Bill Roper's Journal

So it went like this...

The new baby gate arrived this morning. I dropped the old baby gate off at UPS over lunch and it is on its way back to Amazon. After work, I decided that I would see if I could quickly install the new gate and it turned out that I *could*, having figured out all of the problematic parts with the previous gate. The gate is now installed on the stairs and should, I think, prevent Calvin from coming upstairs. It does not *seem* to prevent Gretchen from coming upstairs, although it doesn't make the whole process any more pleasant. And Julie needs to see how to operate the gate so that she does not tear it down accidentally. I have called Julie and suggested a demonstration, which she has declined. I worry about this.

Meanwhile, the new Thunderbolt 3 adapter card for the Apollo 8 unit that I bought arrived from Sweetwater. It had come via USPS and the notice said that it was in the mailbox. This seemed unlikely and it was, as all of the mail had been left on the porch, because that box had no hope of fitting in the mailbox. I brought everything in and it was now time for dinner.

We have been keeping Calvin on an extra-long leash to keep him in the family room when he is not in his kennel, but after dinner, I decided we should let him roam free on the first floor and determine whether the new baby gate would keep him off the second floor. This cost us one wooden cooking spoon that had been used for dinner and which Calvin found while counter surfing. Ruby took it from Calvin and it died while I tried to take it away from Ruby without breaking it.

And then a little while later, Calvin went and laid an enormous load in the middle of the living room where he has been previously guilty of doing so. Great.

By now, I am *really* unhappy. I head back into the living room to turn on the lights and clean up the mess.

And I trip on Julie's suitcase, which is still sitting in the passage between the hallway and the living room where it has been for over a week since Windycon. I had been thinking that this stupid thing really needed to go upstairs. I had thought correctly.

Trips to the floor: one.

Swearing and shouting ensued, because I was unhappy with pretty much everyone in the house at this point, including myself. Happily, I don't seem have done any major damage to anything, so I was able to pull myself up on the stairs, get up, and clean up the pile of poop. In multiple trips to the toilet, but no more trips to the floor.

I had thought to drag Calvin to the living room and rub his nose in it, but he was having none of this, so I exiled him to his kennel. Then when I was done cleaning things up, I dragged the kennel full of Calvin to the living room, where he will remain until morning in exile there.

And then Gretchen and I finished watching our TV show. After that, I went to the basement to install the new Thunderbolt 3 adapter into the Apollo 8 unit. This is easier when the unit has not already been installed into the rack so that it can only be accessed from the floor.

Trips to the floor: two, but with more planning this time.

Taking the card out requires a lot of playing with a teeny, tiny Allen wrench (which I only dropped once). Then I discovered I couldn't lever it out with my fingernails, but I got Julie to come in and hand me the bit of metal that had once covered a expansion card slot in the back of a computer. That tool did the job nicely. The new card was installed, the screws put back in, the Thunderbolt cable that needed to go to the computer which I had carefully identified and rerouted was plugged into the Apollo 8, and -- as long as I was on the floor already -- I moved the rest of the cables on the assumption that this was all going to work.

I levered myself off the floor, walked through the procedure for registering the used Apollo 8 unit to my account, and all of that worked. Now, the only thing that needed to be done was to use the new, short Thunderbolt cable to connect the Apollo 8 unit to the Apollo Silver unit.

I called Julie to do this, because it has to be done underneath the console. She plugged the cable in and went back to her computer.

The Apollo Silver unit and the Satellite refused to pop up on the list of devices.

Ok, there is no reason this shouldn't be working, unless Julie has somehow plugged the cable in incorrectly. This means that I will need to inspect the cable install.

Trips to the floor: three. Once more with feeling.

Thunderbolt cables are finicky beasts and it turns out that Julie had twisted the Thunderbolt cable so that the lighting bolt was face up on the Apollo 8 and face down on the Apollo Silver. In her defense, I hadn't removed the cable wrap from the new cable and that was the way that it *wanted* to be plugged in. It was just wrong.

I unwrapped the cable, plugged it in correctly, and stuck my head out from under the console. Three devices were now present in the display. Yay!

I crawled back up into my chair, fiddled with things a bit more, discovered that all of my plugins were now recognized, and declared victory. I fired up Cubase, pulled up a recent project, and hit the playback button.

Everything sounded good. Very good. Probably better than before, which is what one should expect from the newer unit with the better converters.

So this project was a success.

I am going to go take some Aleve now.

I recorded replacement vocals for two of the three tracks for "Amy & Me" tonight, leaving one to go. Yay, me!

Recording the final track won't happen tomorrow night, because the priority mission is taking Calvin the Dog to his first puppy obedience training lesson. I have my fingers crossed, recognizing that no miracle will happen in one lesson. Right now, I just need the puppy to stop terrorizing my younger child...

One of the other things I did this evening was to remove the X-Touch Extender that refused to power up at all when I was in the studio on Monday and replace it with an open-box X-Touch Extender that arrived today. Happily, it has powered up correctly and is doing the things that a working piece of gear does.

I am still not sure what part inside the older piece of gear went wonky, but it is surely not something that I have time to look into right now, because I have an album to finish. :)

Picked up the bass tracks that Jen recorded today and started uploading them into Cubase. The first one I listened to sounds fine, so all's good there. Yay!

In other news, I discovered -- after I managed to unprogram every remote for the garage door opener -- that I had installed the new battery upside down, which explains why nothing I tried was working. Once I fixed that, it worked much better. *Then* I reprogrammed Gretchen's remote so that it still worked, because *not* fixing that would have been a distinctly unfriendly act. :)

Jen and the kids arrived a bit later than they hoped, but earlier than they might have. While the kids were out with Finn collecting free Slurpees from 7-11, we went down to the basement and got a couple of takes of Jen on the bass for "Inconstant Moon" so we could get an idea of what was working. It all sounded good and we will do the minor editing tomorrow before we go on to the rest of the tracks on the schedule.

But so far, so good!

I took a day off from studio work today, because I went to the Cubs vs. Cards game down at Wrigley, which was scheduled to start at 5:10 and was only delayed by an hour. But all of that meant that there really wasn't time to get down there, even to record a single vocal track.

Recording is back on the schedule for tomorrow, along with work, where I hope to make some good progress.

For a variety of reasons, I was later getting down to the studio to start recording than I'd hoped. I fired up the Apollo unit, woke up the computer, and discovered that they were not talking to each other. Again.

I unplugged and replugged the Thunderbolt cable with no improvement. I rebooted the computer. Same story.

I can't get work done with the machine behaving this way. It was now time to go to my backup plan and build a new computer. Today.

I went to the Micro Center website and threw together a configuration based on the research that I did last weekend. It has twice as much storage and RAM as the current machine, because it didn't cost that much more. I wanted the same case that I had for the old machine, but Micro Center doesn't carry Antec cases and the soonest that I could get one of the Silent series cases here from either Amazon or Newegg was about two weeks which was not any help for the time frame that I'm looking at, so I grabbed a Fractal Design case and am hoping that it is reasonably quiet, given the minimum number of moving parts. If not, I can always cannibalize an old case and move things around, but that was not going to be today's project.

The one thing that I couldn't get was a CD-R drive, but I *can* get one of those from Amazon to show up here tomorrow. I placed the order and tore out for Micro Center so I could get the parts and get back home tonight.

It took about two hours (and a modicum of swearing and dropped screws), but the machine is now assembled, save for the optical drive which can easily be popped in tomorrow.

And then we'll fire it up and see how it works. Which will be tomorrow evening's project.

I am going to buy the old machine from Dodeka for whatever it is worth and use that to help defray the cost of the new box. Gretchen is going to need a new desktop to replace the one that is ten plus years old (the previous studio computer) and which will absolutely, positively never run Windows 11. This machine is wretched overkill for what she'll do with it, but that's ok. :)

Just for those observing, the total cost of this build will be well less than half of the cost of some of the fancy pre-built recording computers that I could buy. And it has a fancy gaming motherboard, because that got me the right combination of ports on the back.

The best thing about it is that I can have it tomorrow.

I hope...

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.

Ok, things are going more slowly than I might have hoped, but I have managed to record fresh guitar tracks for five of the songs slated for "Crosstime Bus". I've also done various bits of fix up on the drum tracks and I recorded a new vocal for "Love at First Sight" since the original scratch vocal was not really a very happy thing to listen to after the transposition for the key change.

This leaves eleven songs to go. I hope to make more headway on this tomorrow.

Sunday, I'm going to go watch the Cubs play the Mariners. And it will be *hot*...

Gretchen's knees were giving her heck today, so I went out to lunch by myself. City Barbecue had dropped a coupon for a free dessert in my account, which convinced me that going there was a fine choice. I had a lovely brisket sandwich that I think had come directly out of the smoker. I had the peach cobbler packed to go and took it home to Gretchen, where we split it, which is a *much* better choice than trying to eat it by myself. :) I also picked up food from Culver's on the way home, which meant that no one had to go out and feed the kids.

I had now arrived at the stage where it was pretty much time to do some recording for the "Crosstime Bus" album or just kick myself in the head. I'm not flexible enough to kick myself in the head, so my choices were limited.

I picked up one of the Universal Audio Sphere modeling mics a while back and have used it on a few things, but I have never used it to mic an acoustic guitar and I wanted to give that a try and see what the results were like. Cleverly, I read the instruction manual before going downstairs. The target song for today was "Love at First Sight", where I had used pitch shifting to move the original vocal and guitar scratch tracks to capo 2 while leaving the drums intact. The scratch tracks had to go, starting with the guitar. I retrieved the lyric sheet from my office, along with my iPad, which I pretty much only use as a Cubase remote. Realizing this, I took the charger along with me. If I'm using the tablet in the basement, it can live in the basement. I also grabbed the guitar and took it to the basement with me. Cool! All set.

Ha! I fire up Cubase and the iPad remote software and verify that they are talking to each other. Ok, let's go to the Apollo unit and turn on the phantom power for the mic. And I need to configure a stereo input to grab channels 1 and 2 so I can route them to the mic modeler and get a stereo guitar track out. Input configured, all good.

I ducked into the recording booth and realized that *nothing* was configured correctly. A dead USB microphone had been wished onto the top of the rolling cart where the iPad was supposed to go. It left. I moved the guitar stand to the opposite side of the room, because I was planning to sit while recording, which meant I needed to pull the cart closer into the space the stand had occupied. And then there was adjusting the microphone. One of these days, I will find a mic boom that doesn't slowly sag under the weight of any microphone of size. And for this application, the mic needs to be turned 90 degrees from the normal position, because I'm using it to capture a stereo image.

While I'm in there, I put on the recording headphones and verify that I can hear playback, having remembered to turn on the headphone amp while passing through the engineering side of the booth. The headphone cord has developed an annoying short, but wiggling the cord gets everything working.

I fire up Cubase and the iPad remote software and verify that they are talking to each other. Ok, let's go to the Apollo unit and turn on the phantom power for the mic. And I need to configure a stereo input to grab channels 1 and 2 so I can route them to the mic modeler and get a stereo guitar track out. Input configured, all good.

Except that there is no signal on the input or the target stereo track. I expect some noise. I twiddle the knobs on the Apollo and nothing happens. Let's go in and play the guitar at it, because maybe I just need some reasonable volume. Nope, no signal. And I realize that the Sphere mic lights up when it is powered. This mic is dark. Grumble.

All of this is more difficult, because I need to be in two places at one time. I have not yet mastered bilocation. I want a noticeable sound source in the recording booth so I can track the signal in the engineering booth.

I have a phone. I pull it out of my pocket, set it to play "Mamma Mia" on a loop, and leave it on my chair. Back to the engineering booth I go. There is still no signal.

Ok, let me pull up the UA Console application that is used for routing things. Unlike the Apollo unit, the Console app believes there is no phantom power to the mic. Power up channel 1, power up channel 2, and -- surprise! -- the mic lights up and I have signal. Make sure the signal is routed from the input to the track and I should be in business. Time to go record!

Back to the recording booth. Close the doors, adjust the position of the sagging mic, check the tuning on the guitar, put on the headphones, press record.

There is no sound in the headphones.

What the heck? There was sound here a minute ago. I check to make sure that the short in the cord is not the culprit and convince myself that it isn't. Stop everything and go back to the engineering booth.

I have a very old silverface Apollo Firewire unit that has a Thunderbolt card installed. Somehow, the mapping that the latest version of the Console software has supplied is shifted by two positions, so that almost all of the hardware is entering in the wrong location. Hardware location Line 1 and Line 2 are mapped correctly, but Line 1 is then mapped again to Line 3, Line 2 to Line 4, and so on. I'm getting sound, because Line 1 and Line 2 have correct mappings, but the software Monitor channels that feed the headphones are not getting any signal.

I remap *all* of the channels on the Console. I *save* the mappings as a preset. I hope this works. In the meantime, I found another set of headphones in the engineering booth, plugged them into the headphone amp, and once I had mapped the Monitor channels correctly in the Console and *then* made sure that everything was mapped correctly in Cubase, I had sound in the headphones again.

Rah.

Unplug the headphones in the engineering booth. Go back to the recording booth, close the doors, fix the sagging mic, check the tuning on the guitar, put on the headphones, and let's hit record. There is sound!

I blow the count in, but there's sound.

After a little while, I have multiple copies of the guitar track, at least one of which is pretty satisfactory, along with two backup tracks to use to fix any glitches.

It would be a good idea to replace the pitch-shifted vocal, which sounds terrible, because it was a scratch vocal and the pitch shifting has done nothing to improve the sound quality. Back to the engineering booth I go to create another stereo track, but I'll use a *different* modeling program here so that I end up with a mono signal that I can plug a number of different types of mic into and see what they sound like. Piece of cake.

Back to the recording booth. Close the doors and now I need to raise the mic so that I can sing standing up and also turn the mic 90 degrees so that it's in the correct orientation *and* convince the whole assemblage not to fall over. This last just requires some minor boom adjustment. Then I put the pop screen back up and now I'm ready to try recording a vocal track.

About a verse in, I realize that I have left the lyric sheet nowhere near where I can read it. Do not underestimate my ability to farble my own lyrics under pressure.

Let's move the music stand so that I can read the lyrics. That's better. I do several takes to give myself choices, but the last one is, I think, pretty good so I can go play with it now. Mucking around with tracks and plugins follows.

I will listen to this more critically at a later date, but it's progress.

A learning experience. That's what we call it.

I packed everything up and went upstairs where I grilled some steaks for Father's Day dinner while Gretchen prepared baked potatoes and sweet corn. Dinner included the kids and was remarkably silly.

And that's a good way to end the day. :)

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.