My name is Rob. I am a musician, audio engineer, semi-professional studio owner and professional IT guy.

As a musician I've been a guitarist for 25, years, a drummer for 20, bass player for 11 and an engineer type for around 15. I also play synths, sing, etc.

I was involved in a number of groups and projects during my younger years and slowly drifted more into the audio engineering and studio side of life as the years went on.
A full time career as a UNIX engineer as well as having both a beautiful wife and daughter have taken priority over my musical projects for a number of years.

My studio work has slowed down over the last few years which I'd contribute to a lack of bands having the finances to record as well as the growth of home studio ownership as well as my lack of availability needed lock out blocks of time for projects.

Seeing as I have a studio and quite a few years of engineering experience and am still an active musician in my spare time I decided to start a new personal music project around 2 years ago now.
Mechanisma is that project.

Some technical details.

All of the drums on these projects/groups of songs are a combination of:
 1) drums I've recorded live myself and then converted to MIDI format to make augmenting and songwriting easier.
 2) Modified MIDI tracks from the Toontrack series of drum software.
 3) MIDI programmed by hand. All of the drums you hear are samples recorded of my actual Sonor drum kit with various microphones and then converted into Slate Digital Trigger format. The cymbals are mostly Toontrack based samples, but I've augmented many of them with my own cymbal samples as well.

All of the guitars on the projects were recorded with my primary guitar, an ESP LTD SC-607B baritone seven string guitar. Tunings vary between Drop C, and B standard.

The amplifiers used are a Peavey 6505+ for Project 1 and a 1994 Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier for Project 2. Both through a Mesa Boogie Rectifier 4x12 cabinet recorded with a single SM57. All of the rhythm guitars are quad-tracked. Two hard left and two hard right. The leads are sometimes dual-tracked or quad-tracked with various panning settings.

Bass guitars are either a Fender Jazz 4 string or an ESP LTD B-105 5 string. All via DI and then run through various bass guitar amplifier VST simulators and/or re-amped through the Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier after the fact.

Some of these tracks have vocal parts and ideas here and there and were recorded with a Shure SM7B microphone.

All of the instruments on these were played by myself. I am also working with another vocalist and potential vocalists to contribute to the project and these songs were written with vocals in mind so they may seem sparse in spots in their absence.

All of these songs are currently in progress and are in various stages of completion. There is also a 3rd album/project underway currently. All of the projects are different in their own way and I use sounds to illustrate my mood(s) and I'm sure that is reflected in the music.

Cheers.
-Rob

ic.
Cheers.
-Rob



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