All Posts

August 23-24: Saturday was set aside for eBay sales. There comes a time when sound equipment that hasn’t been used in years needs to be sold in order to finance new and necessary devices. All gains are ploughed back into the land. Each effects processor and preamp embodies a history of its usage. On Sunday, following a magna-clean around the house, our elder son returned home. I’d not seen him since my last visit to London in March, and it was Christmas 2019 when he last crossed the threshold. A world away.

WFH: DAY 119. 7.15 am: Breakfast:

8.15 am: A communion. 8.45 am: I made my customary review of the week ahead. Quite apart from postgraduate teaching, there was resit marking to complete, research admin to undertake, and external examiner business to further. Throughout and in between, I would push on with the sound project. 9.15 am: Inboxing. eBay boxing. 10.30 am: A review of recently commenced compositions before clearing surfaces in readiness for a period of technological inquiry.

I came across this intriguing tweet last week. It was instructive. Les Paul created his own backing-tracks (for guitar and vocals) and played over the top of them, live. What I greatly admire about him, beside his consummate musicianship and innovativeness, was his command of the technology that he deployed. Paul took full responsibility for his sound:

It was going to be a slow day. I’d failed (following an hour’s application) to obtain an output on one of my ‘old’ analogue/digital converters. I was perplexed. After lunch, I rethought my sound system, and without that particular converter. There have to be days like this. They’re never wasted. Problems push you down paths that you never knew existed. ‘Drivers! Isn’t it almost always the drivers’. Wait for: ‘install’, ‘restart’, ‘update’, ‘restart’, [‘upstart’], etc. By 4.15 pm the input/output functions worked, and the two laptops/analogue to digital interfaces were talking to each other:

7.00 pm: A Late dinner. 8.00 am: A late evening’s modulation of several test samples:

Previous Post
August 21, 2020
Next Post
August 25, 2020