
Deadmau5's mansion and its tech setup [video] - dthakur
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBiqFNNfudA
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kristofferR
I'll be honest - he seems to be a prime example of someone focusing too much
on the tools rather than the creative process.

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.

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swiley
The modern musical instrument is a diaphragm controlled by a stream of real
valued position samples.

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.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
And all of visual arts is thousands of colored pixels which can be arranged at
will with something as simple as MS Paint.

Your comment comes across as reductive grandstanding.

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swiley
When was the last time you went somewhere (other than a concert) and saw a
live musician? When was the last time you saw a hung up original painting or
drawing. I see drawings and paintings far more often than musicians,
especially with electronic music.

I think what I've said is fairly accurate, some people just use ready made
software like garage band and feed it samples from "real" instruments,
sometimes they don't, but it doesn't change my point much.

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kleer001
I'm pretty underwhelmed. It's a lot of fun toys, but IMHO that's borderline
adolescent/masturbatory. Not even sour grapes, I swear, but I bet that massive
modular analog synthesizer setup gets zero use. Conspicuous consumption plain
and simple. Yuck. But that's me. I'm more impressed by some poor schlub in
Echo Park with an old Roland sampler and a dozen crates of vinyl.

There must be a pithy term in German for what I'm trying to point at.

~~~
noonespecial
It's almost as if the first creative acts that get artists like this their
fame are acts of desperation, undertaken against impossible odds.

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.

~~~
handedness
The best art is often produced under great constraints, something that usually
disappears after commercial success.

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dajohnson89
Necessity is the mother of invention?

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kleer001
Exactly. Stay hungry. Hunt outside your comfort zone. Break through your
fears. Abandon that which does not serve you. Give it your all. Don't save any
energy for the return trip. No bold knights can flourish in a peaceful
country.

You know the song.

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raverbashing
"and _its_ tech setup" is the correct form

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edraferi
Cool to see that most of the toys are actually geared to supporting the visual
element of his live show. The Lan party / render farm in particular.

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wf
Can someone explain the analog to digital thing he's talking about? Can
digital software not reproduce any sounds his boards can make? If not doesn't
he just lose all those sounds when he converts the sounds to a digital format,
making it a mostly pointless exercise?

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i_call_solo
Digital software is able to reproduce the sounds, the challenge is in the
synthesis of it.

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wf
What does "the challenge is in the synthesis of it" mean?

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petercooper
This is a weak metaphor, but a digital monitor can reproduce a fine work of
art, but _synthesizing_ (or modelling) the look and behavior of real oil
paints digitally is a challenge.

Likewise, getting the algorithms just right and in the right orders and
quantities to replicate everything analog modular synthesizers can do is very
tricky, though theoretically possible.

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iblaine
Interesting to see a Microsoft Pixel screen in the wild. Those are pretty rare
and expensive.

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bcheung
I'm surprised he doesn't have bigger / more monitors in his studio. Working on
a laptop screen as your main display seems lacking—especially compared to
everything else.

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jumpkickhit
Cool setup. I'd really wonder what Aphex Twin would do with an analog wall
like that.

Would be awesome if they ever worked together on something.

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wbl
We know what ELP could do with that.

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housemusic42
who is ELP? only decent analog stuff i know is from junkie xl and baseck

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wbl
Emerson, Lake and Palmer. See
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKNOlDtZluU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKNOlDtZluU)
for some of their bigger works,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iL7p86-2mPo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iL7p86-2mPo)
for something more classical sounding (ok, Xenakis), and
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7NAGTq_IJQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7NAGTq_IJQ)
for an entire orchestra being replaced by three guys and a Moog.

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grabcocque
My McMansion detector just went wild.

~~~
endorphone
Most elements have a practical purpose, and the overall design serves the
interior space needs. I know it's fun to call every modern big house a
McMansion, but sometimes it's just a big house, and you have to pick _some_
style for it.

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.

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SyneRyder
In support of your comment, here's a tweet where he posted a satellite view of
his house. He also mentioned that it's a "studio complex for actual
musicians", which explains why the studio might be filled with more equipment
than he actually needs for himself:

[https://twitter.com/deadmau5/status/536218804221927424](https://twitter.com/deadmau5/status/536218804221927424)

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johnklos
* its

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pier25
The studio is awesome, but that mac mansion though...

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ethbro
It's McMansion... it's faux _British_ , not faux Scottish. (Yeesh!)

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howard941
It may be an allusion to McDonald's...

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darkstar999
Obviously.

