Once we had an actual floor upstairs to put things on, the bed could move up there, and the gear could move from the basement to the to-be-studio room, which was partially pulled apart, plus it also served as storage space for uninstalled floorboards and such. So everything was still pretty raw, but somehow it all worked. Everything was compactly laid out an well within reach. It looked like a total mess, but worked very well.
I felt I really needed a drum machine. I wanted to program insane beats. So I got the Jomox XBase 888, which was quite a solid thing. I immediately learned that (as with with the Machinedrum), I really didn’t want to program insane beats with a drum machine, but preferred to do the sequencing via the DAW and use the drum machine just as a sound source. But still, drum machines are fun, and this one was no exception. To this day I have not been able to program insane beats. Actually, I probably don’t even want to, as I prefer simple drum patterns.
I was also covering Rammstein, so I needed an electric guitar. You just can’t cover Rammstein without one. I decided to get the Line 6 Variax modeling electric guitar (except I already did it earlier without one…and ended up not using it here either due to…er, “technical” problems). An interesting piece of machinery: there’s a switch with which you can select which classic guitar it sounds like. So it can sound like a Fender, a banjo or a 12-string acoustic, among others. Weird but insanely useful. The sound might not fool a guitar enthusiast, but buried in the mix I guess it will be quite hard to spot the difference. And besides, who really cares if it doesn’t sound exactly like a Fender Stratocaster…