Severed Fifth is an ambitious project and one that requires a lot of moving parts to happen. This includes studio equipment, hosting, software, rehearsal space, merchandise, and more. A lot of these moving parts cost money and as such the project needs a certain amount of money to succeed. Some wonderful Severed Fifth fans have used the Severed Fifth Fair Pay system to help support the project, but also some companies who I have asked for support have also been gracious enough to support us. I just wanted to highlight these companies now.

Bytemark Hosting

Bytemark Hosting has supported Severed Fifth from the very beginning by providing free hosting for the website. As Severed Fifth has continued to grow we can thank Bytemark for helping to keep us online, and my friend Adam Sweet performs the administration on the machine.

I have been using Bytemark for years due their pretty affordable hosting and rocking service and they have been incredibly supportive across other projects I have been involved in such as LugRadio too. If you need decent hosting check them out, and let them know we sent you. :-)

ToonTrack

Toontrack produce a range of tools for audio production. Their two flagship products are EZDrummer and Superior Drummer. When I recorded Denied By Reign I played the drums like an acoustic kit but using electronic drums. As such, I used the drum sounds from the kit itself, and the drums sounded really synthetic. The drums were the main criticism I got for the first album.

For the new album I wanted to fix this. I went out and bought a copy of EZDrummer and Drumkit From Hell, and while it sounded good, it lacked the flexibility I needed. Toontrack’s flagship product, Superior Drummer, is much more expensive but it, and the Metal Foundry expansion pack which I also needed, had the features that would make the new album rock. So, I emailed Toontrack and explained what Severed Fifth was and the Free Culture nature of the project and Toontrack kindly donated a copy of both Superior Drummer and The Metal Foundry for the new record. Lo and behold…the drums are sounding awesome! Thanks, Toontrack!

Microsoft

For the live recording of the new album which takes place from 11th – 15th August 2010, I wanted to stream the recording live on the Internet. To set this up I needed a fairly specific recording set-up to take the output of the mixing desk and pump it into ustream.tv. To do this I needed a separate laptop with a USB sound card to output to the net.

While I tried to get this working in Ubuntu, this particular hardware is not well supported so I needed to use Windows. I contacted a friend of mine at Microsoft and explained the project and she kindly hooked me up with a boxed copy of Windows 7 for the laptop. Now we can stream the live album online! :-)

Remember, you will be able to watch the new album streamed live here!