Steve Lawler’s mobile Viva studio

Steve Lawler’s mobile Viva studio

28 October, 2008 | 1.28PM

• Written by: Industry Boy
• Filed under: Music News: audiofly

From these photos you’d imagine Steve Lawler and Audiofly to be sitting in a posh music studio in London, but we are in fact on a tour bus traveling through the Arizona desert at about 50mph.

We’re heading towards the city of Albuquerque in New Mexico.

This studio is located in the back room of the tour bus, which is about 7ft x 8ft.

It’s a bumpy ride too. So bumpy in fact, that the boys had feared their studio computer – an Apple Macbook Pro laptop – had been fatally damaged due to too many road vibrations.

“The laptop is right over the rear axle,” Anthony from Audiofly had explained upon learning that it wasn’t turning on. “Those laptops can’t handle that much vibration.”

It turns out the laptop’s battery had gone into a coma, but even so, getting the mobile studio to a point where it was capable of making music had proved an uphill 12 day battle.

Logic Pro 7 wouldn’t seem to install on the laptop, so they had to buy Logic Pro 8 in one city which did eventually work.

But then Steve Lawler lost a lot of his drum samples inexplicably.

“Don’t worry, we can still make it work using our loops, and we can take drum hits from those,” said Anthony, who took the lead engineer role.

“None of us have used Logic 8, and Apple have changed a lot of menus and the layout in this update so it’s going to be slow going.”

So after 11 days on the road, and a whole lot of hassle the boys managed to play their first kick drum – a 909 sample.

They cheered and gave each other high fives.

Now they’ve somehow got to make a track together (and we’ll be there to document how they do on Beatportal).

On the move: The mobile Viva studio equipment list

1 x Apple Macbook Pro laptop

1 x M-Audio NRV10 8 channel firewire mixing desk

1 x M-Audio Studiophile BX8A Studio Monitors

1 x M-Audio Axiom 49 MIDI Controller (USB)

1 x Logic Pro 8

Lots of plug ins, samples and loops

• (1) Comments
• (2217) Views