HUNTER HUSAR: Hello. My name is Hunter. I’m the computer guy in Mahjongg. We choose to use a dual desktop system running Ableton because we can’t afford laptops that are quick enough that can get musical on it, so it’s cheap to have PC desktops with Ableton. That’s the cheapest solution, and also we have PCI built-in sound cards so we actually are -- They’re a little bit older. As you see it in here, our sound cards are in here.

Michael has a similar setup over there, and it’s a little bit older sound card. It’s a couple of years old but it has a PCI card which actually makes the latency only 2 ms which is anything over 2 ms latency in Josh, our drummer, and he’s using the trigger so he can totally tell, so we have to use -- There isn’t enough -- There might be now but to my knowledge, until recently there wasn’t a FireWire card that was fast enough to have that low latency so you had to use a PCI card which me and Michael use the same EMU -- We use this EMU 1820 Buddy, and we are actually MIDI synced which is really cool because Josh can control the tempo and the pulse and then by communicating Ableton to my computer. But then we don’t really have to play beats, you know. We can do other stuff and they’ll be synced coming out of different speakers which creates a kind of cacophonous sphere of sound.

We use all these junky ass amps that are really noisy but it gets the job done. Here’s a part here that is the secret to the Mahjongg sound. This is a 2000-watt QSC subwoofer, and we have the drum triggers going into my computer and then going back out through here so all the drum sounds are kicking out of this thing right behind Josh, so it sends him into sort of a, you know, higher mental state just because of the rumbling maelstrom of the bass, and it’s pretty nice, and this the kind of secret weapon to getting the room to vibrate in different frequencies for different things.

So, we really try to play to the room with this equipment. You can do with anything I think, you know. It’s a philosophical question in some levels but it sure does help to have 2,000 watts of bass, you know, pumping.

And so, he uses these nice Roland triggers. They’re okay. Roland. It would be cool if they’re metal. They break a lot. It’s pretty amazing how many triggers we go through. Sometimes we have two drum kits on tour. On this tour, we are about to leave on a week for today. We have one less guy coming with us so we brought it down to just one drum set, and we do have electro pads but we’re trying to kind of simplify, so for this one we’re just using normal, an acoustic set just with these triggers here. So, we’ve got these Roland -- I think we like the Rolands actually, this whole one, but sometimes they break a little bit. They get loose. I guess we’re pretty hard on them, and then that goes into this Alesis trigger box and this converts that into a MIDI signal which goes into my computer.

Everything goes through my computer except for the bass and the guitar. All the vocals go through the computer and they go out of this DI into the PA, and this is our DI rack here. So, there’s this one. We’re actually getting another one for the tour so we have ATIs that would just go straight into the board when show up to a club. It just makes it easier that we have our own sound engineer, but if we don’t it makes it easier to talk to a sound guy because usually they’re dicks but if we just give them this one thing, then they can like just deal with it. [LAUGHING]

Our goal is to be completely independent.

[MAHJONGG PERFORMING]