Puttering

[mdlbear]

It was a beautiful, crisp, clear day when I left the house this morning, intending to take a walk and then go up to Gryphon to check out their April Fool's Day sale. Unfortunately, I wasn't paying attention, and drove right past the Los Gatos Creek overpass where I usually stop for my walk. Considered the time, and headed up to Palo Alto.

Then, somewhere between Fry's and Gryphon (they're about a block apart, and Fry's has a nice big parking lot), I stepped off a curb wrong. It didn't hurt, but I could feel that something wasn't quite right, so I decided to bag the walk. Got a couple of guitar books (Guitar From Scratch, volumes 1 and 2 -- books were 20% off) and an green alien-faced shaker egg. Very cool-looking. Fry's was disappointing; no cheap GigE cards, which was about all I was looking for.

Coming back, then, I stopped at Starving Musician, where I got a couple of extra-large mic clips, hoping that at least one would fit the AKG C1000S I picked up used (i.e. without its accessories) a couple of weeks ago. Turned out they both did. The final stop was Guitar Showcase, where I got a nice little ProSonus BlueTube preamp. The thing I really like about it (apart from the blue-glowing VU meter) is the fact that it has separate controls for "drive" (tubularity) and gain.

That got me home at about 2pm, at which point it was time for me to get my recording system plugged back together, and the new preamp installed. (The goal of this exercise was to end up with two good preamps I could plug into the line inputs of my soundcard. That way I can leave the gains adjusted for my "standard" solo recording setup, and use the preamps built into the soundcard's external I/O box for mobile and special setups.)

Getting things back together after the chaos of packing for and unpacking after Consonance turned out to involve a great deal more puttering-around than I expected. And figuring out which of the many sockets on the back of the I/O box were the line in's for channels 1 and 2 was a good deal less than trivial than it should have been (apparently they're a pair of unbalanced inputs on a stereo jack; fortunately I had a cable that would work for that). It all works now, but I still need to tweak the gains and experiment with the drive control.

But things are put together, the shelf that the computers are sitting on is considerably neater now, and I've tossed a considerable stack of listings dating back to my days at the Stanford AI lab into the recycle bag. No, I don't know what they were doing for the 35 years between the time I printed them and the time I found them on my bedroom shelf. Conceivably they were in a box that my Mom sent me when she moved out of the Connecticut house.

Comments

[elimloth.livejournal.com]

and I've tossed a considerable stack of listings dating back to my days at the Stanford AI lab into the recycle bag.

Wow, you invoked ancient lore. There are very few people, and most definitely this is true of the LJ crowd, who would know what a 'stack of listings' means.

[mdlbear]

Scary, but true.