CRAZY Music Battlestations Reactions | Setup Reacts Episode 3

Guys, big news. We made it to the third episode of Setup Reacts. And today we’re going to be looking at music battle stations. Now, for some of you, this is going to be a rough episode because I know nothing about music making, music production, music equipment, software, none of it. But I do know what a cool setup looks like.

So I’ve got a bunch of pretty sweet music focused setups lined up just for you. And if you just can’t stand me not sharing how amazing some piece of music equipment is that I’m just gonna gloss over, jump in the comments and let me know what we’re looking at. And drop a like for this video while you’re at it. Today’s episode is brought to you by the keyboard company I’m building called InputZen. We’re making keyboards and tools that help you complete creative work faster.

And you can learn more by clicking the link in the description. If you want to dive deeper into all the setups we cover here, or maybe even submit your own setup to be featured in a future episode, visit the Setup Reacts website linked in the description. Okay, without further ado, bring on the music setups.

Kind of excited about today. We’ve got a bunch of music battle stations, which are spaces that people use to make music, make music, play with music, play instruments. Anything that involves a setup that’s dedicated to music production. That’s what, that’s what we’re focusing on today. And the first setup I have for you, it’s very interesting one.

I saw an interview that I watched a few years ago. It might have been during COVID I can’t remember, but it was all about this guy who set up what essentially is like bullet time. He set up a bullet time video setup for capturing him playing drums. So it’s this really interesting way of, of essentially him live streaming his drum playing. And he set up these scenes.

He uses obs, a software called obs, which open broadcasting software. And he set up so that you press a button and essentially it takes. It switches between, I think it was 21 or 22 different cameras and it kind of freeze frames. And it’s like in the Matrix where you see that scene where Neo is like bending backwards and he’s moving slow motion while the bullets are whizzing past. He created that effect using I think Logitech webcams initially, and then he moved on to slightly higher end cameras.

But the whole thing is amazing. Yeah. And so we’re going to get into it. His name is Mr. Gregols, and I initially saw him in an interview he did with eposvox, who’s essentially the stream professor. He makes fantastic videos all about streaming video, production video equipment.

So let’s get into his setup. I have an initial video of his setup which is going to show what he, what he does on, on, on Twitch. So I’m going to go to. I found that on Twitter. I found a video sample on Twitter.

So let’s, let’s go to that. Play this, Sam.

It.

Oh man, that’s. That’s a fantastic setup. That’s a fantastic stream. I would. I don’t use Twitch, I don’t follow many Twitch streamers, but this is definitely something I’d have like playing in the background.

The music’s fantastic. He actually seems to be a very good drum player, of course. And man, that, that video setup is insane. And not just so you see, had the bullet time set up where it kind of goes in a, I guess 180 degree circle. That was fantastic.

I love that. And apparently that’s like the chat can request that. I think they type in like a command, something like bullet time and it can essentially initiate one of those scenes, which is amazing. But it’s not just the, the camera set up that’s fascinating about that. It seems that he actually has a very powerful computer set up to handle all of this.

You see, he even had like, you see how the screens going on in the background. I guess that’s kind of like, kind of like video DJs. I think he has like one of those setups too where it’s like the video playing behind him on the two screens behind him can be like sync to the music, I guess, with different animations. It seemed that he had like an Elgato advertisement running and it was kind of like flashing and moving around as he plays. Man, that whole setup, amazing.

I have another sample video which I found on Reddit in a subreddit called Next Effing Level. And it’s just a quick 20 second clip of him playing. So let’s go. Let’s find out, Man. Again, it’s just an amazing.

Every time you see it, it’s so satisfying when it just flicks around because it kind of freezes him and I think he kind of moves in slow motion. So I think they set like a slack delay. I have some. I have another video which is actually from Mr. Gregors himself. This setup was.

Was such a big deal that. And so many people asking him about it that he actually set up a company called Atium, I think it’s called Atium Atrium, I think it’s atm. And they do OBS plugins. They actually have some which are very good for like if you’re into streaming, if, or if you’re into like video production. They have some interesting plugins.

They do have like a vertical, a vertical recording plugin for obs which allows you to record like a, like a normal video maybe for YoYouTube, while you also create another video at the same time for other platforms where it’s vertical, you know, like on a mobile phone. So I guess for TikTok or for Instagram Reels or even YoYouTube shorts so you can create them at the same time, you know. Fascinating. It seems like he’s actually generated, you know, like a whole, a career. You know, he’s built a career off of just this really cool, this really cool technology.

Obviously a very skilled streamer, very skilled musician as well, but man, very impressed with this guy, as I’m sure you can tell. Let me bring up the explanation.

This is bullet time.

21 cameras, 48 cables, some fancy maths and a whole lot of automation come together to create one of the most unique live stream camera. If anyone ever tries to tell me that cable management is too hard, you know, it’s like, oh, you know, I just don’t have the time. Do you see how many cables he had flown from that? That was insane. And it all looked very neat, very organized.

I’m not sure if there was any labeling or anything on there, but man, it was all sort of neatly sort of aligned. I guess it has to be when you have this many cameras. It actually looks like he has a bullet time set up sort of around the bottom there as well as one above his head. Just looking at the shot right here, which is insane. It also seems that he has like a top down shot which I think, you know, you know, I think we see the top down shot in the, in the stream.

It sort of switches between these, a few different default positions. I’m also really impressed how he seems to, you know, be controlling the stream. I guess he has like a stream deck or you know, some sort of like MIDI controller in there as well to sort of change camera angles on the go while he’s playing drums. Man, I find it hard enough just to, you know, I, I can’t multitask. I don’t know how someone has, I mean, I guess if you’re a drummer you’re used to, you have to be in control of.

Your hands have to be moving separately as well as your feet. And while you’re listening to music and you’re sort of playing other people. So I guess you’re probably used to not really multitasking, but you’re probably used to controlling or operating many different areas all at one time. So I guess, you know, that’s just a skill that comes. Comes with the job, I guess.

Anyway, let’s keep watching this video UX on Twitch.

Hi, I’m Mr. Greggles, drummer, Twitch streamer and co founder of ATEM. And I’m going to give you an insight into the camera setup that put me on the map. Bullet time isn’t anything new. It was famously created for the Matrix films back in 1999 and the effect is achieved by taking simultaneous pictures on multiple cameras and then playing those pictures back in a sequence to create the iconic 4 freeze frame effect. Being a film buff and also an ex visual effects artist, I wanted this effect for my drumming streams.

But the challenge I faced was taking this from something that was post produced into something that could be done live on Twitch. The first hurdle was finding a way to capture the output of 21 cameras simultaneously. For this we ended up building a one of a kind PC that could run multiple HDMI capture cards. Usually a PC’s motherboard wouldn’t have enough PCIe slots to attach enough capture cards for this. However, we overcame this issue by using a technique called PCIe bifurcation, which is essentially where you split all of your PCIe slots into two, allowing you to double the amount of Capture cards or GPUs or input cards that you have in a system.

The next challenge was the physical alignment. That’s this is going to be super nerdy. Just a warning, skip ahead if it’s too nerdy for you. That’s interesting. I was actually very recently looking into PCI bifurcation.

Bifurcation where it’s essentially you take your PCI slot normally where you place the graphics card. If you have a computer, you know, you have the motherboard and it has, generally speaking, most motherboards have free, like free slots. And those slots are PCI slots. You place your graphics card in there. You also place other devices like, I don’t know, networking cards or wi fi cards, whatever.

And so each one of those slots has a certain amount of lanes, which means that it can process a certain amount of information. But modern motherboards often allow you to split into, yeah like you said, into 8 by 8 or 8 lanes by 8 lanes or 8 by 4 by 4. Whatever. Whatever is generally it’s like around 16 lanes per PCI slot. PCIe slot.

So it’s kind of interesting he’s talking about that. I was looking into that because I have a mini ITX motherboard, which is a really small motherboard, which means it only has one PCI slot. And I wanted to essentially connect two PCI devices. So I was like, I could buy a new motherboard and essentially have to build another computer and then essentially transfer the parts from our mini ITX motherboard to the larger motherboard. But then I was like, oh, I could see if I could try and split this out.

It is super nerdy, though. And sometimes it, you know, it can work, but it’s. It’s built into the firmware or it’s built into the actual motherboard itself. It’s run by. It’s.

It’s kind of like technology run by the motherboard. So it doesn’t always work 100% and it’s not very well documented in a lot of cases. But, yeah, PCI beautification is interesting. Another solution is just to get. Get a motherboard with a massive amount of PCI lanes.

So companies generate these motherboards, which are used for servers, generally where they know that these motherboards are being purchased in order to connect, say, five or six different PCIe cards for different purposes, networking, sometimes for video production, you need to connect to cameras and different devices, or sometimes to Thunderbolt devices, all these very specialized devices. So they have these motherboards, which I believe are called hedt, not sure what it stands for, which just means it has loads of PCIe lanes and it has, generally speaking, you can run a lot of PCI cards off of these motherboards, but those motherboards are very expensive. You often also have to buy the very expensive CPU to go into that same motherboard. So it’s not cheap. It can, it seems like on the low end, to get something decent, like a thousand dollars, you can go sort of older into.

With older hardware, kind of like recondition or resold old server gear. You could. That’s the way you can find cheap HEDT motherboards. But that’s like a whole rabbit hole. You end up on ebay hoping that, you know, you’re not buying any duds.

It’s a mess. Anyway, this interesting point, it’s going to nerd out on that for a second.

The cameras, which is incredibly important to making the effect look smooth. But by using a section of stage lighting trussing, I was able to form a perfect 2.5 meter circle to which then I attached my Zoom Q2N 4K cameras using camera mounts and clamps and ball joints. I then attached the cameras exactly 16cm apart to the lighting trussing and finally aligned them to look into the center of the focal point where which was where I sat to play my drums. Next, using a whole host of HDMI cables, I was able to attach all the multiple cameras into the capture cards in the PC and pull every single feed into obs. This was another reason why the PC we built was such a beast, housing three graphics cards and a threadripper cpu.

When you’re running that much RAW video data, you need a lot of power to process it. Now, within obs, all of the camera sources were added to a single set scene. This allowed them to be overlapped and therefore be able to be turned on and off in sequence, creating the orbiting effect. Finally, I was able to use ATEM to set up multiple sequences to trigger the cameras to turn on and off in quick procession to make a really smooth animation. The transition between each camera is only 45 milliseconds.

And the reason for this is so we can sync the camera, change to the camera’s frame rate and and therefore prevent any skipped frames or jerky looking animations. But this just creates, albeit a fancy one camera loop. To achieve the effect of bullet time. I used ATEM again to trigger freeze frames within OBS to capture a single frame of each camera. And then I play those frames back in sequence with the orbit effect and you get the classic freeze frame slow motion bullet time matrix look.

And there you have it. The only bullet time setup on Twitch. It took a lot of time and resources to make this possible, but it is something truly unique. I hope you enjoyed this little deep dive into the bullet time that I use on my stream that is powered by atem. And I hope it is inspiration to you all to create something truly unique and awesome for your streams.

But until next time, happy streaming. That’s fantastic, man. Hey, I was going to go over an interview that Mr. Gregor, the guy who was just speaking, did with eposvox, the guy I was talking about before. However, it’s a pretty long interview. It’s like one hour long.

So for the sake of time and also because I think the video he just did there was such a good breakdown. It sort of highlights the key points that was covered in the interview. The interview was a little bit older as well. I think it’s from like 2022, 2021. Anyway, I’ll leave a link to the interview in the description down below if you’re interested.

Go and check that out. Eposvox and Mr. Gregols are both fantastic YoYouTubers, streamers, you know, people in the music and video space. So yeah, definitely worth, if you’re interested, go and check those out. Man. Fantastic interview.

And there’s details on like the PCs he uses to control everything. There’s like four PCs, I think, all set up in a rack. One is to control the video that sort of plays behind him and around, around him in the room. One is for controlling the cameras, just for receiving all of the camera feeds of those 21, 22 cameras he had there. And then another one is for music.

I guess when you’re doing drumming or when you’re playing any instruments and you’re streaming, essentially you need to align your music feed with your video. So that takes, can take quite a decent amount of processing power. So he has a whole computer just dedicated to that. And I guess another one is for, you know, editing and for controlling the whole thing. Man, it’s an insane setup.

Go and check out the interview. You’re going to love it. I loved it. All right, so that’s Mr. Grego setup. Let’s move on to the next setup.

So this setup is interesting. This is one I found in the Music Battle Station subreddit, as you can see here. Music Battle stations. The title of the post is Moved in with my girlfriend and she gave me the whole second bedroom to make a studio. The most interesting thing about this, something I’ve noticed on Reddit, I, I use Reddit quite a lot.

I kind of, it’s like one of my favorite places to scroll because you can kind of, you know, follow these subreddits which are super niche and you kind of just get a feed of only things which you’re like really into. So I have, I have a bunch of things, I follow all of the setup. Reddits, you know, battle stations. There’s one ultimate Battle stations. There’s music battle stations.

There’s a bunch of different battle stations subreddits I follow. But one of the things I noticed on Reddit is that whenever anybody mentions girlfriend, like if you mentioned girlfriend, when wife, you know, significant other, whatever term you use, there’s always someone always just has to drag your relationship into it and make it seem slightly like, oh, that’s, that’s, that’s a bit of a red flag. There’s always, there’s always people who, here’s how I, I see it. On Reddit, if you mention that you have a wife or girlfriend and they’re part of your life, people will either tell you to break up with them or marry them if you’re not currently married. Or they’ll just try and warn you about like, oh, that’s a massive red flag.

Basically, if you have a girlfriend, do not mention them on Reddit. If you have a boyfriend and you’re a female, do not mention them on Reddit. You’re not going to get good advice. I’ll prove it to you right now. I bet that there’s a comment in here, just looking at this title.

I bet there’s a comment in here about girlfriends. See, first one, that’s gorgeous. You should marry that girl. I mean, that’s pretty sweet. That’s pretty nice.

Second comment, every eight hours, check in if she is still there. As a music producer, I had to always go check on her to be like, we’re still good.

It’s just the way it is. People on Reddit are very strange about relationships. I don’t know what it is. Anyway, let’s get into this setup. So this is quite cool.

This seems to be in like, I guess a spare bedroom. And I like this because it’s some of the music setups that I saw in the Music Battle Station subreddit are like, they’re like professional studios and it’s just kind of. You see it, you’re like, I don’t. I have nothing to say about that. This looks perfect.

It’s like I don’t know enough about music to know the details of the thing, so it just wouldn’t be interesting. It would be me going like, wow, look at that. Wow, look at that. That’s. That’s nice.

Versus with this. This seems to be, you know, like a. I’m not sure if he’s a producer or. It seems here, I guess this is a beat machine. Again, like I said, I don’t know anything about this equipment, so don’t hate me. If you’re going to hate, go in the comments and tell me what I’m getting wrong.

Okay. It seems here’s like a. I guess this is a. It’s not keyboard, right? It’s a. It’s a midi.

MIDI board, I think. I don’t know the difference. What’s the difference between a MIDI board and a keyboard? I don’t know. And he sort of has a rack here, a record player and what could be a large audio interface, a mix, a mixer.

Could it be a synth? I don’t know. I love the screen setup. It seems to be an ultra wide 34 with a, let’s say a 27 inch on its side there. Perfect setup.

Speakers on stands off the table. I guess, because you want. I guess with music setups, right? Like, where you place your speakers is very important because you want them, I guess, at ear level, generally. That seems to be the advice I’ve followed with speakers is you want your tweeters at ear level.

So, you know, you generally need speakers to rise up a little bit off your desk here. You separate them completely. And I guess with this also, you know, you’re not getting any vibration, I guess, into your desk, so you get like a clean sound that gives you a bit of audio separation. Again, just. Just guessing here.

He has the audio panels in the back there, sort of flanking his. His window. It’s just nice setup. You know, this looks like a nice place to just sit down and make some music or edit some music or do music. I don’t know.

It looks like a good spot, a nice comfortable spot. I love the RGB lighting, too. Like the little glowing in the corner. That’s really cool. That’s just another angle.

So see here he has a. I guess this is a foot pedal rack. I think these are for guitars, but I’m not quite sure. I think it’s. Whenever I’ve seen these foot pedals, it seems that, you know, when people playing electric guitar, they can. You can, like, compress it and it can change the sounds.

And you can have different foot pedals to produce different sounds, I guess. I think so, yeah. Because this is a guitar amp here, I guess. I like his little cable rack here on the wall. That’s actually pretty sweet, I guess, if you have.

You’re swapping out cables quite a bit, having them neatly here sort of laid out where you can just sort of swap them in. It’s very handy. It’s a good. Interesting spot for a microphone stand here, too. Yeah, you can just fold it down.

Yeah, it’s a pretty sweet sound.

That’s cool.

Oh, I see. See the trackball mouse there? I think I was watching the Defiant Ones, which is a film. It’s a documentary about Dr. Dre and the guy who. Dr. Dre made beats by Dre with Jimmy Iine, Jimmy Irving.

Jimmy Iine. Yeah. So there a documentary about Jimmy Iine, Dr. Dre. And there’s a bunch of shots in there of, I think of Dr. Dre, like, you know, just producing different beats, new songs. And it seems to be like.

Like a lot of producers use trackball mice. I guess it’s because you have, you know, you have these sort of, like, long timelines in these audio editing applications and so, you know, having the trackball to sort of scroll through is just really handy. Or maybe it’s just because there’s never any space. Whenever you see like someone with like a big audio board, they always seem to have like a keyboard sort of like in one little edge. So it kind of makes sense that you know, having a trackball there because the trackball stays in one place and you just move the ball so you don’t have to move the whole thing.

However, he also here has a gaming mouse. It looks like. It looks like a Logitech gaming mouse as well as a gaming controller. So I guess this is multi use. I don’t.

I don’t think he uses a trackball for those purposes. I also like this desk, how it has the two different levels here. That’s actually really cool. I’d love to have a split desk like that where I could essentially have like an upper layer for my monitors and you know, any equipment on the desk in a lower level, which is sort of also better place for a better typing position. To me, that’s important.

So, yeah, this is, this is a very nice setup. Yeah, this is a very good use of space. Very cozy. Seems like a setup of someone who could like over time you could build something like this out. You know, it’s not like you just went out and bought the most expensive stuff and made it super fancy from the get go.

It was. It seems like these are all very like meaningful and well used equipment that he sort of slowly purchased and placed into set up and got it just right. And then he’s added the lighting just to give it a nice vibe. This is beautiful. Lovely setup, man.

All right, let’s move on to the next setup. Okay, so this setup’s interesting. This is like a. This is definitely a setup where I’m going to have to be like, hey man, I have zero idea what any this is, but it looks very impressive. He has this massive like, I guess it’s like a wall of.

I think it’s synthesizers. I’m not quite sure. I looked in the comments. I think all of these people know too much about music to be like, hey, what’s that wall? And to answer the question, so it’s just me.

I’m the only person asking if you know again. Leave me a comment down below, let me know what we’re looking at here. Beautiful. Also, dog tacks. Always a good idea if you’re posting your setups.

Especially if you’re sending a setup in to meet setup reacts. The link to submit your setups by the way, will be included down in the description below. Go there, send me a setups. I’d love to see them. I’ll try and create like a themed episode around your setups if we receive enough, which is similar.

Yeah, man, I’d love to see your setup. So please submit your setups and if you are going to do so, include a dog picture. It will get you extra points. Yeah, it’s just a shameless way to improve the ranking of yourselves. So please do it.

Yep. So dog, dog, tax paid. But yeah. Is that a cat over here? No, I can’t quite tell if that’s a cat or if that’s.

It’s not a cat. That’s just a pillow or a plushie toy. Maybe a dinosaur. But yeah, I love this massive wall here of Sims. Seems to be like built in the middle of the room too.

It seems like there’s more stuff here around the back. That’s very impressive. I guess this is a basement. This looks like a basement level. Let’s see the next picture.

Awesome desk setup as well. It seems he has two different keyboards. I guess there’s two laptops, right? So you’d have. Yeah, one keyboard for one.

One could be for work and one could be for. For play and for music. Who knows the free monitor set up here, man. Like, I think in episode two, we had a setup which had six monitors. So it was three monitors like this and then another row on top of that of another three monitors and all such massive overloads previously, I think I’d be like, ah, you don’t need more than two monitors.

That was, that’s. That was my firm belief. So now when I see three, I’m like, it’s not so bad. You know, I see the purpose. After seeing that 6 setup, 6 screen setup, I’m kind of like, yeah, freeze free’s fine.

Freeze Reasonable. Three is now a reasonable amount of monitors to have. Is this a speaker stand or is this just like a speaker which he’s using as a speaker stand? Because it seems like whatever these. It could just be a big wooden block because he has here the sort of these foam blocks here, I guess to angle the speakers down towards him.

So it could just be a wooden block being used as a speaker stand. If that is a speaker, that seems hopefully that they’re no longer working. But if that. If these two. If these are speakers here behind the monitors, it seems like a very inefficient, a very expensive speaker stand.

I’ll put it that way also. That is yeah, that’s clearly a. I’m gonna. I’m gonna go with dinosaur. I think that’s a dinosaur teddy bear, which I mistake for a cat. I apologize.

Cat lovers. Also, I love this. The exposed brick here. This. This must be a basement, right?

But yeah, there’s an exposed brick in the background. It must. It must give a nice feeling. Yeah. With a bit of.

Bit of light in the corner. Some. Some rgb. I don’t know. I think exposed brick can be kind of cozy in a weird way.

Right. Something about it. I don’t know, it gives you kind of like a warm feeling, maybe a cold feeling. I don’t know. Yeah, there’s that synthesizer.

I’m gonna call it the synthesizer wall, because I don’t know what it is. Again, please comment down below. Let me know what. This wall here. What is it?

What’s going on with that? Yes. And guitars here in the background. This looks like a rack. This looks like a.

Maybe like a portable rack on wheels, something case. Right where they have these. If you go to a concert, they’ll have. They’ll have these. And it seems like, you know, the concert production team, they’ll.

They’ll bring it in. They sort of roll them in. It has all the equipment sort of racked in there. And I’m not quite sure what’s in there. It’s not computer stuff, that’s for sure.

This all seems to be audio, so who knows? This could be connections possibly to this wall here. That would make sense to me. Maybe then allowing you to bring it. Bring in all the connections into the computers.

1. The computer over here, not quite sure, is that. There’s also some records down here. Is that David Bowie? I can’t tell.

I’m not quite sure who this is here. If anyone knows, let me know in the comments. Who’s. Who’s this with the. It looks like a king or Prince of spades on a record cover there.

I know I’d love to actually know who that is, what artist is. I’ll give it a list on Spotify. The. It’s not baby Yoda. That’s a grown Yoda right there.

The adult Yoda keeping an eye on. On the wall, the wall of synthesized. This also looks like some guitar pedals down here, I’m quite sure. And it looks like there’s actually something. Maybe that’s just a table.

Maybe that could be a chair, I guess like a bench. Guess you pull out the bench and it seems to be on the standing. Standing desk. Maybe you can raise and lower this, this wall of the synthesizer wall. He can raise and lower it whenever needed.

It’s kind of cool. Oh, wow. There’s more records back here. I’m not sure if this is like he’s taken because I see Clockwork Orange, the, the movie. Maybe it was a soundtrack for Clockwork Orange.

I’m not sure if these are records or if these are just prints, which is sort of made like a collage on the wall here. And I love this. I love how neatly these cables are managed.

That’s another picture, the rack. Or look at this cable. This is like this, this, this rack here of cables. It both looks highly organized as well as chaotic. I’m not sure if there was a specific cable you needed.

I’m not sure it would be like quick to find them. But maybe, maybe you’re going on length. Maybe it’s a lot of similar cables, but you just need a lot of them to connect to this giant wall of synthesizer. This synthesizer wall, possibly. So, yeah, maybe it’s just a thing where you just need a bunch of different lamps and so he has them at different lamps.

I’m not sure. Also, the album cover I was talking about before is that exotic extent, exotic event could be a clue there. And another one of the. The synthesizer wall. Man, that’s a beast.

What’s this down here? Is this, Is this more foot pedals? Foot pedals? Again, I don’t know what any of this is, so I’m just calling these all foot pedals. These could all be highly specific instruments.

And I’m just like, yeah, they’re foot pedals. I mean, what else could there be? But that’s really cool. It seems like it’s like a custom made rack here.

And one more. The computer setup. I wonder what this thing is. Is this like, you know, sometimes you see like street performers and they’ll sort of like make music on the fly. So they’ll like make a sample of something.

So they’ll play one instrument. They’ll play like a riff on the guitar and that will be like one sound and they’ll assign it to a button and then they’ll do another, like, you know, like a drumming set and assign it to another button. And then you can kind of like make a full song just based on these small little samples that they’ll make. It’s very impressive whenever you see it. Maybe this is one of those.

Or it could just be like a MIDI controller. Maybe it works with this software here. Not quite sure. I guess this is. Is this a door?

Daw. Digital audio workspace. I guess that’s what door means. This could be door software. And this.

This could be tied into it. I’m not quite sure. Another one of the Synth 4. It’s kind of interesting. This.

Is this a microphone? This looks like a microphone on like a. An extended arm here, which sort of just hangs down in front of it. Interesting. I wonder.

I wonder what that’s used for. I wonder so much about this. How does this all work? And it even seems to be like curved at the top. So it’s sort of like almost.

It’s almost like you’re. When you step in front of this, you’re kind of inside it. You know, you’re reaching inside of this curved wall of massive synthesizers. I wonder if you ever need to use like multiple of these at the same time. Or is it just a case of like, each one has a highly specific sound or quality to it, and so therefore, you know, you never really running multiple of them at the same time.

I have no idea.

We’ve got a drum set here. Very cool. No bullet time on this one. This is a really cool album cover that kind of stands out here. And this is the Beatles album cover, right?

Man, that’s the last picture. That is a very cool setup. Bit overwhelming, a lot going on. I think just because of that synth wall. That synth wall is something else, man.

That’s a beast. And I’d love to have something like that. It was just filled with. I know something which I actually know something about and want to play with more. Maybe servers.

Like a server wall with a curve on it like that. It’s just like a massive wall full of servers. One day. One day I’ll try and build one out. I just need to come up with an excuse, like a reasonable excuse to build that.

Let’s move on to the next setup. Okay, so the title of this one is Sad Dad Sound Labs, which gives you a very good hint of what we’re gonna see here. You know, I think this is kind of like a retro themed, maybe 80s 90s themed music battle station he’s got going on here. Let’s zoom in on the pictures. It seems that we have the main sort of workspace over here.

I don’t know what’s going on these screens here. This looks super interesting. It looks like something out of like a. Like a movie. Like an old movie.

Like one of those old movies where like computers were gigantic and there’s a mainframe and someone has to hack it. I don’t know. They hack it from their Bedroom back in the. In the late 90s or in the early 90s, which. Yeah, no one was doing that.

Yeah, you’ve got Jurassic park here. What looks like a VHS copy playing on a. I’m gonna guess that’s a crt. Crt tv like. Or like an old TV there. It’s another old TV with.

Is that like a camera? Is that video camera? Monitor, Maybe it’s split there. I’m not sure. Is this another CRT and a mini one up here?

And this looks like a monitor that has some sort of effect applied to it to. To give it, like, a retro vibe so it fits in with the rest. And I think there’s going to be a strong retro theme here. And he’s got a drum set here in the corner. Electric guitar and pedal.

Pedal board? Is that what it is? Let me know. Pedal board here on the floor. You can tell someone’s a musician when they have a chair like this.

This is not a chair made for, you know, sitting and typing and working all the time on the computer. This is a chair that’s, like, probably optimized for instrument playing, for playing your guitar. He also seems to have a couple of keyboards or midi. MIDI players here. Record player here.

And is that more guitar pedals? I’m going to assume that’s more guitar pedals over here in the corner. That’s kind of cool. Again, I like that. This is kind of like.

This looks like a spare bedroom that’s been turned into, like, someone’s music sanctuary, you know, that’s. That’s the vibes I’m getting from this. Looks pretty cool, huh? Is this. Is this like a DIY rack he’s made here?

It looks like a table that’s been converted into a rack to hold. It’s just like a patch panel, but for connecting different audio devices, actually. That would make a lot of sense, right? Like a patch panel so you can move. You know, if you wanted to connect different, make different interconnects, you could just take the cable out and plug it in somewhere else, and it.

It changes the chain of music. That’s. That’s my guess. And it looks like he has. Is this a mixer?

There’s a mixer up here. I’m gonna guess that’s a mixer, the record player and. Oh, so I guess the wall isn’t pedals. Maybe these are like synthesizers again, I’m gonna guess synthesizers. And it seems that they’re continuing on to the sloped wall, which is fascinating.

Yeah, I’m loving this. What’s this? What does that say mother? Mother 6000 Muthur 6000. I wonder if this is actually functional.

This is just like a wallpaper. That’s the Jurassic Park CRT TV. It looks like a. That’s a NES. That’s a Nintendo, Nintendo NES there and a Nintendo 64 guitar amplifier up here.

And that’s the drum set in the corner. Oh, kitty tacks. Hey, kitty spotted. Very cute. I’m a dog person, but, you know, I still appreciate a good kitty picture.

Makes you feel good. This looks, this really does look like a 90s. Like a 90s room, you know, I mean, like there’s the chair and with the office chair with the fro sort of over it. Yeah, it’s a little bit hippie. You know, it’s like someone who used to be a hippie, but now they’re parents, so they’ve got their life together, but they still love to just, you know, sort of sit here and rock out.

And they’ve got the guitar rack here in the corner. That’s really cool. That’s a, that’s a very cozy setup. You know, it seems like. Imagine just like a Saturday night, you know, if you’re a musician or you used to be a musician, Saturday night you sort of come into his room, got some, you know, play some records on the record player over here.

Yeah, just jam out, man. Just hit, hit the drum set. Hit the guitar. Yeah, hit the guitar, hit the guitar. That’s how we do hit the guitar.

Play the guitar. Strum, strum the guitar. You know, just have a good sort of chilled out evening. What is playing here on this tv? This is really hard to make out.

I mean, it could be, you know, a lot of times when you take pictures of some of these, like older, older TVs, older monitors, you get these heavy scan lines. Same thing when you’re recording videos. Yeah, So I think it’s because the resolution, it’s like, you know, cameras or it’s like frames, the frames per second that you’re recording in. It shows the difference by having these massive scan lines going across it. So maybe that’s why these are so hard to make out, because this seems like this TV isn’t that bad.

But the pictures taken here just. It looks very hard to make out what it is. Or it could just be really old and therefore it just, you know, it’s just kind of deteriorating a little bit. Maybe that’s, that’s what he likes. He likes having this all five.

It’s kind of cool though. This looks like an old horror movie. To be honest, looks like someone’s about to be told by some scary man on the phone that they’re outside. They can see them. That’s a very cool setup, dad.

I’m getting dad vibes from this. I mean, he did say it’s. What do you call it? The sad dad sound labs. There’s nothing sad about this.

This is. This is relaxed on Saturday night, Dad. I think that that’s what this setup should be called. Relax on Saturday night, dad sound labs. That makes more sense to me.

All right, that was a cool setup. Let’s move on to the next setup, which is also the last setup.

Okay, so a little bit of explanation, because this is. You can see this one’s gonna be weird. This is a YoYouTuber called Reed Stefan. I’ve seen some of his videos before. I think I saw a.

A tour of his studio back in, like, it was like, 2021, 2022. And I think that was to mark they had a hundred thousand subscribers to his channel. So he did a. As a celebration, he did a studio tour, and he now has 456,000 subscribers. And this is done in 2024.

So kudos to him, man. That’s fantastic growth. What’s amazing about this YoYouTube channel is Reed Stefan. He’s a real person, but the YoYouTube channel is. It’s all under.

It’s all done by this. This puppet and the characters. Reed Steffen is a puppet. I guess this is puppet version of Reed Stefan. I don’t know.

I haven’t seen enough of the videos to know if that’s what’s going on here. Am I supposed to talk to the puppet? But, yeah, all of the videos, just him as a puppet. What’s really cool is, like, the puppet will, like. The puppet will be typing.

He would like. And they’ll touch something. They’ll actually move. And I’m like, how. This is very good puppet work.

This is like Sesame Street. You know, there’s like, Kermit. Kermit levels of puppetry. It’s very believable. And it seems like there’s so much dedication.

It makes me wonder, how does this start? Is it just kind of like you have a thing for puppetry? And then it’s like, but you’re also a musician, a producer, and so therefore, you’re like, oh, you know, it’d be really cool to just make some videos where my puppet. I can combine my two. My two passions, you know?

I mean, I’m not quite sure Reed Steffen is a puppet. This is a studio tour It’s a really cool studio. There was another one done by his wife and I think her name is Cara. So his wife’s name is Cara. She’s also a musician and it seems that, you know, as a couple, they, they both do producing and a bunch of different things to do with music.

It’s a very cool studio, very interesting with a puppetry. Let’s have a watch.

Production time. I’m Reid Staphan Reels puppet in the game. Today we’re taking a tour of my ultimate home studio setup in 2020.

Over the past 10 years, I’ve been upgrading, expanding and documenting my studio setup as it grows and changes with my career. The work I do is a blend of music production, vocal production, and video production. And just about every project I do is a collaboration with my wife and creative partner, Kara, who’s an incredibly talented singer, songwriter and artist whose original music you’ll be hearing throughout this video. This is our first studio that we actually own instead of renting. So we really got to optimize each room for each specific need and combine multiple spaces into the ultimate home studio for 2024.

Now, he mentioned that his wife’s music will be playing throughout the video, so for copyright reasons, I might have to mute some of the audio. However, if you want to hear it, please go and check out his YoYouTube channel. Reid Stefan or his wife’s YoYouTube channel. I think it says Kara K A R R A Go and check those out. The music’s really cool.

They’re really into the tech and they have. They both have insane setups. Both worth watching. Go and check them out.

And here we go into studio one. So this is where all the magic happens. This room is perfectly acoustically treated for both recording and mixing. The first thing people always notice when they look at this room is the beautiful custom acoustic treatment with a nice concrete looking pattern on them, which I think makes them look really slick and modern. A company called SI Acoustics made these.

And then back in the corner, we have vycoustic products. But honestly, when I put these up, I almost didn’t hear a difference at all. Whereas the Sicoustics, like, transformed the way the room sounds. But moving on to the actual desk, this Argosy halo has been my favorite studio desk setup. One of the exciting other things I added for 2024 is the matching side cabinet by Argosy that holds some of my overflow power outlets, my mic, DSP analog processing box, and also a very affordable DB display which basically shows the loudness of your input signal.

As LED meters. But when I’m mixing, I really spend most of my time looking at this. If I’m looking at an analyzer, this is the Clarity M stereo by TC Electronic. And it shows you your stereo width, which I have up here. Got our radar.

You see what I mean about, like, the puppet, the puppet touches the button and actually it’s like, functionally touching the device. I’m like, how do you do that if a puppet, like, I can’t imagine. Anyway, this isn’t a video about puppets. I just find it really cool how. How good he is with the puppet work.

I find it really cool. I find it really interesting how there’s all these devices to sort of, like, see music, you know, I mean, I just. He has this device here that’s on screen where it’s. It’s like. It’s like an analyzer.

And I wonder how that works. Is it like as a. As a producer or as a music maker? You just want to see how the tones like the levels. I guess you just want to have a quick glance and be able to see them.

I don’t know. I find it interesting that there’s just all these devices to see music, like, to visualize it. It’s fascinating to me.

And an eq, over here on the left, we have a pair of Duro 40A2. It’s like two meters in one. This is your loudness, and this is your dynamic range. Really handy with all the more affordable loudness meter plugins, vectorscopes, EQ meters, and solutions that you have inside your daw. I still find it really valuable to have physical hardware meters because these connect in a way that display all the audio coming out of your computer instead of just the signal from your daw.

So in addition to my variety of analyzers, I also have my vocal chain here on the desk.

This is the vocal chain that me and Cara have been using for pretty much. Isn’t it strange how, like, some equipment, you can just look at it and be like, I know that’s expensive. You know, I mean, even if. If I just saw, like, some of these. These pieces by themselves, I’d be like, yeah, that’s.

That’s. That’s. We’re talking thousands here. This has to be thousands of dollars. This isn’t like, like, audio interfaces which most streamers and YoYouTubers use, which is generally quite cheap, you know, maybe maximum, like 100 bucks.

The stuff I’m looking at here, I’m like, this is expensive. I don’t. I don’t know what any of it is. I just know it’s expensive. I can tell just by looking at it.

It seems highly specialized. Maybe it’s also the fact that it’s in these racks, which is really cool, by the way. Having racks built into your desk like that seems amazing. I don’t know why we don’t see more, like, networking and, like, hardware. Guys who like myself, you know, we like to play with, like, server software, don’t use these.

I mean, maybe it’s because I’m gonna guess as well that these music desk with the racks built into them are ridiculously expensive. Maybe that’s why it just makes more sense to I guess, just have a separate server rack. That might be in the hundreds of dollars where who knows going to guess a desk like this. At least a thousand. So, yeah, it could just be a cost thing.

That’s that. Yeah, that’s what it is. All of our content and the majority of her new album. This is the Telefunken 251. And we got this about two years ago.

And we’ve pretty much been using this as our primary microphone. We really find that for both of our voices, this just sounds so crispy and correct that whether we’re recording voiceovers or singing or rapping, it just gives us exactly what we’re looking for.

We’ve updated the chain a tiny bit since the last studio tour, but not much. First stop is our BAE EQ and preamp. Right now, the lavalier mic that’s click clip to my shirt is what’s going through this preamp. And that signal goes now up to the compressor, the Tube Tech CL1B. When I’m recording singing, I tend to turn the ratio all the way down to 2 to 1.

But when I’m recording dialogue, I don’t mind being a little bit more aggressive with it. And then I just use this as my final level to control how loud we’re going into the interface. And for that, we’re using a Prizm Titan. It’s true when a lot of people say gear doesn’t matter, because the reality is nobody’s going to get to solo your vocals and hear the little nuances of your recordings when they’re mixed in with a track and people are listening to the finished product. But we’re in the unique situation where we make vocal sample packs.

So literally everybody is going to be soloing our raw vocals. So we take the extra step to make sure that our recordings are absolutely pristine. If you’ve been following interesting, he says, like, gear doesn’t matter while showing some high end gear. And I get what he’s saying, exactly what he mentioned about, you know, they, they seem to sell like vocal samples. So therefore it needs to be very high quality because you’re going to have audio people who are making, who work with audio every single day listening to these things over and over again.

So it does probably have to be very high quality. But at the same time I think I feel like with a lot of audio stuff specifically, maybe it’s the same thing with video stuff too, like cameras. A lot of it’s really kind of about feeling. It’s like there’s probably like with a lot of these things there’s a base level you can reach which is just good enough for most things. However, there’s something about like emotional about audio and video equipment.

I think that’s why when you get into these rabbit holes, you, you go deep, you know, you can’t really help it. You’re going to be spending some money just because it’s like, sure, this, the picture I’m recording now might look fine, but it might be like you see somebody else’s video. You or you, some, a lot of times it’s like you have a vision of something like I’d really like to see that. I’d really just like to try and make that real. And until you can kind of, until you can actually, you, you produce that, you just stay on the hunt and you keep buying new equipment, trying new things and it can get very expensive.

I mean the bullet time video, the setup number one is a perfect example of that, right? I’m pretty sure that he maybe watched the Matrix and he was just like, I need to make that happen. And 22 cameras later, four computers later, very high end computers later, he’s like, okay, we’re there. But of course the spending doesn’t stop there. Once you start, you know, I mean you’re going to want to improve or you’re going to want to try something new, reach some new Mount Olympus, you know, I mean my channel for a while, you know that I’ve been a long time ATC user.

Whether you’re producing Beats, whether you’re mixing, whether you’re mastering or just simply doing voiceover work, they sound so good. Let’s do a quick demo. Let me bump these real quick.

Bumping some other stuff on the desk here that I really love is the final mouse. Shout out to one of the coolest gaming. Let me know down in the comments. Are you a speaker, audio speaker person or a microphone person or in ear monitors or maybe over ear headphones. So I said microphone headphone person, let me know down in the comments which one you are.

When I’m working, I really like having a good set of speakers with some heavy bass. It’s just. It’s just perfect for like background music and it needs to be if I have headphones on for too long. Maybe it’s also because most headphones are just this make me really sweaty. Like my ears get sweaty.

I don’t like being in clothes like that you can use in ear monitors. But again, I just don’t feel comfortable having in ear monitors for hours on end. Having some good speakers on my desk just bumping music all day. It’s perfect. I can’t really do headphones daily.

Obviously when I go outside it’s different. I actually prefer I use Apple AirPods just because they’re just so convenient when you have an iPhone. And now I’m using in ear monitors. So I guess not all the time I’m using speakers because it’s not always practical. But when I’m working it has to be speakers.

Let me know down in the comment section which is your preferred listening instrument companies in the game. You can only get these things on ebay. This is called the Finalmouse Air 58. Shout out to this articulating mic stand arm if you’re ever recording tutorials or voiceovers and you don’t really need to stand up and perform. This stand is only like 30 $40 by a company called Innogear.

But man, this thing can hold the telefunken, the pop filter and then some. For my favorite new MIDI controllers is the Rollie Lumi keys. I love these because one, you can set a color scheme that matches your room or you could do just like a basic white look rainbow. It also has really nice MP E capabilities. You can play vibrato in your notes just kind of like by wiggling your finger around like this.

All kinds of expressions that I was really never able to play on other keyboards. That’s so cool. You can just vibrate it and I guess it gives it like a. You’d say vibrato. Vibrato.

So you could kind of get like a vibrating sound off of it just from vibrating. So I guess it has. So I guess it has like touch. Touch sensitive tools in there. And it must be from like different angles too if you can.

If you could sense vibration like that. That’s amazing. Also the colors on this look beautiful. This is amazing device. What’s it called?

A Lumi Wow. It’s a MIDI controller. He said, right? Yeah. Here inside the computer, where we do pretty much all of our work, you can see we have Ableton 12 open.

But whenever I’m making Ableton tutorials or Pro Tools tutorials or whatever, I always have Logic running in the background, capturing my vocal. Same headphones, really, like the audio Technica ATH M50X. I was saying before that I’m not really big on mixing with analog gear, but when I do, I’m using the analog processing box because this is controlled with plugins in your computer that make your sessions instantly recallable. And the plugins in your computer are simply controlling the analog circuitry inside the box. It just makes mixing and mastering hybrid so much easier.

I don’t want to deal with a patch bay. I don’t want to deal with a bunch of pieces of gear. So the APB16 was an easy choice for me. Now the last piece of gear. That’s interesting.

So I guess it’s like instead of just having dials and instead of having dials on the front of the device, it still uses, like, the mechanical function, but it’s controlled in software through your door. Very. Seems very advanced. I don’t know. It’s kind of smart as well.

Maybe that one device replaces that massive synthesizer wall that we saw in the previous setup. Who knows? That I didn’t talk much about is a Moog Slim Fatty. Now, this is a mono bass synthesizer, and you can control it with your MIDI keyboard. But honestly, most of my songs recently have been completely in the box.

So that’s Studio one, my desk, and every piece of gear in it that I use to record and produce music. The idea behind this room was to simply build a vocal booth with a production studio in it. And that’s exactly what we did.

But of course, no vocal studio would be complete without. All right, I think he’s gonna move on to his second. Or maybe there’s a third setup in here. But I think if you want to see the full setup is, you know, the rest of the studio tour. Go and check out the channel Read Stefan.

They make great videos, and you subscribe. They make fantastic videos. And yeah, a link to his setup will be down in the description. So go and click on that if you want to see the rest of this one. There’s some great setups in here I really like.

I think my favorite was the. The Sad Dad. The Sad dad sound. Just a kind of retro feel to it. I don’t know.

That just seems really cool. There wasn’t an insane amount of equipment or anything like that. He just seemed to have a bunch of these kind of like retro like 90s TVs, CRT monitors in there, record players. It just seemed really cozy. That seems like the place where I’d be most happy hanging out.

But yeah, that was my definitely my favorite setup. Let me know down in the comments what was your favorite setup? I’d love to hear what you thought of today’s episode and what you thought of the setups here, which was your favorite. How annoyed are you at my complete lack of knowledge of anything to do with any of this music equipment? And yet I still decided to make a Setup Reacts video all about music battle stations.

Yes I did. I did that. Next up, we have a few announcements if you enjoyed this episode of Setup Reacts, and I really hope you did. We’re going to be releasing a new episode every Thursday, so make sure you get subscribed and drop a like for this video while you’re at it. Subscribing means you won’t miss a single episode of Setup Reacts in the future, and as we’re still a new channel, you help us grow and give us the motivation we need to keep making these videos.

You can also go to the Setup Reacts website and sign up for the newsletter where we go a little deeper into each setup featured here. And you can also submit your own setup to be featured in a future episode. If you’re feeling brave enough, that is. The link is in the description. Finally, this episode is brought to you by InputZen, where we’re creating keyboards and tools that help you complete creative work faster.

Our flagship product is called the buildbox, and it’s a Macropad that lets you program in shortcuts and macros for any software that you use to get your work done. Imagine one key cutting and then moving a video you’re editing in apps like Final Cut Pro. Now expand that amount of functionality to 16 keys, each one uniquely programmable. Add in a crispy display that lets you know what each key’s function is and what layer you’re on. And you can add multiple layers, by the way, meaning hundreds of macros available for pretty much every app you use, and finish it off with one of the smoothest styles out there for scrolling like butter through documents or your video and audio application timelines.

Well, we’ve built all of this into the buildbox Macropad, and you can learn all about it by heading to the InputZen website. Link for that is in the description. Thanks for watching this episode of Setup Reacts and I will see you again next Thursday. Reacting to more insane setups. Alright, I’m gone.

Sa.