Here is, compiled, some replies Alex made to questions of the forum 'Gearslutz' about equipment he uses :D hey

everyone this is alex. i just wanted to speak up because i read gearslutz a lot, but never really post and i saw this thread about jnsi and i recording those stomps. we recorded the stomps at our home in reykjavik, where we have a small home studio. we used an AEA R84 > AEA RPQ > Chandler TG Channel > Chandler TG-1 jnsi and i both love the R84! such a good mic and the TG-1 is amazing too. we leave it on limit mode with the recovery on 1. that setting comes straight from Peter Katis, who is amazing by the way the album we were recording those stomps for is jnsi's solo album, called "Go" it will be released in march. the album was recorded by Peter Katis, mixed by Tom Elmhirst, and produced by jnsi, myself, and Peter Katis. and a big thank you to all of you for being a really good resource for me over the past few years Thanks,Alex thanks so much guys!... we recorded those stomps in our kitchen just because we were being spontaneous... nearly all of the instruments on jnsi's album were recorded at Tarquin Studio by Peter Katis. but i recorded most of the vocals and some other small overdubs from our home studio... as for sigur rs, they have never recorded in our kitchen, but they have recorded most of their music in an old swimming pool turned studio. it's a really nice studio, i was actually working there last month on another project. here is their website:home thanks again... alex thanks a lot, it's really nice to hear that you like jnsi and my album.

and i'm glad your trip to iceland was good and you got to see some of the nature, it is so beautiful! about the album, it was all recorded by jnsi and i at our small home studio. we have a small but very good collection of microphones and outboard gear we even recorded the string quartet and seven piece choir there. we also used our upright piano a lot on the album, some guitar, harmonium, melotron, glockenspiel, and our voices. we only used acoustic instruments and voices though i tend to avoid synthesizers/ keyboards all together, but i am really into samplers! i find that i can use samplers to create soundscape that turn out really organic, i'll sampler piano, guitar, harmonium, and singing, or whole mixes sometimes some of our favorite micas are the U47, CMV-563 with the M7 or M55 capsules, & R84. these are the three we use the most at least and we use a fair amount of outboard gear too, but most our effects are created by using samplers. we slow sounds down a lot, or speed them up. we use "u-turn" all the time, when you have something play forwards then backwards we use reverse reverb sometimes or tape delay. every once in a while we'll record sounds on the built-in mic on our laptops and use it in some way once there was a piano shop that was playing piano music onto the street through a crappy horn speaker. so we recorded it for a long time on the laptop's built-in mic and slowed it wayyyy down, then cut it up and built a song around that recording but most everything is recorded at home we use the TG Channel for anything, but you're right, the EQ does tend to work better on instruments than vocals i'll usually use the HPF and add a little 6.8 and cut a little 300 for vocals. my vocal chain on jnsi's voice for his solo album was U47 > TG Channel > LA-610 > TG-1 for most of the songs. so i tend to use all of those things together we also used the R84 for one song where jnsi sings in his low register. the R84's low end is so beautiful i'm also into the Retro Sta-Level, the Thermionic Culture stuff, and the urei 1176 i love getting sounds juicy on the way in, not being too safe, just having fun! and i use some plug-ins too, Vintage Warmer, Old Timer, Sonnox Limiter, Waves SSL, some T-Racks Singles, Sound Hack stuff, Space Designer, and SampleTron are my favorites.

 and thanks again, it's fun to get nerdy about all this stuff - Alex ok i'll do my best to give some feedback here sampling we use the built in mic on the portasound a lot! yup, we just hold the portasound up to our speakers to sample whole mixes or groups in instruments soloed. we also play or sing straight into the portasound's built in mic. we always use the ADSR on the portasound, it's amazing. we also love the fuzz button and the AM button. the portasound is, by far, the most creative instrument i've ever found. we also often use sounds recorded through good mics into our software sampler for slowing way down or speeding up etcthe casio sk-1 is cool too, but not as usable as the portasound, but it's still a classic reverb & delays we do reverse reverbs in two ways. one by doing the classic process you mentioned, and the second way is with a software reverb called Space Designer. Space Designer is great, it sounds really good and it simple to use and the tape delay i mentioned is also just a software tape delay. it does sound really really good, but i wish a had a real tape unit i will get my hands on one of those someday!other than reverb and delay we don't really use any effects. we don't use chorus, flanger, modulation effects etc we love overdrive, amplitude modulation, and just using automation to make everything alive. mics & preamps we use a high pass filter on most recordings, it lives on 30, but for vocals i put it on 60 or 90 depending on the song. for guitar and piano probably 60 or 90 also depending on the song. i'm never acting safe while tracking, i like to get things to sound as close as i can to the way i imagine it to sound in the end, that's just the way i like to record we don't own any Neve or API gear at the moment, but we both love the vintage Neve console sigur rs has in their studio. and the i've heard some other Neve and API stuff that i though was amazing. we are slowly building up our home studio, and maybe one day we'll have some of that stuff hope everyone has been having a nice holiday- alex

hey again glad you like the R84's too, but for piano I love a pair of CMV563's with M55 capsules! most of our delays come from Logic's "tape delay" plugin. it's a really simple plug-in, but it's so amazing it can sync to tempo, it has a nice little EQ filter so the delayed sound it nice and lofi, feedback control, wet/dry mix, and it just works your next question should be asked to peter katis because he recorded all of the drums on "Go", but when i'm recording my own stuff my favorite thing, in addition to all the usual stuff, is to have a front of kit mic compressed so hard it's just distortion. then i'll blending that mic in with the drums just to have the right amount i also love to put drums through the Culture Vulture! sounds so crazy! some effects we used, other than typical EQ and compression were peter's space echo, his plate reverb, a rotary speaker, and a lot of cutting things up and re-sampling them. and i think Tom Elmhirst also did a lot of neat things during the mixing with the portasound i almost always have the ADSR all of the way up, i just like the slow attack i usually boost around 3.5 khz so it sounds even more crispy, then HPF and LPF like you do to loose the noise. happy new gear (rhymes with year!! ha ha) Alex about the low bass sounds on Riceboy Sleeps, it's jnsi's voice. we sampled him singing long notes, then mapped it to a sampler and played his voice as a bass instrument. glad you like the sound, since it's so slowed down it does to some neat wavering : ) thanks again,Alex hey paul... thanks so much for all your kind words! : ) well, about our monitors in the jungle, we just went for it. maybe it was stupid, i bet the humidity was not good for the speakers. but we wanted to mix the album ourselves, and not in iceland ( just for a change of pace) and somehow we ended up deciding not to go to a proper studio either, but to just take our time, so we ended up in that jungle - ha ha

oh, the monitors we were using are Dynaudio BM 6A mk II. and they are still alive and well and i'm glad you like "Boy Lilikoi" it was such a fun album to work on! Alex when we record our voices for making samples i'll just use anything it doesn't really matter what mics or gear you use when it's for this purpose. once we've recorded everything we map the samples to our shitty little midi controller in Logic's sampler and just play it like a keyboard instrument. it's really simple, we do this with voice samples and with all kinds of melodic samples toowe use Sampletron, it's really cool, but i'm not sure if you can load your own sounds into it, i've never tried that cool idea though Alex thanks again guys... yup, during the making of jnsi's album i got to use so much cool equipment, mostly stuff that belonged to Peter Katis but some of it was just so perfect for the sounds i like to get that i bought a few new treats for my home studio my favorites are the Thermionic Culture Rooster, such an amazing box!! the Retro Sta-Level, one of the most beautiful compressors i've ever heard! it does something really special! Thermionic Culture Phoenix, i use it as a stereo bus compressor. and the Chandler Curve Bender I always work with Logic Pro. i started using it 2002, and since then i've just gotten to know it better and better, i really like it. but most of jnsi's album was recorded with Pro Tools. yup, i use the EXS-24 sampler, i think it could be a lot better, but i stick with it just because it's built into Logic. jnsi is still a Soundscape kid, he just doesn't use it often anymore. the Soundscape system is at Sundlaugin Studio and jnsi doesn't record there very often. jnsi mainly uses Logic these days now i just want to get my paws on everything Retro Instruments and Thermionic Culture make! A