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.
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?
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.
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.
Your comment comes across as reductive grandstanding.
...Or are you just being reductive and showing off your programming knowledge?
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.
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...
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.
Now create a C program that reproduces a person singing, with all the variables that a real singer can act upon
There must be a pithy term in German for what I'm trying to point at.
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.
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.
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.
He must just dilligently clean up the wires.
Saure Trauben
You are right though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMansion
Would be awesome if they ever worked together on something.
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.
