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Dogs and Discs
Sep. 14th, 2025 09:01 pmRuby 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...
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...
