BT creates nearly all his work at his home studio, Binary Acoustics, on a setup that’s “very modest and clean, compared to what I’ve used in the past,” he says. The nerve center is an Apple dual G5 running Logic Pro 7, the 30-inch Cinema display we all wish we had, and lots of MOTU interfaces. “When I hear ‘hard’ followed by ‘ware,’” he says, “MOTU is what I think of. My Traveler has never crashed at a gig, and I’ve crashed a ton of interfaces.” His main controller is an M-Audio Radium. “People are surprised I use an unweighted keyboard,” he says. “But it feels like all those vintage synths I spent summers mowing lawns to afford.”

His newest keyboard is a Dave Smith Poly Evolver. “It’s like a little piece of Dave’s soul in a box,” he says. “He and Bob Moog really imprinted on their instruments.” In Figure 1, a Roland JP-8000 has a place of honor, and like his workstations in other rooms, M-Audio BX-5 monitors make up 5.1 systems. Shielded behind custom cabinetry, the rack shown in Figure 2 is part of BT’s main workstation. It contains a Rolls line mixer, Furman PL-8 power conditioner, racked Neve EQ channel, Line 6 Bass Pod Pro, Esoteric Audio Research 660 limiter, two MOTU 2480mkIIs, HD-192 audio interface, Digidesign USD sync box, Digi 1622 audio interface, and Line 6 foot controller.

Figure 3 shows the rack containing BT’s Capybara 320, the hardware engine that runs Kyma. “It’s pimped out with a bunch of cards,” he says. “It’s still the best thing for esoteric sound design. My Hartmann Neuron [on top of the rack] is almost a Kyma, just laid out like a synth, great for weird pads and textures.” Below that are three dual-Opteron PCs (labeled Jupiter, Mars, and Venus) used as sound modules by the Logic/Mac system. “I call this my orchestral render farm. PC Audio Labs did such a great job that they might as well be hardware synths.” Strings live on one, brass and winds on another, percussion and miscellaneous sounds on the third, all pre-loaded and ready to go. “I’m using all the East West Symphonic Orchestra stuff, and I have a MIDI track in Logic’s arrange window for every articulation of every instrument. I have always wanted something like this!”

A fourth PC is a little less stable due to what’s on it. “This one is for all the weird, beta, written-by-a-15-year-old-hacker-from-Norway kinda plug-ins I find on sites like KVR Audio. There are literally thousands of them on there.” BT also makes heavy use of Logic’s distributed processing. “The Macs around the house are all networked, including a big-ass X-Serve in the basement, and when no one else is here, I’m pinging everything.”