You wouldn't know by the view through the front windows that it's nearly May here. About the only clue is that the Chippewa River is running high from all the Spring rain and snow. It's chilly and damp outside, a perfect day to stay in and get some work done in the studio. We've been making progress. The main computer (a dual-core 2.6 ghz Dell 650) has been up for a couple of months. It's running Win XP, Sonar, Nuendo, Acid, Fruity Loops and much more. The new Emu sound card and software have been installed and seem to be working fine, and I added a 320 gig hard drive for storage. The new Radeon dual video card and old CRT monitors are working perfectly. We scrounged a couple of M-Audio MidiSport patchbays so we have plenty of MIDI ins and outs and can route any MIDI command anywhere.

After I finish the web work I'll spend some time assembling the digital drum set. I'm using mesh heads, triggers, and some old drum shells that I found on eBay and cut down to make trigger pads: a 22-ich kick, a 14-inch snare, and four 13-inch toms. I need to fill and drill some holes, get the lugs & spurs on, and scrounge up a few mounts for the Pearl Icon rack. I haven't picked up cymbal pads yet but found a great buy on a hi hat controller pedal by Hart Dynamics. I plan to MIDI the kit to the recording rig through an Alesis controller and use our ever-expanding sample library as the starting point for all the drum tracks. If need be we can overdub real drums and cymbals later in the iso room.  

Well, the chores aren't gonna do themselves so I'd better get busy. See ya around. RGS

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On the main desktop we're routing two digital Soundcraft boards, 16 channels each, to a 24 track Alesis hard disk and an Ampex 1-inch 8 track tape machine. The boards are slaved together to operate as one unit and can act independently or as a control surface for the software. Very slick. The monitors are 8-inch Mackies and the headphone mixer is a 4-way stereo Behringer unit, though I'll probably add another one at some point. We're not going to worry too much about outboard hardware for EQ and effects: the digital mixers have plenty of goodies onboard, as does the computer. We opted to go with Emu software-based sampling, too, and Kevin is mastering it as I write this.