Hacks and tracks

Took the day off to work on the album, which is getting close enough to taste. (Meager and hollow, yet crisp.)

Out of the seven tracks with problems in yesterday's dump, I've worked on three so far: silence the lip-smacks and breathing in "Little Computing Machine", raise guitar/lower vocals in "Stuck Here", and fix Kat's vocals in "Daddy's World". The latter was kind of interesting: the chaoswolf has a bit of trouble staying on pitch. What I was planning to do was drop her out of alternate lines in the chorus. But that wouldn't really have helped, and would have sounded odd. What I finally did was to put the previous take back in. Ended up with sort of an extra voice in the chorus, and sounds halfway decent. I really wanted Kat in "Daddy's World" because I wrote it for her when she was four. I may try the same thing with "Bugs", but I still want another voice there. The Y.D., perhaps.

Leaves me with two more tracks I can work on by myself this afternoon ("TEOTW" and "I Wanna Be a Webmaster"), plus the booklet and tray-card layout that I've been putting off.

The other thing I did this morning was to upgrade the main disk in the fileserver from a 200GB IDE drive to a 400GB SATA. Went very smoothly modulo a couple of missing symlinks (because I'd merged the /opt and /local partitions). The old drives are still there for the moment, and grub still calls them hd0 and hd1, so I'll have to do a little more editing before I can reboot without them.

That leaves me with mainly the gateway upgrade to do, probably tomorrow morning.

Tracks and Sets

Some actual recording: Replacement vocals for "TEOTW", a tambourine track for "I Wanna Be a Webmaster" -- as far as I know that's the last of it, except for "Guilty Pleasures" and "Bugs", which I need other people for.

Also, put down scratch tracks for what I think are the only two songs on the tentative setlist for Baycon that weren't up on the web yet: "The Cap and Bells" and "The Owl and the Pussycat". (Waves at cflute, who is also encouraged to make suggestions. This is a group concert, after all. The tune for "The Owl and the Pussycat" is public domain, BTW, so it should be possible to track down sheet music for a 3-part arrangement. 5:29 Also note that the songs on the list are in no particular order.)

Three steps forward...

...two and a half steps back. The new vocals on "TEOTW" are iffy at best. Probably could use another go. The others came out mostly OK, though I'm not entirely satisfied with the tambourine track on "I Wanna Be a Webmaster", either.

Meanwhile I jury-rigged a replacement light fixture in the office -- the light started blinking about a month ago, and I didn't have time to deal with it then. It's still blinking, which means that the problem is in the switch (manageable) or the wiring (total pain in the arse to fix). The fixture needed replacing anyway -- it wouldn't take a big enough bulb.