started in on the basement studio, I wanted to be able to record a few instruments and my full drum set at once, so I got lots of mics mics and cables, an 8-channel Mackie mixing board, MOTU Firewire interfaces, and I started using Logic, Apple's high-end multi-track recording software.

It's a much more elaborate setup, and the software had a huge learning curve (I'm definitely still learning, even after reading three books on the subject) but it paid off nicely - I can do much more than I could with the original GarageBand setup. But that original arrangement still comes in handy - I have a very similar setup in my office now, which I use for more limited voiceover or simple recording situations. It's nice to have the flexibility to whichever setup is appropriate - though my neighbors are definitely partial to the smaller one.


Control room setup - small 8-channel control surface at left, MIDI
keyboard, MIDI drum surface, two 20" Apple Cinema Displays, small
mixer and mic for playback (control room talking into external
headphones while recording is in progress), reference monitors and
my old Mac G5 holding it all together below.



Main instrument recording area. Eight cables lead from the channels
in the mixing board into the Firewire interface, which goes into the
control room via a single Firewire cable.



Drum recording setup - there are seven mics total - one for snare and
hihat, one for the kick drum, three for the toms (one between each set
of two), and two overhead condensers.