Anna is giving away both ebook and audiobook copies of Valor of the Healer. This isn’t the universe the soundtrack is from, but it is the same writer, and you should go enter!

The soundtrack has been dragging on, and how long it’s been taking has been getting on my nerves in a serious way. There’s not all that much to be done about that; I wasn’t ever intending to play melody on the traditional Irish Tune portions, then had to, which means I had to learn tunes playing well enough to do it in studio, and then when some of the selections weren’t going to work in a traditional set type arrangement, meant I had to learn to write tunes, or portions thereof, in a way that sounded right.

We are moving along, tho’. Slowly. We had Ellen Eades in last week, recording hammer dulcimer for one set, and Sunnie Larsen will be in tomorrow, recording more fiddle. I’m desperately hoping that between having to deal with the remains of Sewer Implosion 2013 and rehearsal tonight with Leannan Sidhe for their six shows over on the dry side that I’ll be able to rebuild the Chapter 1 track project, which corrupted itself after a crash.

Don’t worry, we didn’t lose any data, it’s just… jumbled a bit. So I have to import everything into a new project. It’s not difficult, just incredibly annoying and a bit time-consuming.

But that’ll depend upon letting the CD labeller get finished with the short run of CDs that are being printed up for those aforementioned shows. See how everything stacks up and gets in the way of everything else? So frustrating.

Whup, sounds like a certain wallboarder has had to get out a larger saw. I’d best check what’s up.

These are links to the complete studio buildout series, as well as some others highlights from our DIY category of posts. It’s by no means exhaustive – we post about DIY on a fairly regular basis – but these tend to be the topics asked about most often. Enjoy!

• Rooms and Sound
• Making Sound Baffles on the Cheap (video)
• Studio Buildout, Part 1: Picking the Right Room
• Studio Buildout, Part 2: Monitoring with Headphones and Reference Speakers
  See also: monitor speaker isolation pads
• Studio Buildout, Part 3: Playback Amps
• Studio Buildout, Part 4: Microphones
• Studio Buildout, Part 5: Sound Interfaces
• Studio Buildout, Part 6: Your Digital Audio Workstation
• Studio Buildout, Part 7: Jeff Bohnhoff on Room Conditioning (guest post)
• Fine-Tuning a Recording Space with Sound Baffles (with video)
• A New Pop Filter Design (with video)
• A DIY Remote-Controlled ON AIR sign
• A Smarter Speaker Switch

We also have posts on making other things, like instruments, pickups, and sound-effects boxes:

• A removable electric pickup and electric-accoustic onboard pickup minimixer for the Irish bouzouki
• A DIY floating-bridge instrument pickup, based on the Cortado circuit
• Pickup chambers used with piezo sensors – spectral analysis tests (excessively geeky)
• A Light, Snappy, Bodhran tipper (with video)
• The Trash-O-Matic 68000 Effects Box 1.0 (with video) | (Ver. 0.8 | Ver. 1.2 (w/new audio))
• A mic-stand-mounted adjustable keyboard and trackball shelf
• A downloadable legal-paper-sized comp sheet, in PDF format
• Hard, Hard Candy: a “focus knob” for instruments, particularly electric guitar

And there are the other DIY collections, too:

• The Microphone Build Collection (all the posts about building microphones and mic pre-amps)
• The Horrible, Terrible, Awful Stage Monitors that Made Good (seriously they were terrible)
• The Mandolin Travel Case Build-Out series (woodworking! mostly)

I’ve always liked these little flowers. They look so fake, like they’re made of some sort of particularly sun-resistant plastic. I’M NOT SAYING IT WAS ALIENS BUT

…it was aliens.

Remember a couple of months ago the hell of upgrading Ubuntu so I could run a modern version of Jack, so I could run Ardour 2.6.14? Well, that was the latest version six months ago, the first time I tried to upgrade.

About five months ago, the long-awaited Ardour 3.0 finally came out. (They’re at 3.1.mutter now; and having the history with Microsoft, this sounds like a sweetspot for versions.) So now I’m fiddling around with that.

I’ve only been working with it for a few hours so far, but I’ve done a little test recording and editing, and tried to put it through some early paces. It works with the version of Jack included with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS; no Jack update needed. It still allows parallel installations, so you can use it without losing 2.6. There’s an installation script, but honestly, you don’t need it; you can run it straight out of its bin directory, which is what I’m doing.

First impressions are really good. Latency is lower. I’ve had a little list of features I’ve wished Ardour had, and suddenly it has them. There are a lot of UI changes, most of which I like, some of which I love, a couple of which… I’m not as happy about, but nothing I can’t get used to. It has updated project formats; I’m figuring out how much that matters, it seems to maintain double root files now, one for Ardour 2.x use, one for Ardour 3.x use, but I haven’t tested that.

I love love love the new project view window.

It’s a lot smarter about use of screen space; I can fit all the tracks of, say, Voiceless usably into the editing window now, and even have a bit of room to spare. “Maximise editor space” is now actually worth using; it’s much smarter about use of screen real estate. Plug-in management in tracks is much better – that was one of those things I’ve been wanting. Click track now lets you set files for both emphasis note and basic notes, and it has an exposed level control. (You could do that before; it was just difficult.)

One way in the past to crash Ardour has been to get freaky with editor zoom controls while the transport is running on a complex project; 2.6.8 would crash pretty easily that way; I’ve only seen 2.6.14 do it once. 3.1 hasn’t yet, despite trying – but the night is still young.

Anyway, those are all just some first impressions. I’ve already made a scratch project for the soundtrack album in 3.1; if things continue to go well, I’ll do the whole album in it, and post new impressions as I have them.

I didn’t really plan to go offline most of this week – it just kind of worked out that way. Nothing’s wrong, really – the biggest news is that we wrapped up recording on Leannan Sidhe’s Mine to Love a couple of days ago, and the mad scramble down at Alec’s to get the last few changes merged in to the mix is underway!

The funny part about doing a lot of this via Dropbox is seeing all these files change. Every time something big happens I get a flurry of file updates, and I’m all HI I SEE YOU WORKING. XD

Also, I’m doing some duplication work today. MAKIN’ MONEY MAKIN’ CDs, which actually means I did fix my robot and the fixes … appear to be stable! It ran okay overnight, anyway, and I have a nice stack of lightscribed CDs waiting for the master disc, with more printing.

So, yeah! HI, I’M BACK. MISS ME?

Seriously, the last few weeks? Digital audio workstation. Webserver. External storage drive. Backup server. (Well, that’s replaced, not fixed; the old one worked, just really slowly.) CD-burning robot.

This week? I have the replacement transformer for my field-modded-by-somebody SM58 microphone. That should be easy to fix, and then it won’t buzz in the presence of phantom power anymore. Damn, that was annoying.

But mostly, I’m doing a lot of cello recording – final work on Leannan Sidhe’s Mine to Love. And Betsy’s cello, Godiva, gets pretty fierce? And lo, securements come off and my studio reference monitors say WELCOME TO BUZZTOWN!

Yes, Betsy’s cello broke my speakers and made me upgrade them. SONIC ATTACK GRAR!

But that’s fixed now. At least, as fixed as I can make it. These little x77s – if you can even call them that anymore, I’ve modded them so much they’re less than half original – can only take so much bass no matter how much fiddling you do. Right now the biggest source of buzz is at very high volume and from inside the sealed tweeter assembly. I can’t fix it, I’d have to replace it, and ribbon tweeters are kinda spendy.

To wit: maybe I shouldn’t turn them up quite that loud. But it’s tempting, because it’s kind of cool being able to shake the floor with 20cm high bookshelf speakers.

AND NOT BY DROPPING THEM jesus you toons. C’mon.

Anyway, back to music mines. But first! Anna’s new book, Valor of the Healer, is out! She’s got a post up on the official Carina Press site, talking about strong female characters that aren’t physical badasses, and wants to hear about your favorite strong female characters who are strong without the physicality part, because that’s kind of her lead character in this trilogy – strong, despite physical weakness.

Eleanor from The Lion in Winter comes to mind, for me, and if you haven’t seen The Lion in Winter yet, go watch it right the fuck now, seriously.

Anyway, clickie and read and comment. And tell your friends – Anna’s new book is out! 😀

eta: Did I mention there’s a book giveaway involved? No? Damn. Well, there is. Clickie!

We’re down to the last bits of reset/upgrade/recovery on all the systems; I’m finally monkeying with the Hitachi hard drive that started throwing read errors in my laptop.

SMART status check reports zero (0) read failures on this Hitachi drive ever. That’s what the drive’s firmware thinks.

The gddrescue disk recovery tool is down to reading 4144 bytes per second a it tries to chew through all the read errors on this first pass; it hasn’t successfully read a whole 512-byte disk block in 1.1 hours.

I think we’ve found our “SMART got ruined by marketing departments” champion.

eta: The Procession of the Dead:

It’s my birthday! At least, my legal one. There’s another date which is candidate for Actual Birthdate, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

And I’m spending it moving boxes and files and hard drives. YAY. I can’t entirely believe I’m still moving files around from the techsplosion and Ubuntu upgrade farce, but I am. No, no additional hard drives have failed, we seem to be past that for the moment. But new drives mean larger drives mean the old backup drives aren’t big enough anymore means moving things around means playing Towers of Hammurabi with archives.

And y’know, moving a few hundred gigs at a time over USB2? That’s… not the fastest thing ever.

Home stretch, tho’. Home stretch. I should set up a Hall of Remembrance for all the dead drives. The Lord of All Drives could preside over it.

17 Years Good Service

Seriously, that’s the weird little what-is-this-doing-here 2G hard drive from lodestone that was serving as lodestone’s swap. I looked it up. It’s seventeen years old. And in fine working order! I figure that makes it RULER OF ALL HARD DRIVES, because damn.

And on a not-entirely-dissimilar note, what do I do with 160 and 40 gig EIDE hard drives in good working order, anyway? The small one is really slow, to be honest – it’s a total dog – so it kind of sucks and I’m not unwilling to drill it, but the 160g is reasonably fast and low milage and everything! What do you do with stuff like that?

I also have three dead drives, and one 500G EDIE drive that got yanked but which I’m putting into a housing and back into service in a new capacity. (Archives.) That’s six hard drives I’ve had to pull out of machines to get this all back together.

“Digital is forever,” they say. “Once it’s online, it’s eternal.” What a load of crap. Reality? Everything is super fragile and needs constant maintenance.

Even if you’re not a supervillain.

On the Clipper ferry heading to Victoria! I’m not as fond of the Clipper as the other ferries; it’s not bad but it… it’s kind of airplanish. Not as bad as an airplane, not at all, but there’s no lounge or anything like the train or the peninsula ferries.

My head cold seems to be letting up, so I might do an open mic at Cornerstone Cafe, but no promises. I haven’t played since Monday, between replacing hard drive – we’re up to five, honestly, what is this – and this cold, and the post-convention cleanup.

Oh, and I managed to get Ubuntu to reinstall the 3.2.0 kernel, and this time it worked! So I’ll be putting that through its paces as soon as I get home, but in initial teating, we look pretty good. Most importantly, my weird hardware is still working. The funny part is that the more modern version of Jack sees, complains about, and reports the device enumating things wrong – the problem which crashed the 2.x kernels (!) which prompted the 3.1.5 install to begin with.

All of which means basically nothing to anyone! Except that it means things should work better in general in production. And I can use other plugins I couldn’t use before, which is awesome. I’ll be downloading those on Monday. 😀

Anyway, have a good weekend, everybody! Anybody going to be at the Le Vent du Nord show tomorrow?

How is it Wednesday? How did that even happen?

I’m working my ass off right now trying to figure out how to update the MBR on a new hard drive in my audio workstation. Basically, my DAW has had two hard drives in it for a while because… oh fukkit there is no good reason. Laziness and It Seemed A Good Idea At The Time. I’m paying for it now, trying to combine them onto a single physical drive.

So here’s a music-acquired roundup from nwcMUSIC 2013/Norwescon 36:

• Experimutations and Counting Sheep from Jonny Nero Action Hero, who has a particularly dynamic live show, double-particularly for a chiptunes artist.
• Geek Girl, Infinity Right Now, and Sidekick and Other Songs from Hello, The Future! Technically Anna bought these but it’s a community property and gay marriage because Fuck Yeah Cascadia, and besides, I already had one of these from Bandcamp
• Temptations of the Fresh, from Klopfenpop, which I downloaded but don’t have the deluxe physical edition yet because he left it at home, and
• The Campaign Mixtape, from Shubzilla, who I actually met there during Jonny Nero’s show. It’s a four-track EP of quality, you should get it.

We had a bunch of out-of-nowhere tech problems including the various components of the sound system – which communicate over IP – all deciding not to talk to any of the other parts on Friday night. Nicole Dieker (Hello, The Future!) had to perform with the emergency backup kit, but fortunately, the emergency backup kit is good kit. And I shot some pretty decent actually video of the second half of her show.

Seriously, it was fucked up. I had to go find a paper clip so John could do some hardcore factory reset action. But that, followed by reprogramming from backup, got it to come back up in time for the Leannan Sidhe show, and it stayed up thereafter.

Cascadia’s Got Talent! got rocky, too – at scheduled start time we had one (1) contestant. Happily we ended up with six, and the Paul Lynde and Charles Nelson Reilly of nwcMUSIC (Death*Star) worked really well with Nicole Dieker (who could be our… Ruth Buzzi, perhaps?) and lots of fun was had by most. Scott’s trophy got a great reception, and our terrible vacation tour was to Prohibition boomtown turned suburban hell Kenmore. (“Kenmore! It’s on the way to Bothell. Kenmore! Where the appliances to go die. Kenmore! We used to be interesting; thank god that’s over.”)

The Saturday night concert set – that was pretty epic. We had four for the last-minute open mic, and actually filled the time pretty well. HeyLasFas’s guitarist – whose name I have dropped not in the sense of name-dropping but in the sense of forgetting it right now – did a couple of numbers solo. Then HeyLasFas proper, followed by Alexander James Adams – who packed the room, as always, and incidentally impressed the hell out of Molly Lewis – and then Molly Lewis herself, with Vixy & Tony dropping in as a backup band.

We ran a little late, but that was okay because this time filk was in the same room! And the filkers were all in the audience. I had fun playing with the lateness – walking up to stage carrying the all clock like I was going to be all cranky, holding it up in front of Tony… and setting it back 20 minutes. XD

Molly drew a genuine spontaneous encore. That’s an nwcMUSIC first.

Anyway, time to burn a new live CD and see if I can use it to rebuild the new drive’s MBR. If you know what that means, pop on to chat somewhere and help me, because honestly, WHY CAN’T I JUST EDIT THIS?! I mean damn.

The second ‘reverb trick’ they’re talking about in this article isn’t explained very well, I don’t think, because the critical element is kind of tossed out there in a side comment.

That critical element is the compression. If you just follow their steps – take a synth track, add reverb, record the reverb separately, put that in a second track, looped – you don’t get anything that’s hugely different to just adding reverb.

But if you do all those things, then also add a bunch of competitive compression – by which I mean, have your intermittent signal (the notes of the synth, when struck) close to the maximum output volume your compressor allows, which causes the compressor to scale back other simultaneous, continuous sounds – you get that interesting effect where the notes have very little immediate reverb, but between the notes, the reverb effect pops back up. It’s like the note is played without reverb, then after the note is over, the reverb pops up, delayed just a bit.

That effect is what’s adding the second implied beat, the semi-syncopation which livens their sample track up so well.

It’s an interesting application of side-chain effects. I think this is one to use sparingly; it’d be awfully fatiguing after a while.