Deadmau5's mansion and its tech setup [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBiqFNNfudA

by dthakur • 9 years ago

71 60 9 years ago

youtube.com

pier252• 9 years ago

The studio is awesome, but that mac mansion though...

ethbro• 9 years ago

It's McMansion... it's faux British, not faux Scottish. (Yeesh!)

howard941• 9 years ago

It may be an allusion to McDonald's...

pier252• 9 years ago

I've always seen it written "Mac" and not "Mc"

You are right though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMansion

raverbashing3• 9 years ago

"and its tech setup" is the correct form

kleer0016• 9 years ago

I'm pretty underwhelmed. It's a lot of fun toys, but IMHO that's borderline adolescent/masturbatory. Not even sour grapes, I swear, but I bet that massive modular analog synthesizer setup gets zero use. Conspicuous consumption plain and simple. Yuck. But that's me. I'm more impressed by some poor schlub in Echo Park with an old Roland sampler and a dozen crates of vinyl.

There must be a pithy term in German for what I'm trying to point at.

noonespecial• 9 years ago

It's almost as if the first creative acts that get artists like this their fame are acts of desperation, undertaken against impossible odds.

Later when fame and money comes, the artist buys more and more tools in a fruitless chase to recapture the previous glory but he can't because the fame and money prevent him from ever again having the one thing that made his first works awesome... desperation.

handedness2• 9 years ago

The best art is often produced under great constraints, something that usually disappears after commercial success.

kleer0016• 9 years ago

If only there was a morality play somewhere we could have learned this lesson /s

twiceaday• 9 years ago

Or is it simply that public focus is limited and ever shifting. Artists cannot recapture the previous glory because it is fickle.

handedness2• 9 years ago

Not German, but nouveau riche pretty well covers it.

anotheryou• 9 years ago

german: neureich

rhinoceraptor2• 9 years ago

IIRC, he said (in his MasterClass series) the synth lead on Cat Thruster is an analog synth patch.

munificent2• 9 years ago

an old Roland sampler and a dozen crates of vinyl.

That's conspicuous consumption as well, just of a different flavor.

Tracking down a working vintage sampler and a pile of rare groove records is a large investment in both money and time.

kleer0016• 9 years ago

It's not CC. The scale of value is off by several orders of magnitude. Drop me in any large city in the world and I can hunt those things down in a day for less than a $1000. Heck, I could probably do a limited run of mix tapes for that too.

The story in my head is the sampler was a thrift store find or a high school graduation gift and all the vinyl is from their dad or uncle (rare 70s grooves). Poor people can have nice things too.

edkennedy2• 9 years ago

He livestreams himself using the modular all the time...

kleer0016• 9 years ago

Thank goodness! And thanks for correcting me.

He must just dilligently clean up the wires.

theSpaceOctopus2• 9 years ago

There must be a pithy term in German for what I'm trying to point at.

Saure Trauben

kleer0016• 9 years ago

Not at all. I'd love to have any of that kit, it's aces.

kristofferR3• 9 years ago

I'll be honest - he seems to be a prime example of someone focusing too much on the tools rather than the creative process.

All his best, legendary, stuff came way before he got this awesome setup, his recent stuff hasn't been very well received. You don't need a ton of expensive equipment to create excellent electronic music.

JohnJamesRambo• 9 years ago

George Lucased.

AndrewKemendo• 9 years ago

As a former amateur audio engineer I really liked seeing all the analog modulators, and putting them all in one area is crazy.

I see it as the equivalent of a shoe closet for sneakerheads. He can finally afford all the cool super tech audio engineering stuff he's always wanted but makes little impact on the output and popular success.

kristofferR3• 9 years ago

My point was actually that it seems to have a negative impact on his output.

swiley2• 9 years ago

The modern musical instrument is a diaphragm controlled by a stream of real valued position samples.

There's absolutely no need for anything complex to play it, you can write simple C programs to generate all kinds of bizarre and beautiful effects.

strgrd• 9 years ago

What is your point? Are you implying that people thought electronic music was otherwise difficult or expensive to produce? Did you think people didn't know you could write code to generate sound?

...Or are you just being reductive and showing off your programming knowledge?

rhinoceraptor2• 9 years ago

Analog synths are a good way to differentiate though. It would be very difficult to replicate an analog synth patch even if you knew exactly how it was set up.

crispyambulance• 9 years ago

In principle, you're mostly right. And its true, there are folks who do make music entirely on their laptops, successfully, and a lot of it.

There's a visceral, physical aspect to music-making, however, that begs for tactile feedback. Some people really need that out of their instruments. That's why, in the case of electronic music, the big old modulars are making a comeback.

raverbashing3• 9 years ago

True, in theory

Now create a C program that reproduces a person singing, with all the variables that a real singer can act upon

kinkrtyavimoodh• 9 years ago

And all of visual arts is thousands of colored pixels which can be arranged at will with something as simple as MS Paint.

Your comment comes across as reductive grandstanding.

edkennedy2• 9 years ago

There are two discussions that have been beaten to death many a time on any forum discussing production of electronic music:

Hardware vs Software (which I would compare to the discussion of a data center in the cloud vs hardware on premise)

and Analog vs Digital

Everyone loves to think they are controversial...

rotexo• 9 years ago

It is true that simple software can generate interesting audio effects. However, I think the parent comment underestimates the appeal of modular synthesizers.

I really believe that there are sounds that are achievable most easily with a modular system. One example that springs to mind: the west-coast school of additive analog synthesis often uses circuits classified as low-pass gates (more or less combining the low-pass filters and voltage-controlled amplifiers of east-coast subtractive synthesis). SuperCollider is one of the most actively-developed systems for experimental audio synthesis, and the only plugin emulating low-pass gates I’ve found is in one of the SuperCollider developers’ personal sandbox repo. A google search indicates that apparently someone has written a PureData low-pass gate emulator, but I can’t speak to its quality. My point is, not everyone who wants to try to make music in one of these systems is going to want to write their own C++ or FAUST plugins, or compile a buggy early version of a plugin. So it seems to me that if you want to just make the sound, a eurorack modular system might be the most accessible way to do so.

And I also think the music people make using modular systems is ideally consumed in a manner very different from, say, EDM tracks on soundcloud or spotify. If you are in the bay area, I highly recommend attending Robotspeak’s regular Church of the Super-Serge concerts to get a sense of this (one performance I enjoyed a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8Xn6IbItT8). Members of the eurorack synthesizers group on facebook are also constantly posting little snippets of modular music. This stuff isn’t for anyone, but it is certainly interesting. Patches people create on modular systems are ephemeral and meditative, so they're often described as sand mandalas. The user explores the capability of their collection of modules, they find an appealing or interesting sound, and develop some minimal accompaniment around that sound. The graph of possible connections in an even medium-sized eurorack system is quite large, and there are many manual controls on each module (at minimum 3-4). “Saving” a patch involves painstakingly recording each knob setting and patch connection. Re-creating a patch exactly is therefore quite challenging. So people leave their system patched, come to the show, and perform a single 10-20 minute long composition. That’s the set. Very idiosyncratic, hit-or-miss, but usually interesting, at least. I hope this conveys some of the unique appeal of putting together a large modular systems.

twii• 9 years ago

Looks a bit like one of JunkyXL's setups. Fortunately for mankind there is no way you can make better music with a setup like this compared to a poor man's basic setup. Most 'poor' people are lost when they happen to become 'rich'. It's a (mouse) trap. You'll see this over and over again..

ehsankia• 9 years ago

That's entirely true, and I don't think he's doing all this "to make better music". But as a true audio geek, that's something that's extremely fun and cool to do if you can afford it. It's like people building insane gaming stations with lots of lights and crazy decoration. It won't make them better gamers, but it's a great hobby.

As mentioned in the video, you can emulate all of these in the computer anyway, but if you've got the money, why not create something cool like this?

kristofferR3• 9 years ago

The video actually claims at 05:10 that they can create sounds that can't be created digitally.

okket• 9 years ago

IMHO the audio nerd version of a huge garage filled with sports cars and old timers.

bcheung• 9 years ago

I'm surprised he doesn't have bigger / more monitors in his studio. Working on a laptop screen as your main display seems lacking—especially compared to everything else.

grabcocque• 9 years ago

My McMansion detector just went wild.

endorphone• 9 years ago

Most elements have a practical purpose, and the overall design serves the interior space needs. I know it's fun to call every modern big house a McMansion, but sometimes it's just a big house, and you have to pick some style for it.

DeadMau5 lives close to me, and I hope it doesn't broach any sort of rules but you can find the sales details by searching up

twiss road campbellville invidiata

Normally it would be uncool to provide an address like this, but Deadmau5 is very, very open about where he lives.

SyneRyder• 9 years ago

In support of your comment, here's a tweet where he posted a satellite view of his house. He also mentioned that it's a "studio complex for actual musicians", which explains why the studio might be filled with more equipment than he actually needs for himself:

https://twitter.com/deadmau5/status/536218804221927424

edraferi• 9 years ago

Cool to see that most of the toys are actually geared to supporting the visual element of his live show. The Lan party / render farm in particular.

iblaine• 9 years ago

Interesting to see a Microsoft Pixel screen in the wild. Those are pretty rare and expensive.

jumpkickhit• 9 years ago

Cool setup. I'd really wonder what Aphex Twin would do with an analog wall like that.

Would be awesome if they ever worked together on something.

wbl2• 9 years ago

We know what ELP could do with that.

housemusic42• 9 years ago

who is ELP? only decent analog stuff i know is from junkie xl and baseck

johnklos• 9 years ago

* its

wf2• 9 years ago

Can someone explain the analog to digital thing he's talking about? Can digital software not reproduce any sounds his boards can make? If not doesn't he just lose all those sounds when he converts the sounds to a digital format, making it a mostly pointless exercise?

i_call_solo• 9 years ago

Digital software is able to reproduce the sounds, the challenge is in the synthesis of it.

wf2• 9 years ago

What does "the challenge is in the synthesis of it" mean?

Deadmau5's mansion and its tech setup [video]

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