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 $H!T about 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
No1: for improved acoustics and
No2 : so that with access panels under the floor the like
800 cables for these patch panels here or the 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. And the gear in here is freaking unreal
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 Orgy"
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 lan Center because why wouldn't you need a lan 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 Storinator 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 NAS advice
So I got him hooked up with the guys at unRAID 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
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