SIRS has finished mixing a group of new songs and is continuing work on more. At this point, we could play a shortish set! Yes! Contact us if that's on your mind.

We are releasing our first 7" in about six weeks. Billy The Kidney b/w Fast Eddie and Curtis is the first release on the fledgeling Unicut Records label. Unicut Records. Where dreams are made...and sawed in two.

Rob's Production Notes:

Making SIRS music has been a wild ride in an acoustically un-treated space. For mixing, I depend on really top-end near-field monitors (Bag End MM-8s) cross-referenced often with headphones and subwoofer (Bag End Radius). The mixes seem to hold up, and I haven't moved too far from my usual studio approach, which is to use the digital workstation very much like I would use a tape machine. Not too much fuss, but it's not two-track live either.

Our biggest weakness in the signal chain is in microphone library. We're using a variety of cheap and oblique mikes but I'm putting them to their best uses. We do love limitations!

I've been laying down bass, keys and guitar plus Chris's vocals over the backing tracks I program

The I/O is an RME Fireface 800, a terrific box I heartily recommend. In fact the only other I/O I would have considered for SIRS was one (hefty) cut above in price and ADDA quality - an Apogee Rosetta. The RME is a real trooper, runs smooth as silk under OSX, XP and Vista (yes, I do need to control it with all three OSes) and has given me no problems whatsoever. The Fireface is actually responsible for three jobs, and recording is only one. It serves as the PA through which Chris and I sing and monitor the backing tracks spewed out of Haizman (a 17" MBP running Leopard). And it also (will eventually) serve as the live playback system as s soon as there are some shows.

The applications scene for SIRS includes ACID 6 (XP under Parallels) for drum sequencing/editing, Audiomulch (XP under Parallels) and Reaper OSX 0.73 -- an alpha build of the Mac version of my favorite DAW.

You know why it's my favorite? Reaper is the first and only DAW application built out of disgust! Justin Frankel, fresh from writing (and selling to AOL for $60 million) WinAmp and Gnutella, checked out all the competing multitrack DAW programs and like me, was stunned by the crappy user experience in all of them.

Instead of complaining, the frighteningly talented Frankel attacked head-on the awesome task of building a quality multitrack DAW from scratch. He started a mere three years ago, and the result is the indescribably superior Reaper. Have you ever been made crazy or nauseous by crappy misfeatures in Cakewalk? Has ProTools legacy of hiding its proprietary hardware pissed you off? Has Digital Performer given you epilepsy with its staggeringly cramped and retarded user interface? Has the routing in Vegas handcuffed you? Reaper. Reaper is all I have to say. Reaper. It's so good, I put the whole band project on it's less-featured and less-stable OSX version and I still beat Logic's ass when it comes to straightforward audio handling. Reaper!

Okay.

Other pieces of the SIRS audio puzzle include a Kurzweil PC2R, Ableton Live, some outboard compression and EQ, a M-Audio TriggerFinger, and a pile of plugins great and humble. Except none of my older VSTs since Reaper and Live only support VST 2.4. And that kind of sucks. But not terribly.

Chris likes to make noise with the purple box. He yells into it.

Oh, and claves. I have a pair of claves. Dook dook! Dook! Dook!