Bill Roper's Journal

I had expected to be tired after Windycon, so I arranged to take Monday off. This was clearly the case, because both Gretchen and I managed to keep falling asleep during the second half of Tracker last night as we were watching it on the DVR. Well, the good news is that it was recorded, so we were able to watch it tonight and understand who the heck this character was who had popped up by the end of the episode.

The other reason for taking Monday off was that I *also* had Tuesday off for Veterans' Day and connecting everything together for one long session of getting things done seemed like a good idea. I have many things to get done.

The first was catching up on the convention laundry. I popped that into the washer before heading out for lunch and a couple of stops to grab stuff for dinner. When I finally got home, it was nearly time for Gretchen to go pick up Julie from school, so the right order of business was to put the load of wash in the dryer, fire up the studio computer, and install the new version of Cubase and the various plugins that I had picked up from Universal Audio with the latest upgrade.

This is easier when the computer fires up. After a bit of messing around, I realized that it wasn't just the computer being stubborn. It was everything plugged into the particular power strip I was poking at, which was apparently dead, dead, dead.

(Now thinking about it, it's just possible that the GFCI had triggered on that outlet, but thinking about it some more, there are two power strips plugged into that outlet and I'm pretty sure the other was still delivering power, based on what lights I saw on the assorted bits of equipment. These power strips / surge protectors are about as old as the studio, so having one fail isn't a great surprise.)

Anyway, I ordered a new power strip / surge protector that should be here tomorrow and will then start trying to figure out which plug needs to come out of the wall, because all of the cords are running under the console. In the meantime, I figured that I would unplug and remove the old Focusrite Octopre unit that's going to be replaced by the used Apollo 8 unit that I bought from Jeff Bohnhoff. Unplugging was easy, getting back up off the floor less so, getting the unit to slide *up* and out of the rackmount was simply not happening without a second person there.

Before dinner, Julie was down in the basement and was good enough to push the unit up so I could extract it. Then it was finally time to *open* Jeff's unit, which had been sitting in its package for weeks. That was easy enough. The unit looks to be in excellent condition and has now been installed into the rack. Assuming that the new surge protector arrives tomorrow, I'll get it plugged in and wired up.

And maybe I'll install Cubase 15...

One of these things is not at all like the others.

I woke up this morning to find out that Tom Jeffers had died. Tom is an old friend of mine. When K was around a year old and Gretchen was recovering from her hysterectomy for endometrial cancer, Tom and Sue were good enough to come down and stay with us and help keep the household together. Tom was one of the nicest guys on the planet which just makes this seem much more unfair. And he and Sue had a lot of happy years together and should have had more. I'm going to miss him.

You hate to move on from something like that to common goings on, but it was a busy day here. I have finished my entry for the OVFF songwriting contest, for which the theme is "Steer by the Stars". I have checked this theme numerous times at this point to make sure that I have not repeated my error from FKO long ago, when I thought that the theme was "The End of the World" and it was actually "The End of Time". Oops. I ended up writing two songs that year; one for the wrong theme and one for the correct one. But this year's song is to the correct theme and no longer on my list of things to do.

Calvin the Puppy has decided that I am the Food God. He may be correct. In any case, he is a very hungry puppy. We have had a few housebreaking accidents, but this is mostly due to a failure to communicate. Ruby goes to the back door and complains when she needs to go out. Calvin just complains, leaving us unsure of what he wants, although food is frequently a good bet. But so is access to the great outdoors...

I continue to learn more about DisplayPort cables than I ever wanted to know. The new DisplayPort cables that I bought were to a new, faster standard. They were not, however, VESA certified, nor did they come with a latch that engages when they are fully pushed in. Today, two replacement cables arrived that are for DisplayPort 1.4, an older version of the standard, but which are VESA certified and have the latching feature. I've plugged them in and the monitors have only blinked once while I've been downstairs.

This is, of course, one time too many. More research followed. The long cable from the computer to the MST hub turns out to be a DisplayPort 1.2 cable, which is theoretically sufficient for MST, but the instructions for the hub say to use a minimum of a DisplayPort 1.4 cable. They also say that the cable should be shorter, but the computer needs to be on the opposite end of the console so that the Thunderbolt cable (which is *highly* length constrained) can reach from the computer to the Apollo unit.

I have now ordered *another* cable (stop laughing, Gretchen!) which is long enough to reach, has latches, and is both VESA certified and DisplayPort 1.4 compatible. It should arrive tomorrow.

And then we will see how it works.

Some projects get closer to done than others.

Yesterday, I assembled the desktop dual monitor stand and put the two new/refurb monitors on it, one on top of the other. Today, the Amazon shipment arrived with the missing cables and I figured I'd take a few minutes, run down to the basement and hook everything up. Getting the power cords into the monitors was a bit more challenging than I'd hoped, but by picking the tower up and putting it in my lap, I managed to get that done. All I had to do was to plug in the display port cables. I had ordered one with the monitors and another from Amazon last night when I realized that these monitors do not have a display port passthrough.

The cable from Amazon is fine. The cable from the refurb place is an HDMI to display port cable. Since these monitors do not have an HDMI port, that's sort of useless.

I have sent a complaint off to the refurb place. In the meantime, I have ordered yet another display port cable from Amazon which should arrive tomorrow.

*sigh*

In other news, the monitors on my desk are a slightly newer version. They have display port passthrough *and* an HDMI port. And they are going to stay *exactly* where they are. :)

I am making excellent progress on the project at work, although the section that I've queued up to work on starting Monday is going to be one of the difficult and annoying ones. Still, I know what *should* be happening, so I just need to convince the computer code to *make* it happen.

It's an annoying habit of computers, this "doing what you tell them to do".

Tomorrow, there will be a lot of laundry and an excursion into the studio. I am going to see if I can slip a third monitor into my studio setup, because a mere two monitors simply aren't enough when you are mixing and trying to read documentation at the same time. The yet-unsettled question is whether the mixing desk has a place where I can clamp a monitor arm to or whether I'm going to have to find another way to shoehorn this in.

If the monitor arm won't fit, it turns out that there are VESA mounts that you can put on a microphone stand. I *have* spare mic stands that could be used for this...

Back to the studio again and just about to start recording. We'll see how much I get done.

A note about the new computer. The previous computer, which is still on the network and which needs to keep its unique name, is "Thunderbolt", although the Thunderbolt card that prompted the name has been removed.

The *new* computer is named "Cei-u".

If you know why, you will know exactly why that is appropriate.

The optical drive arrived today on schedule. It only took a few minutes to get it installed, the new computer buttoned up, and then I was able to take it to the basement.

It took a while to work through the Windows 11 install, because it kept wanting drivers that needed to be downloaded and there was no computer here to do it with, the old machine having been disconnected. Eventually, I got bright enough to bring my laptop to the basement for the driver downloads which allowed me to stop going up to the second floor. :)

Anyway, the good news is that I got the Universal Audio software installed and it promptly detected the Apollo interface on the other end of the Thunderbolt cable. I am now in the process of reinstalling all of the other software that makes things run down here.

And then there is the copying of the audio files. I had intended to bring them across from the old machine, but I think the BIOS battery there has given up the ghost, so it is not going to be booting up until I replace that, hook it back up to a monitor and keyboard, and fix those problems. But everything is backed up to the NAS in the office, so I am now entering the second quarter of a projected twelve hours of copying files down.

Whee!

But I should be able to get things up and running again tomorrow -- depending on how much software still needs to be installed. :)

I was down in the studio in and around laundry today (still got to go down and retrieve the towels!) playing with some tracks that I had done a quick mix on earlier so that I could send them to a friend. The quick mix wasn't bad, but it was time to look at it a bit more critically.

The first thing I realized was ..that I wasn't really happy with the sound of my guitar. That track was a direct in from the Taylor ES2 system and it was sounding thin. Pretty much everything that I'm using in terms of plugins at the moment is from Universal Audio and I had thrown the Hitsville EQ on this. It wasn't being a good choice.

When in doubt, try to learn from the experience of others. So I opened up the search engine and asked for suggestions on EQ for the Taylor ES2 system. A bit of poking around found a number of reasonable suggestions, one of which was to try the Pultec EQs. I pulled the low and mid-frequency Pultec EQs onto the track, fiddled with them a bit, and the sound was improved substantially. Yay!

EQ games followed with my vocal until I got it sounding better, as I picked up a bit of low end that had vanished into the ether. We'll call the EQ adjustments good for now.

I want to look at the reverb settings, because I'd thrown everything into a single reverb field, which is probably suboptimal. But that will be tomorrow's project, having saved today's work into a new session.

In the meantime, the Cardinals have swept the Cubs in today's doubleheader, so that will make up a bit for the doubleheader that the Cardinals dropped to the Royals a few days ago.

Now, we just need the Brewers to lose some games...

I spent some time this evening in the studio playing with tracks. We'll see how they sound when I listen to them again on the next day.

This would be easier if the last software upgrade I picked up didn't require four different licensing schemes for four different merged companies. I got *three* of them right the first time... :)

Before she left yesterday, Jen came downstairs and helped me test out my new purchase for the studio, a Townsend Sphere L22 modeling microphone. We recorded a couple of vocal tracks and spent some time playing with the plugin to see what it would do.

Today, I came down and spent a bit more time working with it, watching demo videos, and seeing what else I could learn about it. Then I went to the Universal Audio site and used two coupons with their current sale prices to pick up the other two packages of mic emulations designed to work with the mic for $100. Given that the hypothetical list price for the two packages together would normally be $500, this seemed like a good deal. :)

I now have more than enough plugins and gear. I really need to record some music...

Cubase has offered a bunch of free plugins to current users, but you have to download them by this weekend. Since this weekend is rapidly approaching, I figured I should take care of that.

The plugins are now all safely downloaded and installed.

Now I just need time to play with them.