Alchemy Setup

Its been a long way since I first started playing bass till the point I'm today where I produce electronic music.
Here are some of the changes I've experienced in my setup since I started.

First I bought a crappy but very decent sounding Hyundai bass. pretty solid stuff for the prize I payed ($500 argetine pesos) and was rocking the hell out of it on a 20w fender guitar amp LOL. Once I got more serious with music I bought a decent bass amp and in 2008 I bought my precious Fender Jaguar Bass, pretty dope upgrade!

(not actual photo)
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After listening a lot of Dream Theater and the weird awesome sounds played by Jordan Rudess i got a lot of interest in synthesizer and thought, damn, I'm sure this sounds can be done in my computer! so i downloaded a trial version of ableton and a lot of soft synths and started messing around with my computer keyboard. One day I stumbled across this video



Needles to say due to my low budget and being cautious if this was just an impulse of the moment I bought this beast!

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I started to learn about Ableton, reason and different software watching tons of video and stuff.
Soon I started to listen to electronic music, mainly deadmau5 at the time, afterwards daft punk and justice and fell in love with the merge between rock and electronic these last two made. Starting to go to electronic parties Djing also got my interest. By this time I discovered DJTechTools, currently one of my biggest inspirations for material and information.

So, wanting something portable and cheap my setup evolved to this.
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At this point I was making crappy mixes on traktor with my desktop PC which had two stereo outputs and I could monitor. However I was completely in love with Ableton and production so I turned my atention to making Dj mixes on it. I was making my Dj mixes on ableton running 4 channels, controlled with the nanokontrol and firing clips with my nanokey and a red box script I downloaded from the internet. This was pretty awesome and my game went up a lot.

Paying more attention to production I bought a M-Audio fast track pro as I wanted to record my bass, play with vocoders and other stuff.

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After making some mixes, a promoter here in Buenos Aires listened to one of them and called me to play a gig at a pretty important club here. I was psyched but I didn't have a laptop to take to the gig so I borrowed by brothers computer and installed everything and went to the club and played with the fast track, nanokontrol and nanokey.

After this a friend of mine lent me his M-Audio keystudio 49 and was an incredible jump in my "studio" passing from the nanokey to a full sized 49key midi piano. Also I wanted to replace my nanokey for firing clips in my gigs so I bought a launchpad.

As I got deeper into production I started to experiment the limitations of my desktop computer, and after working for a couple of months and selling a bunch of stuff I bought a 13' macbook pro.

One of the experiments I tried to do at this point:
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Pretty fun live stuff for playing around at home, though it was pretty tough to try to do so many things at the same time live for an audience.

By this time I was making all of my music on a pair of decent edifier computer speaker but I wanted to take my studio mixing to another level so again, I saved till I could buy a pair of KRK Rokit 5 studio monitors.

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As I generated more and more studio material I felt the urge of making a sort of live performance, this was the setup I started to use. A friend of mine came from the US and brought my the korg monotron to make some weird analog sounds.

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After a while I started to feel the limitations of the nanokontrol, so I found a pretty good deal on a nearly new Behringer BCR2000. My last acquisition.

Here is the "live" part of my studio which is located to the right of my main screen monitor so i can easily manage everything. (More clear photo soon)

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And the production part with my best tool. A beefy simple mouse!

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Well this was a bit of my history of how I evolved in music making!
Hope you like it!