Welcome to the Mouse House.
Joel Zimmerman, AKA Deadmau5, invited us out here
to hang for the day and give you guys a peek
at the tech setup of one of the world's most iconic
electronic music artists.
Spoiler alert, this guy is a big, huge nerd
and this place is flippin' awesome.
Okay, now I know everybody else setting foot
into this castle would start with the, you know,
taxidermy, with, oh, I don't know, the taxidermy room
or maybe the garage of supercars, but not me.
I'm starting where the magic happens,
if you know what I mean, the master bedroom.
And that is an entirely appropriate thing in this case
because Deadmau5 has turned it into one of the only
Dolby Atmos mix studios outside of Dolby themselves.
You actually need a special black box
that he wouldn't tell me about
in addition to the nine custom-made speakers from ATC
that are perfectly positioned in the room
in order to master audio in 3D space.
Remember, Atmos can scale to hundreds of speakers
surrounding the viewer.
This room has actually been under construction
for three years and it's still not quite done, but it is.
It's really close.
I mean, to be clear, slapping a MacBook on the table
and chilling out to some sick jams in here is,
as the kids say, dope AF,
but it's about like playing CSGO on a supercomputer
compared to what it will be capable of.
And this is really cool.
So this entire room is actually suspended
from what used to be a vaulted ceiling.
This was done for a couple of reasons.
Number one, for improved acoustics, and number two,
that with access panels under the floor,
the like 800 cables for these pad panels here,
or the like banging optical DisplayPort cables
for the monitors that are gonna be installed here
can all be run without disturbing
the room's otherwise pristine aesthetic.
And the gear in here is freaking unreal.
So the Neve analog console in the center here
would run you about a half a million dollars.
As configured.
And honestly, that's just to take in the inputs,
apply some EQ and compression, and adjust levels.
And check out these walls.
On the left and right of the center console
are different variations
of what are called analog modular systems.
Now, a lot of folks would produce electronic music
exclusively on a computer through software these days,
but you have to remember that those would be
digital reproductions of what is inherently
an analog thing.
So this wall here is the culmination of over five years
of curating and collecting tone generators,
sequencers, filters, I mean, you name it.
This one's called the Modulation Orgy.
How can you not get one of them?
And Joel was kind enough to give us an in-person demo
of how something like this works.
So here's my hip, and I plug it into there,
and then that's the input, and then we wanna go,
maybe an 18 dB output for a filter.
So I'm just going from one module to the other,
if I just say.
And oh, now I wanna change the pitch of it
to be like a tune, right?
So this is a 1V oct, which means one volt per octave.
I can get these little nuances of turning these analog dials
and creating these sounds that subconsciously
you probably know just aren't quite right,
you know, which is neat.
Now, he obviously doesn't use that for everything.
I mean, it's the digital era.
But from an artistic standpoint,
what's great is having options.
An applied voltage on a stepless dial
provides, practically speaking, infinite options,
which I guess leads us into why there are
over a dozen synthesizers in this room.
Now, to the stupid layperson,
one middle C equals another middle C,
but that is not the case.
All of these have different tonal properties,
and many of them have
multiple stories.
This Juno 106 worth about 1500 bucks,
he got for $20 at a pawn shop
from some guy who didn't know what it was.
This Jupiter 8 and this Prophet 10 down here,
these are really, really hard to get your hands on today
because they were built in the 70s using components
that even if the manufacturer wanted to,
they couldn't build this stuff again
because that stuff's not available today.
And they have this unique retro tonality
that like, for example,
when they went to do Stranger Things,
they had to use this equipment
because we still don't have the capability
to emulate what these sound like electronically.
Like these guys would have gone
for a couple hundred bucks in the 70s.
Now they're worth tens of thousands of dollars.
This one that folds up in a briefcase right here,
this is R2D2.
I don't mean this is the same model that was R2D2.
This was R2D2.
It still works.
And to say this place sounds freaking amazing
would be selling it short.
I mean, I only even got to listen to a couple of tracks
on the stereo speakers, but my God,
it is an audio listening experience
the likes of which I have never come even close to.
And all of that, that's just the surface level.
Let's head down to the dungeon of this modern day castle.
First up is the Land Center,
why wouldn't you need a Land Center in your basement?
This is about as tricked out as it gets.
Five small form factor custom built machines from NVIDIA
with the cases customized by PC Junkie Mods to match,
get this, to match Joel's cars.
Every single one of them is also running
a Blackmagic Micro 4K camera for game streaming.
And the capture machine for his game streaming setup here
is actually running under this.
This like center pentagram console thing that I'm standing on
and it's hooked into their 10 gigabit
home networking solution.
You heard me right.
I found the only other person in Canada
with a server room in his freaking house.
And I couldn't be more excited to tell you
that it's actually quite a little bit,
maybe quite a bit better than mine.
Not that it's a competition, not that I'm upset.
It's just that that is where the two,
gigabit internet connection comes in
from the 103 foot tower with ubiquity fricking dishes
on the top out in the yard.
This one right here,
this is a custom box with 16 NVIDIA Teslas in it
that sounds like a freaking jet taking off.
And this guy right here,
this 45 drive Storinator is actually the reason.
This was the springboard for this whole collab,
because Joel reached out to me about a year ago now
asking for some NAS advice.
So I got him hooked up with the guys at Unraid
and now he's all set up with 70 terabytes of,
of course, highly expandable storage for all of his music.
And actually now come to think of it,
do music files really take up that much space?
What do you even know?
No, of course they don't.
But the answer, the real answer is really freaking cool.
Now I have to confess, I never really gave a,
gave a lot of thought to, well,
how do the graphics on the cube or the helmet
sync with the music?
I just assumed that it was farmed out
to some expensive Hollywood production house
and that it was just kind of done by magic.
But no, Joel and his team actually build
a lot of these tools and effects in house,
including 3D modeling.
So most of those gaming machines over there, like,
when there are no friends over playing Rocket League,
are actually being used as render nodes.
And this is in addition to the Teslas in the server room.
There are a total,
and I think it's 43 NVIDIA GPUs in this house
that are all used for rendering.
So one of the animations for the cube that Joel showed us
was actually recorded using motion cap
from like his Microsoft Connect.
Then he used a model
from non-stop night, redid the head,
and animated it using Cinema 4D,
then rendered it out using Octane.
And the visualizations and the synchronization
to like the head, which by the way,
I absolutely did get to wear,
there is exactly as much sweat in there
as you would imagine,
were designed by him and his crew as well.
And if you're a networking nerd,
this is where it gets even cooler.
So this massive touchscreen,
that's a relic of Microsoft's acquisition
of perceptive pixel,
there are only four in the world by the way,
can be used through the network
and some custom software that Tim and his team developed
to allow audio effects and animations
to be controlled in real time on a massive touchscreen.
So pretty much the entire show can be run out of this box
with a couple of Mac Pros with this nifty mount on it,
and this front house mirror.
And this is the whole mixer.
Well, I hope that this whole thing has been
at least 30% as fun for you guys as it has been for me,
because that means it's been pretty fun.
Thank you to you guys for watching.
Thank you so much to,
oh, he's standing out in the driveway over there,
but he's waving.
I definitely had permission to do all of this.
Thanks to Joel for allowing us to hang out here for the day.
And I guess that's pretty much it.
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