Big kinds of progress afoot
Some of the things that have made progress this week are actually "Evil Laugh" good.
The First had to do with all things recording and soundy.
As I wrote last week, I did not know how to get my Roland VS1880 and my computer to synchronise during recordings thru the SPDIF ports. If that problem were solved, then I can finally do a functional, smooth upload of my current multitrack projects into the computer for editing, processing, mixing, effects, etc and FINALLY move my entire recording process into the digital domain, with no analog steps. So on Tuesday, Steve (my former musical partner from The Sacred Chao) came over and had a five hour (?!) wrestling match with the software and hardware and the interfaces, and finally got a solution to work. Yes, solutions to this problem are actually fairly common, thanks to MIDI, but there are multiple ways of doing it and multiple standards and multitudes of configurations and preferences and methods, so once it's working, it's great, but getting there is all too often, a path of pain and peril. There's no way in HELL I could have figured this crap out on my own. It's like I'm a freshman in college all over again. Anyway, the functional solution we found was in the Sonar LE software package that came with my spiffy new PCI card. For reasons we can't quite fathom, Sonar wants to be the "Master" to the 1880 over an MTC synchronisation link and -tada! (It didn't work the other way, even tho it would *seem* to make sense that the 1880 be the master if we're dubbing from it. WHHAT EVURRRR!)
Sonar looks to be a real nice sound editor/recording/MIDI package, and I'm probably going to be learning alot more about it and using it more in upcoming projects. Especially for the next step, which is mastering VST plugin effects, that will hopefully work better than the plugins I use in Audacity (which are good, but not great, and often tedious). I'll probably still be using Audacity for edits, and especially for smoothing over glitches and splices.
But as I said, just being ABLE to do this step (the dubbing from the 1880 onto the computer) represents progress that warrants BIG evil laughter.
And yesterday was spent in another all day "class" learning from
jmax315.
The (1st version of the) website is very nearly set up. Just a couple of files to upload, and a couple of things that need to be "switched on" (if I understand the metaphor right), and the very 1st 1 page version of www.stevehaug.com will be running. Probably VERY SOON, like any day now. Again, this is "Evil Laugh GOOD".
Last night featured a very pleasant dinner withtafkad and his SO, with lotsa good Indian food and catching up and pleasant stuff.
Today, will mark (pending my clearing a path for the delivery guys) the arrival of our new front loading washing machine. That should mark not only an upgrade in our clothing cleanliness process, but also a vast improvement (and elimination) of occasional floods of laundry water downstairs. Yay!
Tonight, I will be cheering onsagesaria in the production of Tommy she's performing in.
Tomorrow, I'm hoping to go busking, which will make for some improvements in my cash flow, that be very very nice.
Next week, I get to take all these advances and apply them to a now even bigger backlog of work I want to do.
The First had to do with all things recording and soundy.
As I wrote last week, I did not know how to get my Roland VS1880 and my computer to synchronise during recordings thru the SPDIF ports. If that problem were solved, then I can finally do a functional, smooth upload of my current multitrack projects into the computer for editing, processing, mixing, effects, etc and FINALLY move my entire recording process into the digital domain, with no analog steps. So on Tuesday, Steve (my former musical partner from The Sacred Chao) came over and had a five hour (?!) wrestling match with the software and hardware and the interfaces, and finally got a solution to work. Yes, solutions to this problem are actually fairly common, thanks to MIDI, but there are multiple ways of doing it and multiple standards and multitudes of configurations and preferences and methods, so once it's working, it's great, but getting there is all too often, a path of pain and peril. There's no way in HELL I could have figured this crap out on my own. It's like I'm a freshman in college all over again. Anyway, the functional solution we found was in the Sonar LE software package that came with my spiffy new PCI card. For reasons we can't quite fathom, Sonar wants to be the "Master" to the 1880 over an MTC synchronisation link and -tada! (It didn't work the other way, even tho it would *seem* to make sense that the 1880 be the master if we're dubbing from it. WHHAT EVURRRR!)
Sonar looks to be a real nice sound editor/recording/MIDI package, and I'm probably going to be learning alot more about it and using it more in upcoming projects. Especially for the next step, which is mastering VST plugin effects, that will hopefully work better than the plugins I use in Audacity (which are good, but not great, and often tedious). I'll probably still be using Audacity for edits, and especially for smoothing over glitches and splices.
But as I said, just being ABLE to do this step (the dubbing from the 1880 onto the computer) represents progress that warrants BIG evil laughter.
And yesterday was spent in another all day "class" learning from
jmax315.The (1st version of the) website is very nearly set up. Just a couple of files to upload, and a couple of things that need to be "switched on" (if I understand the metaphor right), and the very 1st 1 page version of www.stevehaug.com will be running. Probably VERY SOON, like any day now. Again, this is "Evil Laugh GOOD".
Last night featured a very pleasant dinner with
tafkad and his SO, with lotsa good Indian food and catching up and pleasant stuff.Today, will mark (pending my clearing a path for the delivery guys) the arrival of our new front loading washing machine. That should mark not only an upgrade in our clothing cleanliness process, but also a vast improvement (and elimination) of occasional floods of laundry water downstairs. Yay!
Tonight, I will be cheering on
sagesaria in the production of Tommy she's performing in.Tomorrow, I'm hoping to go busking, which will make for some improvements in my cash flow, that be very very nice.
Next week, I get to take all these advances and apply them to a now even bigger backlog of work I want to do.
