[FLUTTR EFFECT MUSIC VIDEO “I WANT YOU NOW” PLAYING]

GRETCHEN HASSE: Have you done any engineering yourself as far as mixing and like doing the final mix yourself?

VESSELA STOYANOVA: I personally haven’t done any recording or any engineering. The drummer and the guitar player in the band have done quite a bit, and in fact this new album that we’re writing right now is going to be recorded completely in our own studio, which makes me really happy.

One of the things we found out is that you can get into a really great studio and you can have a really great engineer, and if you don’t have enough time and if you’re not relaxed enough to put out your best performance, then it doesn’t matter. If you know you’re playing $500 a day or $700 a day and you’re stressed about time and you’re stressed about all the conditions and it’s not your perfect environment, then you’re not going to get it. And “Marking Time”, the last album we did was recorded that way, and I’m happy with it. It’s a picture of who we were that time, and there are things about it that I think are great but I am a lot more interested in being more comfortable and having all the time in the world. And if you have to sacrifice a little bit of production in order to capture that, I strongly believe that it’s worth it.

And then in addition to that, this time around we decided to record without worrying how we’re going to play it live. Everything we’ve played so far, everything we’ve recorded so far has been we write the songs first, we play them live for a while, and then we go in the studio and worry about how do we capture what we’ve been doing live on tape or Pro Tools. In this case, we’re going to go the other way around. We’ll record whatever needs to be recorded, and if I have to lay 10 different tracks on MIDI then I’ll do that, and then we’ll worry about how we’re going to play that later, and I have all the confidence that we’ll be able to pull it off, but the attitude is going to be different this time.

I personally just got the Muse Receptor box, which is my contribution to this studio. It’s basically a two rack unit that has a computer built in that is specifically dedicated to running virtual synths, so it works with VSTs and you can buy any VST that you want. I have Komplete in it right now, Komplete 5, and the -- even that it’s never outdated. The sounds are always there, and if something is outdated, you just go and get the new software and you plug it right in and it runs, and I can have a ton of effects on it and it’s really flexible as far as working with your own sounds and mixing your own stuff so you don’t have to use presets. You can go and tweak parameters and start playing around with that, which is how you create your unique voice.

GRETCHEN HASSE: That’s good

VESSELA STOYANOVA: And actually, more than one person can run through in, so I can have other people in the band be running effects through the Muse at the same time and I don't have to carry my laptop to gigs anymore, which is amazing, because my entire life is in that laptop, and every time I open it at a smoky bar somewhere with beer spilling all around, I’m really not comfortable.

GRETCHEN HASSE: [LAUGHING]

VESSELA STOYANOVA: [LAUGHING] It makes me really nervous plus laptops crash, and Muse so far has been foolproof as far as that goes, and there’s no pictures and Word and other things on the Muse to distract you, and there is virtually no way of putting a virus on it because you’re not plugging in directly into the Internet. So, it’s just a dedicated computer that has one function in life”: to provide sounds to your MIDI.