This is in my garage the night we finished it. Sorry, the frame rate only catches about half of the led hits. This gives a good idea how the pitch wheels work with Ableton…

Here it is with the band Family Force 5 on the Warped Tour this summer…

Photo taken – Summer of 2001

Other ways I’ve moved on:

1. Monstrosity of an electronics setup.
   • SP202 sampler.  Ancient.
   • Both an Alesis DMPro (for the sub kick sound) and a D4 (for the click sound (the Tama triggered the D4)).
   • MIDI loom both to and from the 50lb Drum Kat.  Professionally loomed with cheap blue, green, and white electrical tape.
   • Two Mixers, harder to see is the blue Rolls mixer in the rack
2. Percussion
   • Woodblock – I do not miss it. You shouldn’t either.
   • Cowbell – I should bring this back.
   • Tambourine – The Hi Hat mic is really competing for space now.
   • Wind Chimes!!!
3. Other
   • I used to organize my stick bag.
   • My ride was mounted vertically (and it’s a Z-Custom!)
   • Extra pedals – Subkick and bank change switch.
   • Splash Cymbal – Shane Wilson won’t give this one back.

If there’s something I’ve missed.  Let me know.

I’m calling this a work in progress because for now i am still working out bugs and leaving hogan’s rig untouched until we decide if this route is stable enough to rely on full time. Hogan and I talked about eventually having his rig minimized with maybe a 303 sampler for a few sounds and loops he needs to run with the turntables and his synth setup. So far I am pretty impressed as ableton has not had one glitch or foul (any errors so far have been mine (sweet!)).

One of the biggest advantages to using ableton is having my click and loops locked in at all times. I can bring loops in and out of songs and all the while the click never changes. Also, ableton’s editing and clip features makes any changes to loops or arrangements quick and painless.

I’m using an edirol fa-101 as my audio and midi interface as well as my monitoring system and mixer. The hardware monitoring feature allows me to mix any of the four stereo inputs (eight if mono) with any audio from ableton to the headphone out. So my monitor mix from the engineer goes into inputs 1/2 and loops from hogan are in 7/8. I’m sending the loops from ableton out of 3/4 and the click out 5 using aux sends in ableton. Doing it this way I can monitor the loops directly and still have control of the amount i’m sending to the band both for loops and click. The spd-s is sending its midi into the edirol fa-101 to control ableton.

The little silver device is a griffin powermate. It is basically a simple usb volume knob, but I’ve implemented it as a scroll wheel and launch button for live. In its preferences you can have it send keystrokes so i used that to cursor up and down through scenes in ableton. The controller next to that is an original oxygen 8 that i’ve cut down to just the controller section and recased in plywood (kind of a temporary solution inspired by frugalpole’s stimey controller). I also removed the spring from the pitch bend wheel so i could use it as a volume fader along with the mod wheel. Eventually i want to make it a little smaller (maybe an electronincs project box) and replace all the knobs with faders and turn the key inputs into launch buttons.

Here is the back of it…

edit: i forgot to mention that i’m using a lexar lightning jump drive to hold the samples which makes latency from the drive practically nothing. copenhagen talked about this in another thread so i tried and it worked great. i got the lexar lightning because it boasts the most bandwidth, which is important for streaming audio. at this point the only latency i’m dealing with now is about 7ms of midi latency from the drum controller.

we did a track today that needed a really big fat beat throughout. no need for toms, just a fat beat. so we took the toms away and brought out the 14×8 (big!) snare that matches the 24×16 (also big!) kick drum that were provided by kieth at risen drums. they are sounding huge. i can’t wait for all to hear. also i used a set of hats that we’re given to me by my neighbor growing up. she’s kinda the reason i started playing in the first place. these hats are pretty trashed. they are not hand hammered. more like hammered by kids for the last 30 years. and they are thin to begin with. she gave me an entire kit that is a japanese student model from the late 60’s. the original heads are still intact. you could not get their sound anywhere else. go listen to “beautiful collision” if you want a reference. i’ll have pictures for them tommorow maybe.

We played about a month ago at a church in Austin where a good friend of ours is the pastor. I used the church’s kit that night and it had a Yamaha Copper Snare. I loved it. All the attack and “crack” of a Ludwig Black Beauty but with warmer tones and a little lower pitch. This copper drum was on ebay pretty cheap so I couldn’t resist. The hammering and cast hoops only makes it darker and warmer. It was immediately used on the first two tracks we did “Can You Feel It” and “For A Thousand Tongues”.

Dan Hamilton of The Robbie Seay Band has an old Rogers Wood Dynasonic – Superten hybrid that has been a staple of Crowder records. I think it can be heard at its finest on “All Creatures” on Illuminate, but it has been used on numerous tracks over the years in many, many different ways. It’s basically a wood Dynasonic shell with Superten hardware, which I’ve read was a common thing to do in the seventies. It sounds fantastic. Anyway, I wanted one bad but thay are hard to find and pretty expensive, so i had Kieth at Risen Drums build me a clone. Ten Ply maple shell with reinforcement hoops, with a completely round bearing edge. It’s 14×6.5 and I think it really compares well to the original Rogers. We used it on “Glory of it All”.

I should also note that Kieth at Risen finished the drums from “A Collision”. We were gonna do a cloth wrap that was gonna look very vintage (like they had sat out in a barn for a hundred years) but it didn’t work out. So we did this kinda 70’s retro green fade with silver sparkle which looks crazy good. It has 24×16 and 26×14 kick drums (very big) and 12 14 and 16 inch toms. he also made a 14×8 snare to go with it.

I’ll post a lot more pics when it is finished…

other inspirations:
http://www.anti-theory.com
http://highlyliquid.com
http://frederic.letaconnoux.free.fr/cpg135/thumbnails.php?album=27
http://electro-music.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=76364#76364
http://www.jz-server.de/forum2/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?233