I needed to write music to a trapeze performance of a friend of mine, who lives some 500 kilometres away. I could’ve used the microphone of the laptop, and let it record the stuff from speakers, but that would’ve resulted in lousy audio quality. So, I started looking for a way to get audio from … Read more
Our live streaming schematic looks like this. Yours will be different, but this might help you understand how to route your cables, and how to configure your software. Download the full size image of the audio & video routing schematics. Audio routing In our case, we have audio coming from different sources. The audio signals … Read more
Genesis Pro has made a lot of headlines lately, mainly due to its incredibly low 1€ price tag. It sure is more like a symbolic price, but if it sounds anything as awesome as in the preview video, OzSoft is set to make some serious money. On the video, Ummet plays a bunch of the … Read more
At Unzyme, we have recently concentrated on not using so many 3rd party software synthesizers, and use mostly Ableton’s own instruments. We have 3-4 laptops on stage, which all run Ableton Live, so having updated licenses for all those computers becomes a hassle, and expensive. Having less software instruments also allows easier collaboration between band members … Read more
We just ordered two Cameo UVBar 200 IR blacklight fixtures to spice up the Unzyme experiments. The idea is to use some blacklight strobe effects in songs. The lab coats should look pretty cool in UV light. We already had four stands for Stairville LED Bars, and wanted to hang the new blacklight fixtures to … Read more
Ville injects some beat repeat effects to his biomechanical drum kit. Fabio appears in a cameo role. The system fails us once again. Daniel gets accustomed to the strange ways of the mixer and the anomalies of the MOTU sound card.
A new worm is born (via meiosis). The worm gets a new, lovely violet dress. A balance is found. Lighting system gets a new standard positioning, DMX fixtures are color tagged and their positions mapped. Songs get played.
We are a three-person band playing biomechanical pop. We have live vocals, live keyboards, live drums and a backing track. In addition, we have pre-programmed lighting systems for each song. How is all this put together? Our live system has migrated from a very simple collection of separate sound modules to a more integrated mesh of … Read more
We record every experiment on at least two GoPro cameras. The main purpose of this is to see how the performance actually looked like, and what could be done better. This is especially great in post mortem situations, when something has gone terribly wrong. It’s the black box of failed experiments. But it’s not just for … Read more
In an earlier rant I talked about the current MacBooks being a bad choice for musicians. Now Apple has decided to make things even worse. They have decided to make it more portable, at a very fucking high cost of performance and connectivity. It will also suck to use these computers for any kind of … Read more
When I bought my first MacBook Pro 17 inch model, it was the best option I could find. It was fast, it had a big screen and it was upgradable. That’s not the case these days. MacBooks have become very inconvenient for live musicians and music producers. MacBooks lack USB ports Musicians usually need a … Read more
This is a post from the perspective of me, Ville (the drum guy), on our two gigs in Synapsi with Hocico in August 2014. The diary includes lots of technical stuff, which might be out of the interest-range of many people – all the technical mumbojumbo is therefore written in italic. Unzyme played at Synapsi for the … Read more
On December 9th we did a web-only broadcast of an experiment, during which a fan of us reminded of the lack of ambient light. The cameras (webcams especially) don’t perform well in darkness. Our solution was to resort to our old “lighting system” to get more ambient light. It’s kind of funny that our original … Read more
The long-awaited package from Thomann arrived to the Unzyme test facilites about a week ago. The package included two American DJ Dekkers, two Stairville Led Floodlight 150s, a Stairville 1500 strobe and the SF-1000 fog machine from the same manufacturer, a bunch of DMX cables (aka XLR cables) and an Enttec USB DMX converter. Oh, … Read more