Gadgetory

welcome to the mouse house Joel Zimmerman aka deadmau5 invited us out here to hang for the day and give you guys a peek at the tech setup of one of the world's most iconic electronic music artists spoiler alert this guy is a big huge nerd and this place is flippin awesome okay now I know everybody else setting foot into this castle would start with the you know taxidermy route with oh I don't know the taxidermy room or maybe the garage of supercars but not me I'm starting where the magic happens if you know what I mean the master bedroom and that is an entirely appropriate thing in this case because deadmau5 has turned it into one of the only Dolby Atmos Nick studios outside of Dolby themselves you actually need a special black box that he wouldn't tell me serve out in addition to the nine custom-made speakers from ATC that are perfectly positioned in the room in order to master audio in 3d space remember Atmos can scale to hundreds of speakers surrounding the viewer this room have actually been under construction for three years and it's still not quite done but it's really close I mean to be clear slapping a Macbook on the table and chilling out to some sick jams in here is as the kids say dope AF but it's about like playing cs:go on a super computer compared to what it will be capable of and this is really cool so this entire room is actually suspended from what used to be a vaulted ceiling this was done for a couple of reasons number one for improved acoustics and number two so that with access panels under the floor the like 800 cables for these pad panels here or be like banging you know optical DisplayPort cables for the monitors that are going to be installed here can all be run without disturbing the rooms otherwise pristine aesthetic as the gear in here is freaking on real so the Neve analog console in the center here would run you about a half a million dollars as configured and honestly that just to take in the inputs apply some EQ and compression and adjust levels and check out these walls on the left and right of the center console are different variations of what are called analog modular systems now a lot of folks would produce electronic music exclusively on a computer through software these days but you have to remember that those would be digital reproductions of what is inherently an analogue thing so this wall here is the culmination of over five years of curating and collecting tone generators sequencers filters I mean you name it this one's called the modulation or G how can you not get one of them and Joel was kind enough to give us an in-person demo of how something like this works so here's my hip and then plug it into there and then that's the input and then we want to go give you an 80 DB output for a filter so I'm just going from one module to the other if I just say and oh now I want to change the pitch of it to be like a tune right so this is a 1v acht which means one volt per octave I can get these little nuances of turning these analog dials and creating these sounds that subconsciously you probably know aren't quite right you know which is me now he obviously doesn't use that for everything I mean it's the digital era but from an artistic standpoint what's great is having options an apply voltage on a stepless dial provides practically speaking infinite options which I guess leads us into why there are over a dozen synthesizers in this room now to the stupid layperson one middle C equals another middle C but that is not the case all of these have different tonal properties and many of them have unbelievable stories this Juno 106 worth about 1,500 bucks he got for $20 at a pawn shop from some guy who didn't know what it was this Jupiter 8 and this prophet 10 down here these are really really hard to get your hands on today because they were built in the seventies using components that even if the manufacturer wanted to they couldn't build this stuff again because that stuff's not available today and they have this unique retro tonality that like for example when they went to do stranger things they had to use this equipment because we still don't have the capability to emulate what B sound like electronically but these guys would have gone for a couple hundred bucks in the 70s now there were tens of thousands of dollars this one that folds up in a briefcase right here this is r2d2 I don't mean this is the same model that was our 2d - this was our 2d - it still works and to say this place sounds freaking amazing would be felling it short I mean I only even got to listen to a couple of tracks on the stereo speakers but my god it is an audio listening experience the likes of which I have never come even close to and all of that that's just the surface level let's head down to the dungeon of this modern-day castle first up is the land center because why wouldn't you need a land center in your basement this is a boat as tricked-out as it gets five a small form-factor custom-built machines from Nvidia with the case is customized by PC junkie mugs to match get this to match Joel's cars every single one of them is also running a black magic micro 4k camera for game streaming and the capture machine for his game streaming setup here is actually running under this like center pentagram console thing that I'm standing on and it's hooked into their 10 gigabit home networking solution you heard me right I found the only other person in Canada with a server room in his freaking house I couldn't be more excited to tell you that it's actually quite a little bit maybe quite a bit better than mine not that it's the competition not that I'm upset it's just that that is where the two gigabit internet connection comes in from the 103 foot Tower with ubiquity freaking dishes on the top out in the yard this one right here this is a custom box with six beams and vineya Tesla's in it that sounds like a freaking jet taking off and this guy right here this 45 drive store inator is actually the reason this was the this was the springboard for this whole collab because Joel reached out to me about a year ago now asking for some math advice so I got him hooked up with the guys at unrep and now he's all set up with 70 terabytes of of course highly expandable storage for all of his music and actually not come to think of it do music files really take up that much space would you even know now of course they don't but the answer the real answer is really freaking cool now I have to confess I never really gave a lot of thought to well how do the graphics on the cube or the helmet sync with the music I just assumed that it was farmed out to some expensive Hollywood production house and that it was just kind of done by magic but no Joel and his team actually build a lot of these tools and effects in-house including 3d modeling so most of those gaming machines over there like when there are no friends over playing rocket League are actually being used as render nodes and this is in addition to the Tesla's in the server room there are a total of I think it's 43 NVIDIA GPUs in this house that are all used for rendering so one of the animations for the cube that Joel showed us was actually recorded using motion cap from like his Microsoft Kinect then he used a model from non-stock night redid the head and animated it using cinema 4d then rendered it out using octane and the visualizations and the synchronization to like the head which by the way I absolutely did get to where there is exactly as much sweat in there as you would imagine we're designed by him and his crew as well and if you're a networking nerd this is where it gets even cooler so this massive touchscreen that's a relic of Microsoft's acquisition of perceptive pixel they're only four in the world by the way can be used through the network and some custom software that him the team developed to allow audio effects and animations to be controlled in real time on a massive touchscreen so pretty much the entire show can be run out of this box with a couple of map pros with this nifty mount on it and this front house mixer well I hope that this whole thing has been at least 30% of fun for you guys as it has been for me because I think it's been pretty fucking fun thank you to you guys for watching thank you so much - oh he's standing out in the in the driveway over there but he's waving he I definitely had permission to do all of this thanks to Joel for allowing us to hang out here for the day and I guess that's pretty much it if you like this video hit that like button if you really like it get subscribed maybe consider checking out our merch store which has blue shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join