This is the New and Updated page. If you want to see the equipment used
to produce "The Curvature of Space" click here

Master Zap music is made in the ZapTroNic Studio located in - you guessed it - Zap's garage! Here's a little tour of the equipment available in the Studio.

Digital Stuff

Samplers et. al The Ensoniq ASR-X is a powerful sampler/resampler. Mine is fully expanded w. SCSI, 8 extra outputs, 34 Mb of RAM, and the EXP-3 "Urban Dance Project" 24 Mb ROM extension. It's a pretty neat piece of gear. I use it for samples, but also the internal synth, which is pretty durned cool. The FX bit is radical, and with the fully-digital resampling, you can do almost limitless things w. it.... The Ensoniq TS-12 is a powerful workstation of an older Ensoniq vintage. It's main strength is in the built in sounds, it's acoustic section is especially great. As a synth it is neat, but the lack of resonant filters is a big drawback for modern music. Like most Ensoniq Stuff, it has a totally cool FX section which can do wonders with your sounds... I use it for acoustic sounds, pads, and the like... The Casio CZ-101 (sits on top of the rack devices in picture) is a nice old-school digital synth with Casios own whacky "Phase Distortion" synthesis. I use it for all sorts of wierd sounds, and often filter it through the analog filters of some of my oldschool analog synths. The picture is taken as seen from where I sit at my computer (nice view huh?). The computer system is a Dell Dimension 200 XPS Pro system with 80 Megabytes of RAM, 9 Gb of Disk, and containing both a SoundBlaster AWE-32 soundcard (that I use for some drum-samples and other stuff) and an Ensoniq AudioPCI digital audio card I use for recording.

Analog Stuff

My old Analog Machines are my most prized possessions. Here you can see both my big Korg Mono/Poly, a totally deadly analog 4-oschillator superphat machine (just look at all them knobs!), and mounted upright behind it, my very first synth - a Yamaha CS-5, monophonic, analog, but oh so nice....this is the device that started it all! The CS also has an analog in, so I can filter other sounds through it (most often the Casio CZ-101). In my Rack you also find my Roland MKS-50 synth (black thing under the Zoom FX unit), a nice old warm analog thing, good for acidic sweeps, rich lush string sounds, and wierd wobbly things. Just below that is the neat Syntecno Teebee 303, a nice, yellow TB-303 clone, for those essential acid thrills... and it also has ring modulation and filtering of external sources, which makes it very very yummy... The Syntecno also takes care of controllogn (via CV/Gate) my Korg and Yamaha machines... Then there is the "assorted pile of stuff", like my Amiga (left) and my Logan String Melody II (left) really old string synth. Or stuff like my old Kawai R50 and Boss DR-110 drum machines, my old MXR-01 digital reverb, or my (unfortunately broken) Simmons V5 simmons drum synthesizer unit. It's actually the death of this unit that caused me to write Stomper in the first place....

Mixer and Effects

All the mentioned devices (and a few unmentioned), goes into my Fostex 2440 Mixer. The mixer is a very nice thing I picked up cheap; a huge (and I am talking physical size here, 140x85 cm) 24 channel thing of impeccable quality, with dual swept eq's and inserts on all channels, 4 sub busses, mute/solo/pfl, and a gazillion of cute multi-colored knobs to turn! :-) The mixer also feeds my effects units, which include a Zoom 1201 multieffect (WARNING - don't buy one - the Vocoder is cool, but it has 10 dB more noise than even my oldest analog synt!), as well as a couple of old Boss digital delays, a dist unit, an old Hitachi tape deck wired as a dist unit (yes really!), a simple Flanger.... The output is then put through a Homebuilt 2x350W amp and a pair of JMS Unique 3500 speakers. In a garage. It's amazing the frequency curve isn't more skewed than it is... ;-)

The end result....

The output from the Mixer is then fed back into my Computer, through the Ensoniq AudioPCI card and recorded in impeccable 16 bit 44 khz glory. The very same computer which runs CakeWalk Pro Audio 6.01 sequencing software to drive the whole thing! The noise is then processed in SoundForge or CoolEdit, and eventually, when I'm satisfied, burned to CD-R's with my Teac R55S CD Writer, for your enjoyment!

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