Bill Roper's Journal

It's still Bandcamp Friday (for a little while, at least) and I figured out how to post the Amy & Me album for digital presale. This means you can buy it now, get three tracks now, and the rest will be available on the release date when we get to OVFF.

Learning experiences! They're fun.

Bandcamp link

The album is off to the duplicator.

This morning was absolute chaos. I wanted to do one last track check and did so. Anything that I might try to fix in that track is that way in the original recording, so that is the way that it will stay.

I got a note from the sales rep that I needed to have everything in by 11 AM to hit the production cycle. Piece of cake, right?

Well, except that my original quote turned out to be for 300 CD-Rs. Ack! It turns out that pressed (replicated CDs) are still available in quantity 300. They are just a bit more expensive. And worth it, in my opinion. So my rep updated the quote.

The automated system had jammed up when trying to upload the PDF artwork over the weekend. They have apparently fixed that problem. And it was at that moment that I was reviewing the quote and realized that my printing was laid out in a template that was not the template specified in the quote.

No, no, no, no, no.

I had gone to the template page and had taken the only available template that could possibly hold a two-CD set. It was just not the right one, because it won't actually hold 2 CDs, pocket or no.

My sales rep told me where to find the right template and promised to tell the website folks that it would be good to put the right template on the big page with all of the Digipak templates so that this never happens to someone again.

That just meant that I had to rebuild the entire insert in a new template. Before 11 AM. Starting at 10 AM.

Did I mention that I have been doing desktop publishing since the days of Ventura Publisher? I am not an expert at this, but I'm pretty good. :)

A whole lot of cut, paste, and finagling later, the new insert was built and uploaded.

And the project is paid for and at the duplicator.

This was followed by an email with my CD printing images failing prepress because they are in grayscale. This is true, but they print fine -- or, at least, they have done so for the last three projects. :)

I had a brain once...

Gretchen and I gave the latest set of mixes a truck test tonight. Tracks 1, 2, 7, and 22 need the reverb reduced a bit, which is trivial. Track 17 is a bit congested which is a bit trickier, but shouldn't be too hard to sort out. Everything else is fine.

Tomorrow, I will go down, make the necessary adjustments, and then print each track as a WAV file, extending the start and end points just a bit so that I can easily do the proper cuts and fades in Wavelab to get everything in final form. Then I'll make the two DDP masters and I will be able to upload them along with the printing and get this project off to the duplicator.

And then I can resume normal household activities. :)

The mixes for the "Amy & Me" album are almost done. The vocals are now properly adjusted, but I'm not happy with the relative levels of the fiddle and guitar vs. the vocals, so I need to go down and take another run at the songs. Unfortunately, this takes time and time has been in short supply.

On Friday and Saturday, I was going to and from Ball State for Parents Day. This was a priority interrupt. :)

Sunday, I reworked and tested the mixes, realized where some of the problems were and started experimenting with some different approaches.

Monday, I had a Windycon meeting.

Tuesday, I went back into the studio and touched up all of the mixes.

Wednesday, I tested the mixes in the car and found them wanting. Tonight, there was another Windycon meeting.

Thursday night is the dog training class, so there will be no mixing on Thursday.

I expect that I can get this cleaned up on Saturday and off to the duplicator by Monday morning.

Assuming that nothing else happens...

Ruby and Calvin were successfully redeemed from the dog boarder this morning. It was no surprise when Ruby hopped promptly into the car. It was more of a surprise when Calvin did, because Calvin has been -- up until now -- unwilling to get in and out of the car voluntarily. But he got in and then got *out* when we got home.

This did not mean that he had learned anything else in our absence, as I discovered after lunch. But Gretchen has read through some of the training materials and is trying a new approach to housebreaking Calvin. We'll see how it works.

Ruby is scheduled for surgery tomorrow morning to take out a new (thankfully small) tumor of the same kind as the previous one. I'll be taking her there and I'm hoping that everything goes well.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to push the "Amy & Me" album to the duplicator, which would be easier if I had actually finished mixing it. We tested the then-current mixes on the way down to Ball State on Friday and decided that the track order works, but that there is a problem with the matching between the tracks with replaced vocals and the ones that have live vocals. I did a bit of research last night and got some ideas about how to approach this, which I figured I'd give a try after lunch today.

Unfortunately, what was sounding reasonable in the studio did not sound reasonable at all in the car. But this gave me an idea of where the sonic problems were, so back to the basement I went. This time, I decided to grab the Slate modeling headphones and mix with them instead of the studio speakers. This turned out to be a good idea, I think.

I swapped around the mic modeling plugins again and found something that seems to have worked better. I also reset the compressors on the guitar and vocal, switching to a different compressor plugin that I've never used before for the vocal. I also switched out to a different program for the maximizer.

All that done, tracks went back onto the USB stick for another test while grabbing dinner for Julie. And these were much better. The first track in the set of 10 needs more work, because it was the first track and there were more changes that got accumulated as I went forward, but the other nine sound good.

So I need to patch the first track, then I need to touch up the other 13 tracks so that they match, and then maybe this will be solid for duplication.

Naturally, I have a Windycon meeting tomorrow night...

We had a lovely visit with Amy McNally today. And if you follow Amy's Patreon, you may have seen that we have accomplished the mission of getting a cover for the "Amy & Me" album. :)

There are still things to be finished up, but I should be pushing this out to the duplicator Monday or Tuesday.

And there will be much rejoicing! :)

I am blessed by having Adobe Illustrator and a fairly standard way of laying out my CDs. This one is a little different, because it's a double CD, but they're all digipaks nowadays and as long as I'm in the four-panel layout, it's really pretty easy to grab the cookie cutter and get to work.

Fonts though. Fonts are a thing. I own a great many fonts and finding the right ones for a particular cover can be a challenge. I went through several iterations before finding something that I felt happy with.

I still need a cover photo. And I still need to lay out the individual CD templates, although that is high on the "piece of cake" scale.

And of course, I still need to do the final trims on all of the songs and the assembling of the masters.

But this is looking more and more like an album every day.

And that's a good thing.

Nuts! Wire nuts to be specific.

The guys who did the wiring on our home occasionally did some very interesting things, as I discovered when I tried to wire in the new doorbell transformer. In this case, four very large wires were crammed into one wire nut with the tiny wire from the transformer. It turns out that wiring this back together with the wire nut they used is very, very difficult. And I failed.

I have some other larger wire nuts. Somewhere. A search has thus far yielded zip.

I went to check the Home Depot website and discovered that it said that the Randhurst store was closing at 10 PM. It lied, as I found out after driving 15 minutes to get there. The store closes at 8 PM on Sunday. Thanks loads.

So tomorrow, I will go and get some larger wire nuts, put things back together, and see if the new transformer is working. Eventually, because I *do* have to work at my day job.

But progress was made on some things today. The library was finally mostly put back together after the visit two weeks ago and the sheets have made their way to the dryer.

And I managed to do some more of the finicky editing work on the cover for "Crosstime Bus" since I didn't have anything that urgently needed to be touched in the studio today. And you can see that cover below:

I have pulled CDs to ship for Baycon, so they should be able to leave the house tomorrow if anything goes according to plan. Yay!

I have two weekends left to finish going over the scratch tracks for "Crosstime Bus" which means that it is going to be a busy time in the studio in and around laundry. In the meantime, I should practice some more.

Part of what makes this more fun is that when I *wrote* the songs on this album, I wasn't using a pick. Internal evidence tells me that I picked a pick back up between 2005 and 2010. This means that I have new and interesting learning experiences as I pick them up again, although all but the very oldest scratch tracks use a pick. And, well, I've played *most* of them in the meantime...

Practice, practice, practice!

I am down in the basement today and will shortly (I hope!) get back to working on "Crosstime Bus", which I hope to have out soon. This would be good, because I have been working on this album for a very long time. Long enough, in fact, that the newest song on the album was written in 2006. The track list for this album is on the Filker website, along with the track lists for my other three studio albums and "Live in Germany (mostly...)", which is Gretchen's and my live recordings from when we were guests at DFDF. (Thanks, Smac!)

My question is this: when I am in a position to make another album after "Crosstime Bus", what ought to be on it? Let's toss out anything that is on the five studio albums (including "Crosstime Bus"). Songs that are only on "Live In Germany" are eligible. Songs written after 2006 are likely to be good choices, but maybe there is something older that I have managed to blindly skip over that should be included.

Note also that there are a bunch of individual tracks over on Bandcamp from the "Amy and Me" project which are from concerts where I've been fortunate enough to have Amy McNally accompany me and I think none of those are on a studio album, so if you want to know what some of these songs sound like, it's a good place to look.

Anyway, I have some ideas, but I would be interested to hear what you think.

Thanks for the input!