billroper | Entries tagged with studio

I have guitar tracks for the last three songs to replace the scratch track. They may yet need some more work, but they are in good enough shape I think.

I then went back to record revised scratch vocals for those songs so I could drop out the original guitar. I got through two out of three songs before the iPad that I am using for a remote control announced that it was out of power and would like to retire for today.

So tomorrow! Tomorrow will be good 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.

I rambled downstairs today and got back into the studio and worked over three songs for Crosstime Bus, leaving me three to go, all of which are fingerpicked guitar, so they will require a slightly different setup. I'll see if I can get those to behave tomorrow.

One of the songs that I worked on today, "Dance by Starlight", is going to need some fixup before I'm done with it. I wrote that song back in 2005, about ten years after Gretchen and I got married, when I was an ocean away from her at the British filkcon which was very, very full of wedding vibes that weekend. I like the song a lot, which is why it's on the album list.

It is, however, being a pain in the butt, because I wrote it *before* I started using a pick again. When you're not using a pick, you can easily transition between the fingerpicked section at the beginning, the strummed section in the middle, and the fingerpicked section at the end. When you are using a pick, this is not something that can be managed at my skill level.

When I'm playing the song *now*, I have worked out that I can arpeggiate the formerly fingerpicked sections and play them with the pick. However, the timing on that is just slightly different from the timing when fingerpicking. The scratch tracks, which have some accompaniment associated with them already, were played without a pick.

Today's session made it clear to me that I cannot get the fingerpicked section to time out correctly when I'm using a pick. This means that I am going to have to record a separate guitar track for the beginning and end of the song and patch it in around the picked section in the middle. I can do this, of course.

It's just another learning experience. :)

But I really like the song, so it will be worth it.

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 am off on Thursday for the Juneteenth holiday and will be taking a vacation day on Friday, because four-day weekends are few and far between. I intend to use this time to try to catch up on many things that I need to be doing in the studio.

This does not mean that I am not *sorely* tempted to head down to watch what is now a scheduled straight doubleheader between the Cardinals and the White Sox tomorrow afternoon, tonight's game having been rained out. Two Cardinals games *and* the usually better food on the Southside...

I have things to do. :)

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 did three loads of laundry yesterday around work and another three loads of laundry today. I also took Julie's iPad in to have the broken screen fixed and then turned around about 90 minutes later to pick it up. This has made Julie very happy.

In the meantime, I have been able to spend some time down in the studio. I am becoming very fond of some of the new Spark plugins from Universal Audio. Even if it *does* mean that I have invested in way more DSP than I am likely to need. :)

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... :)

And the recording project is complete.

That was simpler (and more complex) than I expected, but it's all done now. :)

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...

I've been doing a lot of laundry today, which gave me the chance to drop into the studio and download a mass of updates. Mostly, I wanted to pick up the new Universal Audio plugins, which I did and got installed. Unfortunately, after doing that the UA software wouldn't talk to my Thunderbolt devices, which is about fourteen kinds of bad.

After messing around for a while, I decided to give up and try installing the big Windows update that I've been postponing. After that, things started working again, which is encouraging. We'll see what it does next time I come down here.

In the meantime, I have discovered that the method that Universal Audio gave to download my upgrade to Ultimate 11 (after buying the Ultimate 10 upgrade with a free Ultimate 11 upgrade attached) is not working. I have sent a message off to their support and hope to hear something next week about how they are going to fix this.

In other news, I put together a Windycon ad for the Chambanacon program book, so we'll have that there, which will be good.

And now it's time to do some more laundry. :)

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.

Today's email included an offer for some free plugins from the Plugin Alliance. As we know, the sound engineer who dies with the most plugins wins, so after putting the first load of laundry in, I headed over to the studio to pick up the new plugs.

It took a few minutes to get everything downloaded and installed. Then I figured I would go take a look at them in Cubase. I started up Cubase and discovered that they had released a new set of fixes while I wasn't looking, so I hopped back out and downloaded the patched version. Ok, let's try that again...

One of the plugs was a compressor; another was a mastering plug. I figured I would pick up something simple to work with, so I grabbed the project where I'd recently recorded a couple of vocal tracks for a project that's in process elsewhere in the filk community.

The plugs seemed reasonable on examination, but I wanted to try to give them a bit of a workout. And then I realized that an interesting thing to do would be to lay them across the mixed stereo backing track that I'd been sent to sing against. If I used a sidechain input on the compressor, I could raise the level on the backing tracks in the mix while automatically ducking them slightly when the vocal was in play, as the compressor will follow the sidechain vocal input and use it to determine when to lightly compress the backing tracks.

Of course, I have never actually *used* a sidechain input when mixing in the box, only in the old analog realm. Hang on while I read the manual. (And stop laughing.) I set up the additional send to route the vocals to the sidechain input on the compressor and everything worked, as I could now push the level of the backing tracks up and duck them when I was singing.

I will add this to my toolkit. Should have done it sooner...

My package has arrived and has been opened, unpacked, and plugged in.

I now have a *lot* of processors for my UA plugins. :)

I guess I should mix something...

The best laid plans...

The new two-meter long active Thunderbolt 4 cable arrived this morning, so this afternoon, I took it down to the studio to sort things out. This did not go as well as I might have hoped.

The first thing to do was to remove the old Thunderbolt 1 card from the Apollo unit and replace it with the Thunderbolt 3 card that I had picked up a while back in anticipation of getting all of the Thunderbolt stuff working. This meant another trip under the console to unship the old card and substitute the new one. And then I went to run the new cable through, which is when I realized that my calibrated eyeballs had failed me. The new cord was really no longer than the old Thunderbolt 1 cable plus adapter combination that I had been using, perhaps a fraction shorter. This was not really a fraction that I had to spare.

I pulled the computer to an incorrect (in the sense that it really can't stay there) position and managed to get the cable plugged in. The computer stubbornly refused to recognize the Apollo unit, although the Thunderbolt port was supposedly live. And I was annoyed.

Having swapped two parts, it was possible that either the board or the card was bad. It was also possible that the Thunderbolt port in the PC had decided to misbehave.

And then I realized that the new recording laptop has a Thunderbolt port. So I downloaded the Apollo software onto that machine, took it to the basement, plugged it into the Thunderbolt cable, and the laptop promptly recognized the whole assemblage.

Lots of reading of webpages ensued and eventually I managed to get the studio computer to recognize the Apollo unit again, although possibly on only one of the two Thunderbolt ports. I need to spend some more time investigating that, but I had long since used up all of the studio time for the day. And I wanted to test to see if the system was now going to let me combine the Thunderbolt Apollo with the Firewire Satellite in Cubase, which actually *did* work now.

The upshot of all this is that the computer is going to move back to the other end of the console in yet another round of rewiring everything, because I can't in any rational way get a longer Thunderbolt cable, while I have enough cables to wire everything else from the other end.

I think I'll do a better job of running the cables than the way they started though. :)

I went down to the studio to try to get things finished up and have managed to do something that has bollixed up the Thunderbolt port. This is discouraging, but I am trying to figure out how to get it back together.

Earlier in the day, I had problems with the Apollo Thunderbolt and the Satellite Firewire coexisting, which caused one of the plugins I was using in Cubase to disable itself. I have a feeling that is going to continue to be a problem, but we'll see.

Well, that was entertaining.

I ordered a new keyboard and a couple of USB extension cables for the studio, figuring I would need them to finish the rewiring. They came today and I went downstairs to work on this, but I had had a revelation since placing the order:

I could move the computer to the opposite end of the console.

More to the point, I could move the computer to the opposite end of the console where the computer monitors sit *if* the Thunderbolt cable would reach. And it *does*. Not with a lot of excess length, but the cable reaches, so all things became possible.

After dinner, I crawled underneath the console and started removing cables that were no longer needed. Really long DVI cables, network wiring, PS2 keyboard extenders all came out and were tossed into a pile. USB cables were pulled out from where they were, untangled, and fed through slots to come out at the other end of the console. A USB 3.0 hub was discovered (gleefully!) among the debris, which meant that there were now a metric ton of USB ports available.

And when I wired it all up, things worked. I had to fix up the touch screen on the appropriate monitor, but that's not unusual. It turned out that the main monitors in the studio weren't working because the plug to the subwoofer had loosened just enough that it wasn't getting power, but once that was plugged in, they went back in business.

Before doing all this, I installed the old Firewire card in the new machine which will -- if I'm reading the documentation correctly -- allow me to continue to use the old Firewire UA Satellite Duo for a while longer. We'll try wiring that up later. And I also have a pair of cheap computer speakers that I need to wire into the computer proper and see if I can get them to work.

But it looks like things are working. Now it's just clean up around the edges.

The new studio computer is together and in place. There's still some more rewiring to do -- there is *always* more rewiring to do -- and I need to trace various wires to make sure that they haven't gotten lost and aren't plugged in, but I actually got sound out of Cubase through the Apollo unit in Thunderbolt mode today. Well, I got sound out of the *small* speakers, because something seems to have come unplugged for the big speakers. I'll figure that out soon, I expect.

But the system is working fine with the integrated Intel video. One monitor is plugged into the Display Port, the other as HDMI and everything is smooth. Given the problems that Cubase seems to be having with Nvidia drivers, this may be a plus. :)

And when I was unplugging the old computer, I discovered that it had a pair of USB 3 ports supplied by an extender on the backplane, so I opened it up and popped that out and plugged it into the new computer, which got me two more USB ports, which I sorely need. Serendipity is a wonderful thing.

The old computer has come upstairs and has been wired up in the dining room, but it appears this was one of the few motherboards that I bought that doesn't have built-in WiFi (10 year old built-in WiFi, it would be now), so I'll need to pick up a dongle for that to get it back on line. But this old machine will still be a substantial improvement over the hulk that it's replacing.

I figured out this weekend that I can easily pick up a motherboard, CPU, and RAM to upgrade any of my homebrew machines to a level that would run Windows 11 for $350. By the time I might actually need to do that, I trust the required parts will be cheaper. :)

And when I started up Cubase this evening, the process of indexing all of the plugins was *so* much faster than it's been in the past.

Whee!

I put the new computer together over the last few days, but because I misread something in the description, I needed to swap one of the M2 drives for one with a heatsink, as the computer only comes with one included heatsink for those drives. Naturally, that drive didn't arrive until just before I headed out to pick up Chinese takeout for dinner, but it popped in easily.

I had figured that I'd do the configuration borrowing the monitor and such from the computer in the dining room, but it has neither a Display Port nor a HDMI in (it's a rather elderly monitor), so I ended up hauling it to the basement and swapping cables around in a temporary sort of way to use one of the studio monitors along with a scavenged keyboard and mouse. Happily, the system booted up from the Windows 10 USB install set that I'd made this morning.

Unhappily, I had forgotten the Windows 10 OS disk upstairs. I went up, got it, and discovered that the disk packet had already been opened and that the product key had been removed. There was just enough time to drive back to Micro Center where I had bought this on the preceding weekend in preparation for this build and they were good enough to exchange it for a complete copy. I also picked up a PS/2 keyboard/mouse splitter, since there appears to be a combo port on my new motherboard. Back home and back to the basement, where I finally managed to type in the correct key and get the system authorized.

It took a bit longer to get the drivers to install from the CD that came with the motherboard; longer yet to finally figure out how to get the two M2 drives configured as a mirrored RAID. But that was eventually done. And I tried using the splitter cable and discovered that only one side was going to work at a time, so I abandoned that plan.

In any case, the new machine is zippy fast and is getting a great many things installed on it. A great many *more* things will need to be installed tomorrow, and then I have given up and picked up a new USB keyboard (the mouse is USB, but the keyboard is not) and two USB extension cables (because clearly two new cables were not enough for this project). Those can get wired in on Monday when they arrive.

And *some* time tomorrow, I will find out if the Thunderbolt ports work...

Well, there's nothing like research.

Having determined that DDR5 is going to carry a substantial price premium over DDR4 memory for at least a year -- assuming that you can *find* it -- and that the observed performance benefits from having it are sharply limited; and having determined by observation that the available motherboards tend to only have Thunderbolt available without an add-in card if you get a really expensive motherboard with all of the possible bells and whistles, but that an add-in card is only a bit over $100; I decided to pull the trigger and I have ordered all of the parts that I need to build a new Alder Lake Thunderbolt-capable computer for the studio.

Normally, I would pick up the parts from Newegg or Micro Center, but the promo code I got for Newegg was restricted and they were charging more for most of the parts than Amazon does, while I can get a 5% rebate on my Amazon purchases. Micro Center, meanwhile, had almost nothing I needed in stock, but had Alder Lake CPUs in quantity for substantially cheaper than anyone else, probably because you can't sell them if you have nothing but DDR5 motherboards to install them on in the current environment.

That simplified a lot of decisions. Most of the parts were accumulated from Amazon orders and should be here in a few days, while I drove down to Micro Center to pick up the CPU and OS (because I just get itchy when I order an OS from Amazon, as there are so many questionable suppliers that are *probably* just fine. Probably.).

And I've decided to try to run the system on Intel Integrated Graphics, which should run a dual monitor system for me. We'll see how that goes, but I've got a Display Port and an HDMI output on the back of the motherboard, which matches up nicely with what's available on my existing monitors. Cables have been ordered, because who keeps extra 15 foot cables around?

We'll see how this goes.

Meanwhile, I went down to the studio to fire up Cubase and look at the status of the "Crosstime Bus" project. I had opened a few Cubase files hunting for the drum tracks that I'd recorded with Sally some years ago and hadn't found them. It turns out that I had just opened the wrong files, because we hadn't actually *finished* recording a full set of drum tracks and had planned to pick it up at some future date.

You cannot imagine how relieved I was to find those tracks. :) (And that I had not imagined that recording session...)

So it will be time to get back to work on this.

And other things.

Crossposts: https://billroper.livejournal.com/1971969.html

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billroper

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Bill Roper's Journal

Entries tagged with studio

The Stereo Bus Goes Round and Round

Once More, With Feeling

Meanwhile, Back in the Studio

Reassembling the World

We're Taking the Afternoon Off

The Equalizer

Is This Thing On?

Back in the Studio Again

All Done (More or Less)

Mic Testing

Testing, Testing

Plugging In

A Better Learning Experience

Plugged In

Figuring It All Out

One Small Problem

Re-Wired

Mostly Rebuilt

Assembly Surprises

Time for Rebuilding