Hacks, tracks, tools, and cool

I'm not normally home at 4:30 in the afternoon, and I don't normally expect calls, either. But there I was, setting up to do some recording (more on that later), when I got a call from one Buck P. Creacy, a storyteller and retired toolmaker in Kentucky, who promptly put me on a speakerphone to listen to his performance of my song "The Toolmakers", in front of a live audience. Is that cool, or what?

Buck performs "The Toolmakers" as a dramatic recitation, since he first encountered it years ago without the music. As I've said many times, I love hearing what other people do with my songs, and this kind of thing is one of the reasons why.

I stayed home today mainly to do some recording -- I'm hoping to finish the recording on my CD this weekend, and the mixing hopefully in the next week. I also got in a four-mile walk, picked up some random bits of hardware at Guitar Showcase, and moved my recording box back to the back bedroom studio. The random bits of hardware are intended to make it unnecessary to move it back to the office -- instead, I'm going to try running the audio out from the Delta 66 soundcard to the monitor speakers in the office, using an unused run of Cat5. Unshielded twisted pair isn't the best thing for audio, but when it's low impedance at fairly high levels it should be OK.

Recorded vocal retakes for "Little Computing Machine" and "Mushrooms". That leaves two vocal parts to redo ("Someplace in the Net" and "Guilty Pleasures"), three guitar parts ("TEOTWAWKI", and "Guilty Pleasures", and "Silk and Steel", and two songs that ought to be re-recorded because the recording was sub-standard ("Uncle Ernie's" and "Stuck Here"). Those last two were among my earliest attempts at recording -- I've learned a few things since then, especially about mic placement.

That makes some seven tracks to do, in an evening plus two days. Even a notorious procrastinator like myself ought to be able to do that. (The editing and mixing are another matter, but...)

And did I mention that I need to get moving on my taxes? I kept thinking, "plenty of time after I finish the album sometime in March..." Yeah, right.

Cheops' Law of cable building

Everything takes longer and costs more.

Today it was mostly "takes longer". It took much longer than I expected to put the mic stands back where they belong, clear a space for the computer, shut down and disconnect the computer in the office, and bring it back up in the bedroom studio.

Then it took a lot longer than I would have liked to get the Cat6 cable run back in operation. It didn't work when I installed it -- I figured (correctly, as it turned out) that the problem was screwed-up plugs. I ended up cutting off both ends' plugs and connecting them to a patch panel on the office end, and a modular jack in the garage attic. Naturally this required several tests, each of which meant a round trip up and down the garage stairs. Par for the course.

This freed up the the old Cat5 run I'd been using, leaving me free to use it as I'd originally intended: to run audio for editing, so I don't have to waste two hours moving the box the next time. It took longer than I expected. Surprise. And I wasn't expecting the sound quality to be particularly good, but I wasn't expecting nearly as much 60Hz hum as I ended up getting, either. Not nice

(A few minutes later) An isolation transformer (Furman ISOpatch) helps a lot. And I'll be the rest of the problem is caused by the fact that there are two independent paths for what is really the same ground. (A few minutes later) Maybe not: shorting the two grounds at this end doesn't seem to help, and I know they're shorted at the other end. I may just be stuck with it for now.

If I had real differential signals this probably wouldn't be a problem. At least now it's down to the point where it's not really noticable when I'm actually editng. So I could edit now, except that I'll need to go to bed soon.

tracks

Did some more editing on "Silk and Steel" It may work ok with the guitar track I have; I think I'll record one anyway just to see.

Recorded new vocal parts for "Little Computing Machine" and "Mushrooms", but they still need some editing. Definitely not releasable in their present form.