Bill Roper's Journal

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 need to record some scratch tracks. (I need to record some final tracks too, but it's clear that I want to record final tracks in the studio, so let's stick with the scratch tracks for a moment.)

Now, I could do this in the studio, but running the studio from the recording booth is complex. I could try to get some help with this, but getting help is a challenge, so it's best to plan to do this solo.

The other problem is that the studio is in the basement and the guitars aren't. They are mostly on the second floor. I could haul the guitars downstairs to the basement, but when I was done, I would need to haul them back upstairs, because leaving the guitars in the basement is not really good for them and I actually want to have them upstairs most of the time anyway. This is a lot of hauling.

Of course, I still have the microphone stand mount that I installed on my office desk shortly after COVID popped up. I don't use it much, but the mount is inobtrusive in ways that the microphone arm is *not*, so it can just stay there all the time. And the microphone arm and a microphone are in my closet.

I would need some software to record on. And I'm accustomed to Cubase and I want to do as little work as possible, so Cubase would be a good choice. I already have it installed in the studio and on the remote recording computer. It turns out that you can have three active Cubase installs at a time, which means I could just load Cubase on the office computer and declare victory.

But I'm building a new office computer next week, so maybe this is not the week to do this. Maybe *next* week. And that's ok! Because the remote recording computer is small and light and easy to carry up to my office.

If there were enough clear space to put it on my desk.

Hmmph. Ok, I can fix that. And maybe while I am doing that, I will turn up the Scarlett Solo interface that should be *somewhere* on the desk, because without an interface, there will be precious little recording happening.

I guess it's time to finish cleaning off the desk. I am going to have to find places to *put* so many things.

There are days that my life feels like "For want of a nail..."

The new toys from Prime Day continue to arrive.

Yesterday, I got a set of USB-rechargeable, magnet-on, motion-sensitive LED light strips for the place in front of the filing cabinet in the basement where there is no light to see by. I have installed various battery-powered LED lights there, but I am in that spot so seldom that the batteries are usually dead before I get around to using them. We'll see how these go.

I also got a couple of new surge protector power strips with USB charging ports. One of these will go next to the end table in the family room for all of the things that want to be plugged in there. The power strip that is currently there will go up to the bedroom so that I can replace the one behind my night stand that is literally trying to fall apart. ("Literally trying to fall apart" is a bad characteristic in any device that is carrying that much current.)

But the pick of the litter is the new USB-powered 15.6 inch monitor with a kickstand that will fit in the laptop case that I am using to haul around the portable recording system. This allows me to have a second monitor in the traveling setup, which -- in Cubase! -- means that I can have the track editor on one screen and the faders on another, which is really convenient. I hooked it up last night and verified that it will do the job, so it is now safely stowed away in the laptop bag.

I mean, I can get along without a second screen, but when the price has gotten down to $60, it's hard to resist. :)

So I had a theory several years ago that it would be a nice thing to get myself a Spire Studio and use it to record simple tracks while sitting at my desk. I got the Spire Studio and I've used it a few times, but not nearly as often as I had hoped to, which is sort of par for the course. But I figured that Gretchen and Julie had gone out to Starved Rock for a turnaround trip today, so why not give it a try again?

My desk is, as usual, a mess, but I managed to clear space and find my iPad. The iPad was sadly pretty heavily discharged, but I managed to find enough plugs to plug it in to charge, along with the Spire Studio, which *also* has a built=in battery, but why not give it enough power to play with too? It had been a long time since I used the gear, but I eventually managed to get things set up, get levels set, and set out to do a quick bit of recording with the built-in microphone.

Now, the problem of recording with the Spire is that you pretty much have to get the whole track right in one take. This is not impossible. It is made more difficult when your contacts dry out and you can't read the next line of the song. But I can get past that.

Then I realized that maybe I should silence the computer. So I did that.

And then my brother-in-law, Jeff, called looking for Gretchen. But I wasn't recording when the phone went off, so it was ok.

I *was* recording when Gretchen texted me a few minutes later. Perhaps I should have silenced the phone too. But I figured I may as well finish the track anyway. And, yes, it turns out that the incoming text is clearly audible, but this is an experiment, so let's just give up and finish it.

It's been a long time since I used the Spire software on the iPad. And in order to use the mixing software on the iPad, I have to disconnect from the Spire and reconnect to the home Wi-fi. I spent a bit of time poking around and found nothing helpful, so I finally decided it was time to go ahead and render this mess and see what it sounded like on a different pair of speakers than those built into the iPad.

Oh, look! I can use the built-in effects in the Spire hardware to do a bit of aided cleanup on the mix. Except to get that to work, I have to disconnect the iPad from the Wi-fi and reconnect to the Spire hardware. So I do that and let the track render.

Now, all I have to do is get this 70 MB WAV file over to my Windows computer from my iPad. Ha, ha, ha.

A bit more research shows that I can set up a network shared folder on my computer, get the IP address for the computer, feed it to the iPad files app, log into the Windows machine, and then copy the file to the shared folder. I could probably get this to work with the Synology NAS as well, but this started to seem like more trouble than it was worth.

The track sounds, well, not terrible. Not really what I was hoping for, but not terrible.

A bit of Internet searching turns up the fact that the Spire Studio is now abandonware, which is somehow not a great surprise, so it's definitely a case of what I have is what I get for as long as it continues to work. I could, of course, improve the situation by plugging actual microphones into it.

Or I could just get up from my office chair and go down to the studio.

I'm thinking that going down to the studio is a better plan.

Maybe tomorrow.

When we got back from Capricon (about which more later), my new touch screen monitor for the studio computer had arrived. Naturally, I had to hook it up and try it out.

It seems to be working ok, after some fighting through configuration problems. But the version of Cubase that I'm using doesn't recognize multitouch, so that's a bit limiting. We'll see how it sorts out...

I'm going to be running the multi-track recording demo at Musecon next weekend, so it was high time to get out the portable gear and check out the setup. This involved:

Working through the "battery plugged in but not charging" problem again

Downloading the new anti-virus software

Downloading the latest Windows updates

Downloading the new version of Cubase Elements

Downloading the new version of Wavelab Elements

Downloading the updates to Cubase Elements and Wavelab Elements

Plugging in the mixer

Listening to some tracks from Capricon

Discovering that the Thieving Magpies recording from Capricon stops unexpectedly after about 35 minutes of the 75 minute set

Sending a grumbling e-mail to Debbie on the subject

Pulling out the headphone amp from the basement and hooking it up to the Aux1 output

Grabbing one of the mirrored hard drives from the basement and backing up the 191 MB of audio recording on the laptop

Sometime soon, I will make the last couple of changes over in Cubase, load up the scratch track from Cheshire Moon, and get the session ready to record.

Later, I will refamiliarize myself with how the "lanes" feature works, because that's one of the more interesting things to show. Then I need to go over rendering a song in the Cubase mixer.

And I'll be ready to go. :)

daisy_knotwise took Katie and Julie out shopping so that I could do some re-recording of tracks from the Grim Roper that desperately needed the fix up. I managed to record all four scratch tracks and (I think) two usable guitar tracks.

Two guitar tracks to go. The vocals should be relatively easy. :)

But everyone's home now, so that's a project for another day.