San Francisco's Halou started making music together in the late 1990s. The band's members include Ryan and Rebecca Coseboom and Count. The band has released three CDs and scored numerous films and ads. They have also remixed songs for other artists. Earlier Ryan Coseboom talked to Gearwire about making music with ProTools.

Coseboom also talked about how the band's studio and live gear differ.

"Samplers are totally important to us. Count plays all the drum sounds from the albums via a sampler. I also grab stuff from the recordings and toss it into the sampler. I'm usually playing a combination of sampled noises and a more musical piano or guitar part," he says. " Rebecca uses three microphones live to get some pretty crazy vocal sounds going. She's got her main vocal mic with some delay on it. A green bullet mic for the radio vocal sound. Then, she's got a mic going through a Kaoss pad for some of the crazier stuff. That mic works particularly well."

The band uses string players live to "bring the performance up another notch."

When it comes to amps the band, well, they do not use amps.

"At the moment, we're not using amps on stage. I use a Line6 Pod Pro for my guitar and I run my bass through NI's Guitar Rig running on my laptop," he says. "It's a bit strange, but I need to be able to call up guitar sounds quick and reliably as I'm usually playing keyboards at the same time."

They prefer the SE Gemini for a vocal microphone. SE Electronics website says the mic is a throwback to the warm, expansive valve mics of a couple of decades past. The mic is a dual tube microphone that Coseboom says really brings out the breath in Rebecca's voice while giving it a certain "fuzziness."

"She's got one of those voices that has two elements to it - the timbre and the texture. The Gemini really defines the texture of it, I think," says Coseboom. "It's the combination of the mic and the Tube-Tech channel strip that we paid a lot of attention to when setting things up."

Coseboom briefly answered one of the standard Gearwire questions (i.e. If you could have ANY piece of gear, price not being an problem, which would you choose?).

"I'd take a Moog Modular and a new room to put it in." says Coseboom.

Halou is more than halfway done with their fourth CD and plan on finishing that by early next year. Spring is the projected release date. Following the release the band plans to tour.