Hardware is wonderful, but make no mistake about it: many musicians have put the same care and musical love into their software setup as once was limited to tangled guitar pedal rigs. We’ve been watching as intricate computer music studios appear in the CDM Flickr pool.

proem, the gifted electronic musician from Austin, Texas (see Wikipedia, proem’s own site) who regular shares haiku-like reflections in CDM comments, is the latest to post his setup:

• Dual Dell e207 LCD displays
• Windows PC
• FL Studio (aka Fruity Loops), with a custom dashboard for controlling all the hardware and a modded install
• Native Instruments Komplete
• Evolution MK249-c keyboard (Evolution was a UK-based keyboard maker later absorbed by M-Audio)
• M-Audio Trigger Finger
• Wacom Intuos3 6×8 (just picked up the same tablet myself and adore it — mouse, begone!)
• The now-discontinued (sadly) Fingerworks iGesture multi-touch controller. Apple iGuesture any time soon, perhaps? (I’ve heard rumors from a couple of sources that they bought the patents.)
• The not-discontinued Shuttle XPress
• Tablet2MIDI, which translates Wacom graphics tablets to MIDI data for use in performance

DIY music can be as much about attitude as specific gear. We had performances Friday and Saturday night during the Maker Faire, and while the performances covered quite a gamut, a common theme was finding new ways of playing old instruments, or to make new instruments out of existing stuff. That’s something not unique to anyone genre — electronic music included — so perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising at all.

Friday night was a Maker Faire “edition” of the regular Robotspeak Sessions electronic music night. The venue is an incredibly cool little electronic music store on lower Haight. Imagine a dream store filled with both vintage gear and the newest stuff, and you’ve got Robotspeak; it’s unreal. Saturday night was the Maker Faire “Chips + Music + Fish after party”, which I planned with the help of Make Magazine’s Paul Spinrad. It turned out to be just as insane as I thought trying to run an event in the middle of Maker Faire, but we had some terrific artists. (And yes, the fish and chips turned out to be the greasiest thing I’ve ever eaten, but tasty!) The venue was a wonderfully quirky place called Edinburgh Castle, and the best part of the evening for me was that we ran into one of the members of a great band called Echodrone that happened to have a projector. He was playing vintage training films on electricity, which we got to watch run behind Barney’s massive home-built Theremin. (See above.)

I don’t believe music should be about gear (surprising as that may be given the site I run), but I do believe you can tell a lot just by looking at the tools musicians choose. Here’s an overview of the artists we encountered.

If I can do it, you can do it. Over on the just-launched Create Digital Motion, I describe assembling a custom PC from a barebones Shuttle case, with photos of each step. To keep that from getting boring, I dropped it all into the fantastic plasq app Comic Life to make it into a how-to comic:

Building a Portable SFF PC for Live Visuals, Music Gigs: Part 1, Assembly in Comic Book Form

As you’ll see, there’s not much to it. Shuttle already includes the motherboard and cables; it’s BYO processor, storage, and graphics. But those options alone can give you a lot of flexibility you don’t get from pre-built systems.

We’ve talked a lot about options for gigging with computers on this site. Laptops remain the most portable alternative by far, of course, and they’ve gotten very powerful. As I noted for Macworld, the MacBook Pro can keep pace with even my dual-2.5GHz G5. So why have I suddenly shifted gears and built a desktop form factor PC? One major reason is the ability to have an upgradeable video card for gigs, which is why the story is on CDMotion rather than here. Sure, Apple will ship a competent ATI Radeon Mobility X1600, but you have to splurge on the Pro rather than the MacBook, there’s only one card with one output, and it’s not upgradeable.

Video aside, there are plenty of reasons mainstream audio users might consider a desktop form factor machine for music production:

It’s not about pissing contests with who can get the biggest rack of gear any more, evidently. While some of us CDMer can’t stop collecting computers (see the forum thread on that), many are looking for a minimal setup that lets them focus on actually, you know, making music. These setups often aren’t just minimal for the sake of it; going on the road or moving from one house to another often requires sacrifices at least temporarily, and that should be no reason to give up your daily music creation dose. (See last week’s mobile guitar rig roundup for more thoughts on that.) We got to see Billboard-topping remixer Francis Preve’s setup on Friday; here are some more:

My friend Francis Preve sends pictures and details of his new “convertible” studio. He claims this is shameless self-promotion, but I call it aesthetic envy — and for another reason to be envious, Gabriel & Dresden’s Tracking Treasure Down (for which he did a remix) just hit #1 on the Billboard Club Charts. Not too shabby, saying you have a #1 single. Maybe it’s the shoes. Maybe it’s this studio. I love the slim-line M-Audio keyboard in a drawer.

Fran sends the details, for your enjoyment:

Now having seen fold-up guitars in briefcases, here’s another approach to what to put in your portable guitar rig, from our friend Kevin Johnsrude of The Nettles. Kevin plays both bass and guitar, but he has a more portable rig so he can play music everywhere. Kevin writes:

In the photo:

The diagonal headless guitar is an old-school Traveler headless guitar minus
the knee rest.

The purple box is a Korg Pandora with tuner, multiple effects, crummy
sampler/looper and drum tracks. I have a modified jazz guitar dialled-in for
most of my practice and I use the drum tracks for my metronome when I’m not
playing with recordings.

The headphones are Radio Shack folding headphones.

The small black box is a 1 GB Creative Nano which holds all the repertory that
I’m currently practicing plus an audiobook.

Missing from photo:

Shubb capo (which fits on the head of the headless guitar)

iRiver ifp-799T which I keep with my gigging guitar for recording gigs for
future practice. Theoretically, I should be able to hookup a mic to the Nano
but I haven’t bothered with that yet.

~50 double-sided xerox pages of practice tunes.

The nylon carry case which is about the length of a pool cue case but a bit
fatter.

There you have it. Wherever I go, it goes. Life is too short not to play music.

Got a portable guitar/bass rig (or otherwise) you’re proud of? Let me know.

We’ve covered rack rigs for rack-mounting PCs, Power Macs, and even Mac minis for the stage for a while. Now, I’m going to go an extra step, and actually build a machine step-by-step here on CDM. But instead of making a rack-mountable machine, I wanted something even more portable. I want a desktop-class PC I can carry around on a subway. And, no, a laptop ain’t gonna cut it, because I want the whole system to be upgradeable (particularly the video card, for running high-quality 3D visuals simultaneously with sound).

The basis for this machine is already on its way, Shuttle’s SN26P barebone. It’s friendly to my 3D requirements down the road, with two PCI Express x16 slots and SLI. (For those who have no idea what I just said, suffice to say this is an unusually high-end graphics configuration to see in a small form factor PC.) Integrated RAID, FireWire, USB 2.0, and digital audio all keep up with the audio side. But the whole package fits in a backpack (which Shuttle also makes). The one thing you lose with a laptop, of course, is an integrated display. Carrying around cheap LCDs is a no-no, because they aren’t generally built to move, but fortunately Shuttle has that base covered, too. If I do this successfully, the result should be a dual-boot Linux/Windows audio/visual “performance fragbox.” After calling Shuttle, I learned plenty have gone this route already, including a recent Native Instruments tour for Traktor. (They used the SN25, minus the beefed-up graphics capabilities, which makes sense for an audio software developer.)

I’m spec’ing out what goes inside, so if you have any requests of gear you’d like to see in the CDM Mobile Dream Machine, hit comments.

Oh, and don’t worry — my Macs aren’t going anywhere. (Actually, that was the initial problem. Yes, I’m looking at you, Power Mac G5.)

As always, stay tuned . . . and watch for special YouTube videos of me struggling like an idiot with a screwdriver. Okay, maybe not.

Now that the rest of our studio has gone digital, the approach to producing score for acoustic instruments has changed, too. Here’s a look at some of my favorite toys and tools for keeping music flowing.

You’d have to be a true Luddite to argue that word processors are bad for writing. Blogs, perhaps, sometimes inspire poor writing (ahem), but it’s more difficult to blame technology. The original argument that word processors would end the process of drafting and revision is absurd to anyone who’s spent long hours slaving over text in Microsoft Word. Our attitudes have changed as we’ve grown accustomed to the technology.

When it comes to music notation, though, there’s still an uncomfortable relationship between composers and computer scoring. That’s understandable: producing a score is a lot more involved than typing words, and even with modern software filled with keyboard shortcuts, scoring music is slow in any medium. But, even as some traditionalist composition teachers preach against the “evils” of computer notation (you know who you are), I think computers are becoming part of an elaborate digital creation process, even for composers working on entirely acoustic scores. Leaving out the tried-and-true methods of drinking tea/coffee, stopping for sandwich breaks, and outright procrastination, here are the tools I consider essential to my studio:

Thomas Dolby’s blog continues to induce rabid gear lust. After drooling over Mr. Dolby’s live rig and repurposed vintage MIDI controller, we now get a glimpse at Johnny DeKam’s live video rig. (Kevin Johnsrude caught this one, and reminds us that “envy is one of the seven deadly sins.” Better keep that in mind.)

Actually, we can divide this into “things to envy” and “things to note.”

Thomas Dolby is on the road again after 15 years. And how times have changed: unlike the year 1991, the year 2006 means he can blog the whole tour. For starters, he’s posted the gory details of his performance rig “for the geeks and musicians out there.” (You called?)

1. Power Mac G5 Dual 2.0 GHz, to be replaced with a MacBook Pro when everything gets ported to Intel
2. MUSE Receptor for still more plug-in hosting
3. Logic Pro 7.2 acts as a MIDI host (for outboard hardware synths and plug-ins), plug-in host, and (primarily) playback device for presequenced backup tracks
4. Stylus-RMX plug-in for loops, thanks to the fact that you can queue up irregular loops
5. Built-in Logic plugs, plus more: Arturia’s MiniMoog, RMIV drums, Slayer2 guitars, UltraFocus, Camelspace gating effect, T-racks mastering.
6. Rack: UPS power backup, PreSonus Firepod FireWire audio interface, MOTU MIDI interface, Nord 3 racked synth
7. Keyboard controllers: Three of them, no less: CME Pro 7 (now distributed by Yamaha), Novation ReMote SL25 (which automaps nicely to Logic), and the Virus TI Polar. The Virus is the only sound source.
8. M-Audio Trigger Finger for drums, samples, muting and unmuting tracks.
9. Vintage gear retrofitted for MIDI: Knobs on old oscilloscopes and signal generators controlling soft synth parameters? Now, that’s cool. (Wouldn’t you do something like that if you were Thomas Dolby?)