A peek at the inner workings of EMPulse Records, Rocket Propelled Geeks, and Studio 6 .

Life around here has been getting more insane daily. We're up to 12 or so computers in the house and our power bill is getting out of hand. Lappy286 here is one of them, and old IBM ThinkPad 600E with an impressive 128mb of RAM in it. I was running xubuntu and xfce4 on it until RPR started getting out of control and I needed to edit audio (mainly voicemails for air) on it and remain compatible with the monster in the studio. Outside of this laptop, Spork's got one somewhere around here as well as two computers in his little dungeon. IP's got a desktop and mine brings us up to 7. We've got an office (read: converted dining room) machine and another hooked up to the tv that brings the total to 9. The Old Skool BBS runs on an old Pentium II (WinXP, WorldGroup 3.2 and MajorMud) and sits beneath the TradeWars 2002 server. ...that's 11. Then there's Jupiter, an evil bastard of Linux box. Some old school dual Pentium 2 with 1gb ecc ram. Once upon a time it was a server for a local design company with fiber channel and 4 10krpm SCSI disks in RAID 5. Now it's ATA and generally referred to the loud bastard in our family room. Last but not least is Broadcast, the temperamental red machine in the studio streaming RPR to Jupiter. I guess we're up to 13. ...great.

On to the monster referred to above. Empulse is the workhorse of Studio 6 and was graciously built for us on spec by Atlantic Computer Innovations in Daytona Beach. A massively heavy rack mount box housing, iirc, an Abit 8va with a PentiumD and 1gb Corsair ram. 4 160gb WD drives(8mb) are in RAID 5 for the audio and there's a small 30gb RAID 0 partition for scratch disks. All of the audio in the studio runs into our MOTU 1224 and 24i boxes which are plugged in to the MOTU PCI 324. If you're looking for a multitrack setup on the cheap, this is most certainly the way to go. An equivalent Pro Tools setup would cost about $18,000 new. Our MOTU setup cost about $700.

For the longest time we searched the great lands of the interweb for a full rack of Art Dual MP's to power the 14 or so mics required to record a band. We literally bought every one on eBay. ...all 1 of them. For a while, I had some pres on loan from Caveman and was using a Mackie 1404vlz pro for it's 4 shitty preamps. Then, out of nowhere, Bob The Soundguy dropped off a Studiomaster Mixdown Classic 8. A 24 channel british monster that currently runs not only the studio, but RPR as well. If you listen to Yellow Alert you're listening to what is most likely the only internet radio show ever to be running phone calls through such a beautiful console. (Update! We're now running Yellow Alert from the back porch through pieces of the live rack and the Mackie) Admiral Awesome the Intern V2.0 sits behind that monster every Thursday night punching bus routing buttons in a panic. (check out Yellow Alert, show 2, third segment). Now that I think about it, I don't think any other internet radio show in the history of the fucking universe has used so much electricity. ...ask IP about that.

A somewhat brief history of EMPulse Records

EMPulse Records was started in Tallahassee, FL in 2002. Our first release was Rocket Propelled Geeks: GOTO 10 on Jan. 27, 2007. Currently our staff includes Spork, Petey Wheatstraw(aka IP), Ninja(aka TCP), and myself. We also record for Kelly Morgan, Blow In Your Nose, and Vinny (aka Delpido!). Local bands get mixed in there sometimes also (We gotta keep the lights on around here somehow!)

So, what happened between 2002 and 2007? In 2002 I was living a mile from FSU's football stadium and working in the shadow of Capitol Dick listening pretty much exclusively to european techno. (on that note, go and buy Orbital: Orbital 2 right now. Seriously. Start clicking, motherfucker.) Kyle (writer for Blow In Your Nose's 'Fucked You Now I'm Leaving' and third verse in 'It's About Fucking Time') decided he wanted to record metal. I was in the middle of working with Kelly Morgan on Candy and KD47 and had already completed the EMPulse album. We were shopping around for a record deal and actually got rejected by FunkWax records because we were, get this, too good. wtf? They had a trance mix out at the time and didn't want a song we had sent them to compete with it. Insanity. At the same time that sort of bullshit was going down I came to a stark realization; if I signed with a label willing to release vocal trance and prog trance, they certainly weren't going to release a metal album, not that me and Kyle were all that serious about it yet, but still, I'd be stuck writing techno for some label and be bound by contract not to release material to another label, metal or not. Not cool. Being somewhat young and clearly self loathing, I started my own label, Impulse Records. ...the name lasted until I tried to register impulserecords.com. Little did I know Impulse Records had been releasing jazz albums for 40 fucking years. I knew I'd have a real problem proving that we were doing business as Impulse Records before 1960 considering I was born 20 years later. Instead of renting a flux capacitor we decided to change our name. That process only took 4 years or so. In the meantime, I moved back to Port Orange, only confirming that this place is a black hole. I met back up with my high school buddies Spork and Ninja and set up Studio 5 in a spare bedroom at my parents house. A glamorous beginning indeed.
While I was in Tallahassee, Ninja had started recording an album with Vinny (Indiscriminate Ninja) on a roland VS something or other. One of those 8 channel digital recorders. Vinny was tied up recording his own stuff at the time and moved the production over to Studio 5. At the time I was recording with an Gina24 and had only our JX-305, Bass Station, and XP-50 to work with as I was still set up for trance and metal. He asked for a beat for a song called 'Captain Shook' and I thought 'rap beat? what? sort of like trance but darker, slower, and allot more minimalist'. Turns out, producing epic/prog trance for 5 years or so pretty much erases the word minimalism from your vocabulary. What I thought was minimalist turned out to be 30 tracks of samples and drums. Being total fucking nerds back in high school when it still wasn't quite cool yet, Ninja, Spork and I would stand around before class and trade off singing parts to 'Powerhouse' and laughing like idiots. (we didn't get laid why? oh yeah. also, check out Capt Shook for that Powerhouse sample. Think Loony Toons warehouse).
Amazingly, the song came out allot better then any of us had expected. We started work on the rest of the IN album. While recording with Ninja, I was also recording Blow In Your Nose: Sucks with Kyle and obsessing over how demo-garage band we sounded. This is about where I stumbled across the black arts of mastering. By no means is mastering learned quickly. It's an absolutely terrible chore requiring all sorts of shit that we just didn't own and couldn't afford, monitor speakers for starters, a nice sounding IO for the computer, a mixer that didn't cost $299 and so on.

June, 2004. Spork gets evicted and ends up living in another room in my parents house. (for the record, my parents are some seriously nice fucking people. We rent this house from them now and I don't think we've made rent on time in months. Releasing an album is an expensive endeavor. Much thanks to them for the support). So, studio in one room, Spork in another, and I'm jobless. I've spent 18 months teaching myself audio (this would be for the second time now that I took a break from music and decided to learn), occasionally writing a track here and there testing out techniques and such (Sexavixen with Voix, Be Bad, Coulda Been You) and it became clear that I had a choice; computers as a career, music as a hobby or, well, the other way around. Having already dropped out of college I decided music was the way to go. I took a job at Atlantic Computers installing machines for the school system here and moved in to what would become Studio 6. Spork moved in the same day, Ninja the next. I started going over the budget for the studio and the label and realized that I wouldn't make the amount of money required in years, let along the one year we wanted to spend building it.
Enter shitty job, stage left. I got a second job bar backing at night. For what seemed to be forever I worked 40 hours a week at the computer place and 36 at the bar. On my day off, Sunday, I'd put studs up here and there in the now gutted garage. At the rate we were going, the studio would never be done. Ever.

Spork, Ninja and I took a week off of work and took the money we saved to Lowe's. Holy shit is all I can say about that. Who knew? Building a studio takes money. Lots of it. Thousands. For a solid week we work with countless people helping out to build studio 6. On the last day of construction even my dad showed up to help hang drywall. It took another couple months (we were all back at work) to get the drywall finished, do the electrical, carpet, paint, yadda. Then came our eBay blitz. Spork and I spent weeks on eBay getting most everything on the list we made a year earlier. Way more fun then nailing stuff to walls. 364 days and somewhere in the neighborhood of (a shitload of money) later, Studio 6 was switched on. The date was Feb. 28, 2006. Let the insanity begin.

We started recording with Kelly Morgan right off the bat, getting some alt-rock tracks down, testing all the gear, etc. It had been a year since I recorded anything and took nearly as long to get familiar with all the new gear. For a while me and Ninja picked up on IN production where we left off nearly two years prior and recorded Dangerman (listen to Koto, then Dangerman. That's the difference between studio 5 and 6) Then...we sorta sat around and wondered what the fuck we were doing. We had all given up two years of our life, large pieces of sanity, and enough money for PS3 to... wait, run a record label? None of us had any idea how to do that. We had no idea what to record! In Port Orange, the only places to play live certainly won't have rap bands or techno played...so we began work on Blow In Your Nose: Sucks. Catastrophic failure. Ninja moved out, Kyle moved in. Spork began drumming for us and it became increasingly apparent that none of us were much good at playing metal. Progress was so slow that it became maddening. We had a house, a studio, a record label, and nothing to release nor any capital left to sign a band. Oh shit. Kyle moved out, Petey Wheatstraw moved in. We continued letting the studio sit idle six days a week and worked on music on Sundays, still my only day off. Progress got slower, we lost a bit more sanity. EMPulse Records was in serious trouble. I couldn't write lyrics worth a damn, Kyle was taking bass lessons, and Spork was frantically learning old Blow In Your Nose drum patterns, which I had done with samples two years earlier with no intentions of them ever being played by a human. I recorded 'Midget Stomper' with Petey Wheatstraw which came out as a sort of rap/metal hybrid. Shit started falling apart real quick like. Recording was slowed up by preamps(read above), we had no songs to record, and spent every Sunday learning covers so we could get Blow In Your Nose on stage. Times were bleak, practices were skipped, and music became the furthest thing from our minds. Parties were getting out of hand. We had to build the table that this laptop is sitting on now so that the girls stripping at our parties had something to stand on. Something had to be done. I couldn't pay anyone to work for the label and we were in serious danger of the entire thing imploding. On July 24th, 2006, I walked out to our back porch and set my cigarettes on the stripper table. I asked Spork if he would help me write a song - my lyrical skills were nil. I just needed to practice something, maybe get something done, maybe even a song recorded. "What do you wanna write about?" Spork asks. I really hadn't the faintest idea. "I don't care man, anything. What's the stupidest shit you can think of?". Spork shrugged and said "I dunno. Magic the Gathering?"

A somewhat brief history of Rocket Propelled Geeks

At 1pm on July 24th (so says file creation dates) Spork and I were on the back porch writing a song about 'Magic the Gathering'. Lyrics never flowed so easily. It seems instead of writing about drugs and antiestablishment movements, writing about nerdy shit was easy! We'd already spent the last 15 years of our lives as nerds, why not write about it? Spork and I walk into the studio and basically dust shit off and start recording the MTG song. Petey Wheatstraw came home from work to find us recording and, being the house's only real rapper, was naturally interested in what was going on. Ninja just happened to show up 5 minutes later. Both Mr. Wheatstraw and Ninja are amazed to hear us rapping about nerdy shit. We wrap up what little bit of a verse and chorus we had and came out to the porch for a smoke break. Then it hit us. 'Holy shit, we're fucking retards.' Within seconds it seemed clear that every other project we had needed to get shit canned and we had to start working on what came most natural to all of us; being geeks. Ninja had always wanted to form a rap super group with the rest of us and the Wheat was right on board. Spork asks, "What do we name it?". We threw around a couple ideas that were absolute shit (none of which I can remember). The Wheat comes back outside and says, "We should call it RPG." "RPG?" we ask. "Rocket Propelled Geeks" says the Wheat. He was joking. Spork perked up and in unison we all said "Yeaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!". Petey Wheatstraw immediately pretended like it wasn't a joke. I ran inside to check the interwebs. rocketpropelledgeeks.com was available. myspace.com/rocketpropelledgeeks didn't exist. Holy shit! It's on.