Trouble Shooting Back

I am not thrilled by troubleshooting. I am even less thrilled when the trouble shoots back.

You may recall the incident a few weeks ago where I installed a BIOS upgrade on my studio computer and killed my Thunderbolt port which is highly necessary to being able to do recording. Eventually, I managed to roll back the BIOS "upgrade", get the studio functioning again, and have been down here merrily recording tracks.

Today, I came downstairs, woke up the computer, and it stubbornly refused to see the Thunderbolt interface. Great.

Step one was to try all of the non-invasive stuff. I unplugged the cable and plugged it back in. I turned it over, which should make no difference, but occasionally does. I got down on the floor and checked to be sure that the cable was still plugged into the interface. (I do not so much hate getting down on the floor as I do getting *up* from the floor. In any case, the cable was plugged in correctly.)

Of course, at this point, I *still* didn't know whether the failure was on the computer end or the interface end. But my laptop has a Thunderbolt port, so I got K to (grudgingly) bring it downstairs so that I could plug the cable from the interface in there. And the laptop saw the interface, so the problem had to be the computer.

At this point, I powered down the computer, opened up the case, pulled out the Thunderbolt card, reseated the cable on the motherboard header, and put the Thunderbolt card back in. I fired up the computer and it now saw the interface.

And there was much rejoicing. And some muttering.

Everything is now reassembled and still working. I am hoping that it stays that way.

I have priced a backup plan, which involves pulling the motherboard, CPU, and RAM out of the studio computer and installing it in a case upstairs with a motherboard that is too old to run Windows 11; then installing a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM combination that includes built-in Thunderbolt ports. That's going to cost a lot of money before I am done even if I don't replace any other parts in the process. And it will take a lot of time.

I am hoping not to need the backup plan. We'll keep an eye on this.

Chord Wars

Once I finally got the studio computer to behave again, I went back to working over tracks for "Crosstime Bus" and laying down more guitar tracks and replacement scratch vocals that wouldn't be contaminated with the original scratch guitar. The first song wasn't much of a challenge.

And then I was off into "It's All Right". I have been practicing this song. It shouldn't be a problem.

Except I can hear that the second chord that I'm playing in the song is *clearly* not the same chord that is on the scratch tracks. It's labeled on the lyric sheet as "Bm7/A". Right...

Ok, I can hear the high A on the first string clearly. What are the other notes that are in this thing?

Eventually, I realize that this is a D7sus moved up to the third fret. The guitar chord analyzer tells me that it is (among other things) "Bm7/A". Uh huh.

It's amazing how much easier it is to play the guitar when you know what you are playing.