Sunday, June 19, 2011

Abroad DAW & Digital DJ System

Working abroad normally implicates that you do not have the same environment and surroundings like being at home. This includes in my case my lovely wheels of steel and my Ecler HAK310 mixer for Djing. Transporting all this stuff to the Netherlands would have been a mess. There was no other way than really sitting down and think it over cause i don´t want to miss my music and djing. The solution was rather simple and i gave it a shot. To be able to continue with playing around with sounds in a DAW like in Vienna i bought myself a new notebook combined with a small external audio interface from Native Instruments. This enables me to use a digital based system for both, producing and djing. Additional i brought from vienna my old Edirol PCR300 Midikeyboard, the Korg Wavedrum, Zoom H2 Fieldrecorder and my Headphones. The only thing that was really missing was a nice pair of studio monitors, allways using the headphones is a pain in the ass. But fortunatelly Rotterdam is equiped with a professional music store (www.feedback.nl) and they had some KRKs Rokit 5 for me (my wallet was at that day a little bit loose, so i bought a Behringer BCR2000 also). Below two pictures what it looks like when everything was set up in my home:







I´m running Windows 7 Professional 64bit on a HP Elitebook, the Audiostream is routed to the Audio 2DJ from Native Instruments. For producing i´ve installed Ableton Suite and for Djing i´m using Traktor Pro2. In lack of a dedicated DJ Controller i´m still working on a mapping for my PCR300 keyboard. It looks unusual, but in fact it works out quite well. When i´m finished with the mapping i´ll post it.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Sailing

Living next to a windy lake notably implicates the wish to sail. During a dinner at my neighbour, her son offered to borrow me his boat for the last Pfingst weekend. Big big thumbs up!! I had only to pay the harbour fee, which is rather affordable at an amount of 10€ per day (he brought his sailing boat directly to the harbour in front of my house). Luckily my girlfriend Mrs. N visited me the last week, so we could enjoy sailing together.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Mountainbiking without a mountain

To get into better shape (this approach is a little bit like the "tomorrow diet") i try to use my bike as often as possible. This includes rides to site and home again. But to be honest, although the bikeline is nicely routed alongside the Brielse Meer (similar to the Danube Island), i am missing some mountains here in the Netherlands a lot. However, on a lazy sunday i spotchecked a Mountainbike trail around the Ostvoornse Meer, mostly routed on one of the dikes, continuosly seesawing with almost 2 (!!) meter height difference. Doesn´t matter, that´s better than nothing i thought to myself and gave it a shot.