 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, uh, you know, taxidermy room- oh, sorry- with, oh, I don't know, the taxidermy room or maybe the garage of supercars. But not me, I'm starting where the, uh, 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 you wouldn't tell me s*** 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'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, so that with access panels under the floor, the like 800 cables for these patch panels here, or the like bang-in, you know, optical display port cables for the monitors that are going to be installed here, can all be run without disturbing the room's otherwise pristine. 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 want to go give you an 18 dB output for filter. So I'm just going from one module to the other if I just say. And oh, now I want to 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 and 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 lay person, 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 unbelievable 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 LAN center, because why wouldn't you need a LAN 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 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 frickin 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 Stornator is actually the reason, this was the, 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? Would you even? No, 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 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 of, 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 Kinect. Then he used a model from non-stop night, redid the head and animated it using Cinema 4D, then rendered it out using Optane. And the visualizations and the synchronization to like the head, which by the way, I absolutely did get to where 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 him 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 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 fucking 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. If you like this video, hit that like button. If you really liked it, get subscribed. Maybe consider checking out our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should totally join.