Beats & bugs & brains & bullets

Another super busy week at work this week, as my current game heads to Alpha. Not too upset by the extra workload though, as I had a good weekend making music, completing two new tracks. Things will hopefully get a bit quieter next week though, so I can continue working on new stuff in the studio, and also spend a bit of time with House of the Dead: Overkill, which I just ordered from amazon uk (It won't be released here in Germany)! Looks like a lot of fun from the trailer, I totally love the way they've pitched it, even if it is clearly very Grindhouse influenced. The engine for the game was licenced from my previous employer, so there are even going to be some (very) tiny fragments of my code in there somewhere! :)

The crazy increase in web traffic here seems to have died down to more typical levels now - still no idea what triggered that! Looks like it may have encouraged some renewed interest in my releases going by the latest iTunes reports, although I have to wait a while for proper numbers to come through. Thanks to everyone who has been supporting my music over the last couple of weeks though, every sale slowly gets me closer to buying some new studio gear! One cheaper little addition I'm really tempted by is the pro upgrade for Novation's automap software.. Being able to map controls to send keystrokes sounds like it would help integrating the controller with renoise, since renoise doesn't have the usual support for transport controls. Will hopefully get sometime to try it all out next week (inbetween sessions of blood soaked zombie filled violence, obviously... Oh, and that reminds me, new Walking Dead and Invincible books out in a couple of weeks!)

Studio2009

Recently I finally got round to setting up a second monitor on my machine here at home, and thought I'd use that as an excuse to show you all where it is I do all my music currently. As you can see, a pretty modest looking set up.

Let's take a full tour of the image! Just left of centre you see my old monitor, set up with a 90 degree rotation so I can offload a few plug ins there from the main screen, and have it as a virtual rack. With any luck, in a couple of years I can replace this with a (multi?)touch screen version, and have an even more virtual rack kind of experience! Until then, there's still the SL25 underneath there, for midi control and keyboard duties. The main monitor is a 19" monster, a gift from Petra, which you can see is running the greatest tracker of all time, Renoise.

Above that and to the right, you can see the miserable excuse of a speaker set up.. I've had this crappy hifi for over ten years now, and everything on it is broken, except for the speakers and audio input, which thankfully is all I need from it these days. Maybe it would be better if it broke, would be the push I need to finally get me some proper audio monitors..

And finally, up top you can see the print picture my brother gave me for my 30th birthday, of the late great John Peel. Having him watching over me kind of makes me feel a little under pressure at times. The little quote on there is typical Peel.. "I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that sounded better when I played it the other night, at the wong speed". Awesome stuff.

One other thing for today, while wanting to upload the above photo (which btw I didn't have space for on my hosting account, so have just set up a flicker account), I noticed that there was a bit of a spike in traffic over the last couple of days.. Quite a large spike.. Like, 700Mb downloaded in the space of two days. And I don't have that many tracks on here to download, so that's way over the normal amount! Not quite sure what caused the rush of traffic, but if you have a clue, drop a comment here, I'm curious to know!