Bill Roper's Journal

Well, I have CD masters. All I have to do is figure out how to finish uploading stuff for this project and I may manage to get CDs.

Unfortunately, the upload is jamming up on the CD imprints. I am not sure why. But someone will be in on Monday, I am sure.

It also turns out that they are no longer doing pressed CDs in quantity 300. That gets you CD-Rs, which are not what I want. *sigh*

I can find a place to put 500 CDs. I'm sure I can...

Gretchen and I went out and gave an extremely cruel truck test to the current mix for the "Amy & Me" album.

Mostly things are ok. I'm going to go down to the studio, make another small round of adjustments tomorrow, and see if I'm done.

Being done would be a good choice. :)

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...

After you've lived in a place for a while, things start to break down. Today's breakdown was announced by my wife and children, who informed me that something is buzzing in the hallway. A bit of investigation showed that the problem was with the doorbell chime, which is buzzing in a nasty way.

So I did an Internet search and one common cause for this could be that the transformer is failing. I have now ordered a new, slightly more powerful transformer (in case I decide to install a Ring or similar doorbell) and will install it tomorrow, I hope. And then we'll see if the buzzing goes away.

The current transformer is sitting on the side of the junction box that also supplies the light at the bottom of the basement stairs, which reminds me of what we discovered when the house was being built. We would press the doorbell and it would not ring. The builder reported back that, no, the doorbell rang just fine. It turned out that the transformer had been incorrectly wired into the circuit controlling the light bulb at the bottom of the stairs so that it would only supply power to the doorbell when the light was turned on.

They fixed this.

Tomorrow, we'll see if this adds any fun to the equation.

In other news, earlier today, I finished importing the bass tracks that Jen sent me for the Crosstime Bus album and set up test mixes, so that's done. Yay!

I went down to the basement today to resume work on a mix that's being my particular problem child. I think I got almost everything cleaned up, but I will never be quite sure, because that was the moment when the computer froze and had to be rebooted.

Well, I remember what I did. I just have to do it again tomorrow...