SL Sound Studio

I’ve spent a fair bit of time in a recording studio this week; the SL Sound Studio that is, which is based in the virtual reconstruction of Gregory Ain's 1948 Mar Vista Residence (part of the mid-century modernist movement and an experiment in planned social engineering). If you'd like a tour there's a video right here.

In one of the rooms there’s a brilliant electronic music studio, spec as follows:

• Roland TR-808
• Roland TR-909
• Moog Minimoog
• Moog Prodigy
• Korg Trinity v.3
• Oberheim 4-voice synth
• Decks
• Sampler

What really makes this special is the spatialization. No mixer as such but move around the room and you really FEEL it. I ended up with some ok tunes after a slightly shaky start (you need to start with the 808 and build on that – being practically a ‘digital native’ I never read instructions…). It’s been good meeting people in there as we’re all into the music thing, and also you tend to be taken more seriously as a female avatar and less likely to be hit on if you’re doing tech stuff.

Other than that I’ve been skydiving at night, visited Rome, the Kasteel Verloren (amazingly huge castle complete with maze), discussed the pains of memory and bandwidth issues with a couple of German ladies on a train in a Japanese city… the list goes on.

However, I’ve also been doing a hell of a lot of desk/web-based research into SL and writing a fair bit…

Started Sunday by popping in to the Webheads meeting place on Edunation Island for a meeting with a (potential) colleague, and was also interviewed not once but twice on the joys of SL; first time from an intercultural perspective, second time educationally-focused.

So all-in-all it’s been a fun, virtually multi-faceted and professionally-fulfilling weekend. Meanwhile MT has been living in the real-world - i.e. the one with mountains that make you lose your breath - although we did have a rather excellent Wii session on Thursday evening. I'm counting the days until Wii/SL integration (more on this in a future post).

Now for a glass of Rioja and a RL cuddle…