Bill Roper's Journal

It looks like "Falling Toward Orion" has finished setup and should escape to the streaming services shortly. That leaves "Seven Miles a Second", which is submitted and in the queue (somewhere) and "Live in Germany (mostly...)" which I still need to submit and then all of the physical albums will be up on streaming.

I was driving from Ball State over to the Midkiff's after K's visit at the university. The GPS route involves a lot of local roads and as we crossed Mystic Road, I commented to K that "Lost on Mystic Road" is a good title for a song. She replied, "Right. Lost on the Mystic Road" and I corrected her to remove the vagrant "the".

A few days later, I was lying in bed not quite awake when the chorus started popping into my head, complete with the horn section hitting on "Down". (Thanks, Moxie!) I scrawled this down in my phone and kept adding bits over the next several days before finishing it up this weekend.

I hope that you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

The van is mostly loaded for an early departure tomorrow. In a little bit, I'm going to go pack my suitcase with everything except my toiletries. And that will be it until the morning, which is going to arrive *way* too early.

See some of you at GAFilk!

I had thought that I would post our current OptumRX saga (which *may* be resolved) today. But instead, I have finished a song -- more or less, as the tune is still settling down. And I would *much* rather post that.

So here is the cheery little ditty that I started last night and finished up today. There is *nothing* like having a con coming up to engage the songwriting gears...

Anyway, I hope you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

I have been cleaning things off my desk in the hope of eventually getting a surface that is not nearly so big a mess as it has been for the last several months. The problem is that I keep starting to clean it up, but then I get interrupted before the process is complete and a new layer of accreted material lands on top of the previous strata. The result is that the desk surface is the product of eons of accumulated stuff.

Lots of stuff.

In the last two days, I've made another frontal assault on the dig site, which has included going into the overstuffed closet and trying to remove stuff in there so that I can move some of the things that are on the desk into better storage. And I have thrown a lot of things away or tossed them into the recycling bin.

It is *still* a mess.

But among the things that just surfaced from the lower strata on the desk is a hand-labeled CD-R that says "Crosstime Bus, Bill Roper, Scratch Tracks, 1/14/10".

Oh, my.

I have been working on this project for a *very* long time.

This year would be a darned fine time to finish it.

We have survived day two of Eighth Note Fest. Children and parents were fed, a trip to Goodwill yielded a lot of clothing, and the brisket for dinner followed by cookie baking by kids means everyone ended up full. Or more than full.

Last year, on the way back from GAFilk, Jen and I listened to the tracks for "Crosstime Bus" and came up with a lot of ideas about arranging the various songs. Sadly, we didn't actually write any of those ideas down.

This afternoon, we listened to the tracks again and this time I was not driving and was able to write everything down in Keep Notes so that I can now *do* something with all of the ideas. :)

I am a slow learner, but I *do* learn...

It was a crazy day at work today. Sam, Bonnie, and Jerry were coming over for cider and cookies around five. I had hoped to be done with work by then, but it took a few minutes longer. Eventually, I made it downstairs and the conversation was fine. :)

In the meantime, the "Liftoff to Landing" CDs arrived from the duplicator, four days earlier than forecast. I was happy to see those too. One of them has been opened and is being tested in my car, where everything is fine so far.

Tomorrow, I hope to catch up on the shopping that I didn't finish today. Happily, that does not involve a trip to the mall -- just to the supermarket!

I am told that the Liftoff to Landing CDs are shipping today, although UPS hasn't yet received the packages as of last report. But this means that the forecast of CDs arriving soon is excellent! :)

It's easy to record a track down in the basement studio. Really. Yeah.

Ok, this reminds me of why I decided to record a couple of scratch tracks up here in the office. But it got better.

It didn't start well. I had gone down to the basement earlier in the evening and discovered a fair amount of disarray in the recording booth. I'm not sure why, but I have children, so that's always a leading suspect. I saw that the new mic was mounted on the stand that I wanted it on for vocals, but there wasn't a guitar mic in the room.

Before I started doing final renders for other tracks on the album, I decided to hunt down the guitar mics. I found a bunch of the cheap Marshall mics, but I remembered having bought a better pair of small diaphragm instrument mics some years back. They weren't in the mic locker though. Hmm.

I started poking around on the bookcase and found a box of small reel-to-reel tapes of some origin or another. And under the box was a big wooden box with two still-unused small diaphragm instrument mics in it.

I really need to do more recording in the studio. And I have another album that I should be working on that calls for that. But I digress...

Anyway, I finished rendering all of the other tracks on the album and went upstairs for dinner. After dinner, it was off to the basement with the guitar (in case), the lyric sheet, and my iPad. I repositioned the mics, because I planned to do this standing up, adjusted the music stand, cleared the space for my iPad, and then said "Where is the guitar stand?"

There had *been* a guitar stand in the room the last time I was there. It was not there now and it was something that I really wanted, so I went out and found it disassembled on top of the pool table. Why? I don't know. So I put that back together, put it back where it belonged, and then got the guitar out of the case and took it off to the room.

Happily, the guitar was still nicely in tune for not having been touched since Windycon. Ok, let's go get the iPad remote working.

I had downloaded Avid Control the last time that I had to do recording in the studio, because the Cubase remote app was just broken in so many ways that it was both unusable and unprintable. But I had noticed that a new version of the app had come out, so I figured I'd update the iPad to that version and see what happened.

When I went to the App Store, I was informed that they needed my password, which I provided, which was followed by my being told that I needed to go enter my password in Settings, which was followed by a demand for my phone number, which I entered, which was followed by a text message to my phone with a code that I needed to enter, which I *would* have been able to enter much more easily if the iCloud app hadn't kept coming up on top of that window asking for my password, and then after I entered the code, I was told I would need to make a new password, which I did, and then I could finally go back to the Cubase app page where I discovered that the app had been automatically updated at some point.

But I didn't come here to talk about that. I came here to talk about the draft...

(No, I didn't, but this was starting to feel like "Alice's Restaurant" there.)

Anyway, I downloaded the Steinberg SKI remote software and updated it, went into Cubase, activated the remote, connected the iPad to the computer, and amazingly, everything worked. This was good, because if I had just gone through all of that to see things fail, I would have been very unhappy.

I pulled up the UA Console, powered up the mics, and set some trial levels which at least got signal. Then I had to figure out what was wired up correctly in Cubase, because Cubase was hearing nothing, which turned out to be just a matter of setting up the hardware routing.

Ok, let's go record.

Since the original album had been two tracks direct to tape, no punch-ins, no saving throw, I figured I'd do the bonus track the same way. It's a two minute song. How hard can it be?

It's a two minute finger-picked song. Harder, as it turns out. I had a ludicrous number of false starts, but that's ok, because you just reset and start again. I wasn't trying to synchronize with anything, so I wasn't messing with headphone mixes. I was just playing.

Cubase tells me that I pushed the record button 18 times doing this. I think there were only six or so complete takes and I finally decided that the last one was good. I rendered it, compared levels to the existing tracks around it (all good), and then compared the levels to Clif's bonus track.

Clif's bonus track was substantially less loud than the surrounding tracks. Grump.

I opened Cubase back up, adjusted Clif's levels, compared it to the surrounding tracks, and rendered it again.

At this point, I need to duck over to WaveLab and apply the opening and closing fades. Then I can assemble the album, burn a CD to test with, and make the DDP master.

And if everything is good, I can upload this to the duplicator.

But that will be *tomorrow's* project.

I made a number of adjustments to several of the tracks for "Liftoff to Landing". I also mixed down Clif's bonus track. I still need to record *my* bonus track and it is clear that my Guild 12-string needs some work, because the intonation is not in a happy place, so that will have to be done with a different guitar.

Once everything is *done*, I need to do one last set of mixdowns, adding dither. Then the beginning and ending fades need to be applied and the whole thing assembled into an album in WaveLab, after which I can make the DDP master for duplication.

And the printed material needs a couple of tweaks before it is uploaded.

I am *very* close to done...