BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. I’m Bill Holland. I’m here with David Goggin, Mr. Bonzai.

MR. BONZAI: Hello Bill, and we’re outside Mutato Muzika, which is a recording studio complex and production company founded by Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo fame, co-founder of Devo. Unfortunately, Devo is not here today. They’re performing in San Francisco. They’ve been back on the road again occasionally, but Mark will be back soon and this is where a lot of music is done for commercials, for films, for television shows, for video games. I did an interview with Mark recently, and here’s -- so we can have a picture of Mark here at Mutato Muzika, and then shere are the -- Mark with some of his composers that work here. We’re going to meet some of these guys. Here’s a little Life Aquatic. Mark did the music for that movie with Bill Murray. So, let’s get ready for some fun.

BILL HOLLAND: What kind of setup do you have here?

ALBERT FOX: Basically, I’m running a Mac. It’s an older -- What is this? A G5, a dual 2.5 processor. I’m running OS -- I don’t have the latest -- What is it? Like Leopard or? I lost track of the cats. I forgot which one in there. I have 10.4.11 right now. I haven’t done any upgrades. So, I’m running Logic. I use Logic studio or whatever the new one is, Logic 8, in conjunction with, you know, other. It’s mostly Logic these days, but Reason and Live and that kind of stuff, but I’ll would probably about 90% of what I’m doing right now is done in Logic.

BILL HOLLAND: So you use Reason and Live for a lot of like for just basic compositional type stuff and then...

ALBERT FOX: Sometimes. It depends. If I’m, like for remote setup, if I absolutely have to go away and -- basically because I don’t have a laptop fast enough to run Logic right now. I have an older G4 Titanium, so if I want to -- yeah, you too. [LAUGHING] So, if I wanted to, you know, for instance if I go away on a weekend and somebody needs an update for something that we did, which happens a lot all the time, so you take your stuff with you and you just wait for that phone call, and you know you bust out the laptop in the hotel bathroom or whatever you have to do to record vocals on the, you know, on the laptop mic which I’ve had to do in the past but yeah. Because of that, whenever I travel then I have to take the laptop with me and I have her set up with Reason, which is somewhat what makes the setup I have in Logic but it’s much easier on the processor and it’s basically just for writing. It’s like a scratch pad and so most of the -- actually all of this music that I wrote for The Sims 2 was written entirely in Reason, and then after that I’ve had to transfer it to Logic and then do all the tracking, all the replacement of, you know, instruments of the real instruments of, you know, the drums and upright bass and guitars and pianos and stuff.

BILL HOLLAND: What are you using for the guitars and the pianos?

ALBERT FOX: Drums and pianos, I use basically -- MIDI-wise I have -- Boy, I don't even know. BFD we use. We also have use some interactive drum kits that actually I can’t get over. I keep using them. BFD to me is a little kind of a pain in the butt to set up so I don’t mind it. Because most of the stuff gets replaced anyway, then we end up -- It doesn’t really matter a whole bunch of, you know, what we’re using but for piano I think we’re using I think what’s called the GigaPiano. I like to do the Ivory but it’s a little much, but we also have a MIDI grand here in the building so if we ever we need to actually record piano or track piano, you can write the MIDI track and then -- I’ll show you in a second. We’ll walk into Studio A and you can basically just transfrer -- send your MIDI file to the piano, and the piano plays it for you, and you just mic it and it’s...

BILL HOLLAND: Awesome.

ALBERT FOX: ...a perfect, you know, a perfect recording every time.