Infected Mushroom's Production and Performance Rig

Infected Mushroom’s Hardware and Software

TL;DR: It takes about $50,000 in kit and a whole lot of talent!

Why write about this?

I recently attended a show at Boston’s House of Blues with 12th Planet and Infected Mushroom, as part of their Animatronics Tour. It was one of the best shows I’ve attended as an audience member in my life, and that’s really saying something (I attend at least a dozen shows a year, including a couple of music festivals).

Most of the stuff I’ve done over the years has been a product of primarily using great software. I’ve always leaned on that, since I wasn’t able to afford better hardware until recently… now I have a decent studio, but that’s new to me in the last year. I was super curious to see what one of my all-time favorite psytrance bands was using for their rig, and after attending the show, I did some digging online and compared those notes to what I saw them using on-stage. I’m 85-90% confident this is more or less what they’re using presently.

This is my first post on DSF, so I apologize if I commit any cardinal sins here.

The Rig

Here’s all the dirty details I could dig up.

  • Lead guitar is run through a Zoom G9 ($650) & Eventide H8000FW ($5500)

  • Keyboards / hardware MIDI controllers / synthesizers include:

  • Roland RD-800 ($2500)

  • Nord Modular G2 ($2000)

  • Yamaha MOTIF-RACK XS Rackmount Synth ($1300)

  • A custom-designed Doepfer modular synthesizer from Analogue Haven (price unknown)

  • Stutter / LFO / glitch / other production effects during live sets are performed via MIDI gating over the Roland RD-800

  • Electronic drum kit: Roland V-Drums TD-30KV ($7500)

  • Computer audio interface: RME Hammerfall HDSPe AES-32 ($1000)

  • Mixing board: Yamaha 01V96VCM 40Ch Digi Mixer [32-bit/96kHz; Rack-mount; USB] ($2400)

  • Recording is done only in 32-bit, 96Khz

  • Prism Sound Converter renders 16-bit 44.1Khz for CD presses

  • Effects engines include:

  • Universal Audio UAD (several ones, incl. LA-2A)

  • Moog Filter (Low Pass, etc.)

  • Doepfer modular synth / oscillators

  • Their preferred DAW is Cubase

  • In-ear Shure monitors for every band member during live sets

  • Outboard processing via:

  • Eventide H8000FW ($5500)

  • Lexicon 960L ($5800)

  • Sonic Core Scope Xite-1 DSP ($3900) w/ Modular III ($380) & Adern FleXor ($140)

In conclusion…

Hope someone finds this list as interesting as I do. These guys have an awesome band, they played the show with a level of energy like it was the first or last one of the tour (it wasn’t) and had more fun than most artists I’ve ever seen, and if in my entire career I can produce a single track that’s half as good as their worst one, I feel like I’d be doing alright! =)

Shit music though

4 Likes

Is that your idea of constructive criticism?

. * shrug *

Haters gonna hate…

Decent gear, shit music.

Better?

Not particularly. Taste in music is entirely subjective.

Now, if you said something like, “Their music sounds over-produced. It’s not really my preference to have so much gating slicing the bass and drumlines into 1/32ths of themselves at every opportunity, and I also don’t care for vocal tracks auto-tuned to a formant 5th + octave.”

… THAT would be constructive.

I think Bjork sounds like shit, but I wouldn’t randomly share that on a thread from a musician who said it was his favorite artist without backing it up with something that is constructive and adds to the discussion.

6 Likes

cracked daws are free

2 Likes

Have you listed all new prices? Because I bet they didn’t buy all that new and some of that gear can be had used for a great deal less.

Having used both software and hardware for some years I feel like neither is objectively better. These days software is about 90% of the way there to getting sounds that used to be limited to the hardware (mostly analog) realm. Also software does 100x times more for 100x less money.

For playing live though, I still think hardware is probably preferable. I haven’t seen their show…though they are passing through my neck of the woods in a small venue, might check it out just for the gear porn.

There’s nothing constructive about anything you said in that post. You’re like those douches that go to wine tasting lessons so that they can talk about how robust a bouquet is and fundamentally miss the point of taste and preference. Pure pretense.

1 BigUp

welcome 2 dsf

4 Likes

it takes only about FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS… “small loan of million dollars” while i can’t afford to buy anything, fuck life, fuck everything

have you guys seen that new mala track

with the formant 5th + octave

brilliant!!!

1 BigUp

have u guys seen my cock lol

1 BigUp

I feel like I have for some reason.

I’ve seen like at least 3 dsf dongs

The only thing there id want is the prism.
Edit: assuming its an ada8xr, amazing conversion. Its like everything is a thousand times more detailed

Yeah, mostly. Some of the stuff in their kit is so old you can’t buy it new. Some of the kit was used prices as a result. Honestly, you could probably have everything listed above for $10-15K if you were patient, but again, given how much you can do with software and how old a lot of the kit is, you probably wouldn’t want ALL of it.

I’d say it’s worth it just for the animatronics. It wasn’t the FIRST time I’ve seen a giant pneumatic tentacle monster dancing to EDM (El Pulpo Mechanico at Burning Man also shoots fire!) but it was definitely pretty fucking epic.

I agree. Your post was way better, and sounded far less pretentious.

Is this it?

This was the kind of feedback I was hoping for: something that teaches me anything new about the kit list above, which I know very little about. Thanks =)

DSF 2016

2 Likes

Don’t go and buy something like a fancy converter unless u run a recording studio or u will be £6000 out of pocket for a slight sound quality improvement. If u run a studio u will probs need at least 5 if them too