Friday, May 12, 2006

Welcome to the Hybernation Music Blog

Greetings. My name is John Hagewood and I record under the name Fragile Forest. For the last few months, I've been hosting tracks on Soundclick, where you can listen to and download my creations.

My "style" ranges from New Age / Ambient / Chamber to Progressive Pop/Rock. At this point, all instrumentals (I do vocals on cover tunes I record occasionally, and I sing with a classic rock cover band occasionally, but I have yet to record vocals on an original).

My "studio" consists of two Dell P4's running Sonar, Tracktion2 and energyXT, mostly Sonar. These are networked using a MIDI-and-Audio-over-LAN technology called FX Teleport. I also use a Muse Receptor which is a stand-alone Linux-based unit for running VST's remotely.
*** EDIT: please see update below ***

I use lots of VST Instruments (way too many). My favorites lately are all the Native Instruments stuff, Spectrasonic's Atmosphere, big piano libraries from SampleTekk such as TSO and Black Grand, and lots more.

If I get into this blog thing, I plan on putting up entries about new songs and rough ideas as I work them out. Also, I may offer some "historical" perspective on things I have recorded over the last few years. We'll see...

Here are a couple of pics of Hybernation Studio:




EDIT: June 2008 - Ok, I know some people feel that blogs should be little snapshot in history, but I'm not one of them. I sometimes edit my old blog postings to add more information, change the way the songs are linked-to or embedded, and occasionally even revise information. So, in the interest of clarity, I wanted to provide a quick update on the state of my studio, since this original inaugural post is over two years old now.

I no longer own the Muse Receptor mentioned above. For more information on that see this forum post on KVR.

I no longer run multiple Dell's using FX Teleport. I had to give one of the Dell's back when I changed jobs back in the fall of 2006. And in November of 2007, I replaced the remaining Dell with a new quad-core machine from ADK, which you can read about here.