The Strang Quartet

The Strang Quartet formed (officially) in Cambridge UK in 2003, consisting of long-time friends Martin (guitars and vocals) and Julian (drums, keyboards, guitars and production). Our mission statement: to make deep, meaningful, noisy sounds for the delectation of ourselves and others.

Martin and Julian met in the 1990s in Cambridge. At the time Julian was messing about with electronic music on a rather weedy computer setup, but Martin was impressed and they started making sounds together. After buying more second-hand keyboards and MIDI setup than he could afford, it all started coming together... until work dragged Julian away from Cambridge. In 2003, he returned - now with a "proper" PC recording setup, and it's all flowed from that really. We've had an enjoyable and creative year or two, long may it continue. Andy Mazur joined us for 5 songs in 2006 playing bass & backing vocals. Amos Willbond joined us in September 2009 to play guitar and a bit of backing vox. He's got some wikkid metal chopz, innit?

In a phrase: progressive rock. Pink Floyd - bigtime! Hawkwind (trivia: Julian had guitar lessons from Huw-Lloyd Langton once!) Marillion; Tangerine Dream; Deep Purple; Porcupine Tree; Tool; Pain of Salvation; Ozric Tentacles; Jean-Michel Jarre; Patti Smith; Lou Reed; Cassandra Wilson; Jimi Hendrix (of course!); Stevie Ray Vaughan; Jimmy Page.

Hardware: 3.2GHz i7 Pentium PC, 6Gb DDR3 RAM, 1066MHz FSB mobo, 3x80Gb SATA HDD, CD/DVD R/W M-Audio Delta-44 PCI sound module with breakout box. Focusrite Liquid Mix 16 audio DSP. External 500Gb USB HDD for backup. Line 6 Pod XT Live for DI guitars Line 6 Bass Pod Live XT Fender Stratocaster guitar Yamaha Pacifica guitar Gibson Les Paul guitar Roland V-Drums Mapex M-birch Fusion acoustic kit / Samson mics Shure SM58 mic Behringer vocal processor M-Audio studiophile monitor speakers Adrenalinn II Digitech whammy pedal Ibanez Blazer Bass Software: Windows Vista 64 SP2 Cubase 5.x Wavelab lite Spectrasonics Trillian Spectrasonics Triogy Spectrasonics Atmosphere Spectrasonics Omnisphere oZone 4 mastering tools TC-Helicon Voice processor Steinberg Mastering plug-ins BFD2 Drum Module Adobe Audition 1.3 audio editor All the half-decent free VST plugins I can find