I’m mucho tired (at least my aching feet are telling me so), so here’s a wrap up:

* I performed and recorded an experimental composition today. I’ll share when AJ sets me up an FTP account to his server.
* My 11 (ish) year non-vomit streak ended last night in a less than jovial choking event. I needed the trendy version of the heimlich (hit between the shoulders) performed on me. Scary stuff.
* I recieved a package from Amazon that has made me very happy.
* I’ve been in a strangely melancholic mood since my throatal mishap last night.
* I’m looking forward to sleep and waking up with less aching feet.
* I’m not looking forward to this exam on saturday morning, nor the rush study that will precede it.
* The lecturer is making me have two verbal assessments as well as take the usual notes for my missed lecture which I completely don’t understand why. I’m sick of fighting because it’s a losing battle so I’ll just do a “as long as I pass” job of it.

I’m really sorry for typos. I was looking at a few of these words and I just couldn’t tell if they were spelt correctly or not.

I had the great idea to rearrange the things on my desk to try to make a more usable space. Well, more usable than this:

That was mid-way through the move was it was more messy than it is on a day-to-day basis. Well, actually, it depends on the days. Basically I wanted the digital piano closer to the computer so I don’t need to wheel everywhere like a kid who got a chair with wheels for his birthday (and asked for it). Here’s what it looks like at this moment:

So many wires! Now you see why I’m so eager for wireless technology.

PS: Check out Wanda Wisdom’s birthday celebration photos! That’s my kind of party…

I was sitting here wondering why my keyboard drawer doesn’t pull out further, so I gave it a strong pull and it gave a little. A few minutes later, it now comes out an extra 20 centimetres. The downside is I have a bit of grease on my hands. You can’t win them all.

My work is not under appreciated.

By the way, welcome to my 800th post. Can you believe it? Which anniversary gift celebrated 800… pure uranium?

I’m doing the mixdown for the ACT CD tonight. Yes, on a saturday night, how sad. Good thing is it should be finished tonight… except for one thing. (Be warned, this gets pretty technical.)

When we recorded it I really experimented with a number of methods. Firstly I used my MP3 player to record from the line out of the digital piano at rehearsal. This gave me what I had hoped would be a clean piano track. Unfortunately, I had left the input level too high and it blew out a little, but I used it anyway for a number of tracks. Other tracks I played on my acoustic piano live with the recording of the vocal. This is less than desired usually because the spill of the piano into the vocal mic makes redubbing vocals afterwards a bit messy. None the less, we did do this as we were both sightreading, and it was multitracked into Adobe Audition, a program I’m pretty comfortable in. It has the added bonus of automatically trimming your stereo mixdown to the regions which contain audio tracks, no matter where they lie on the linear time plain. This just saves you cutting out all the mis-starts, then having to group all the tracks together to retain their alignment when you move them to the start. Mixing down was very fast.

Now I’ve moved onto the last few tracks we did in Cubase to take advantage of a piano soft synth I was experimenting with. This was a mistake. I am no where near as comfortable in Cubase as I am in Sonar or Audition, which slows me down, but also there are idioms of the program I don’t like. The soft synth is a nightmare, slowing the mixdown process from a few seconds to 15 minutes thanks to the piano rendering. I would have been much better off tracking the acoustic piano live, or taken a mono mix of the digital piano (I have only two mono inputs available when I’m working in XP).

I’ve recorded a wide variety of recordings with my own equipment from my radio play to many rehearsals CDs, plus five or six demo CDs for singers and even an audio book for children. I have serious limitations. Something I need to address is the monitoring situation. Headphones are realy the only way to work when the mics are together with monitoring, and a headphone amp would be excellent. My mixer configuration is also very odd because it lacks inserts (a seperate output for each mic channel), and as I use it for mic preamping, the main outs and even effect sends are taken up by one mic signal each, making things very awkward. Of course, I make do with what I have. Being a recording engineer isn’t something I want to dedicate the rest of my life too, but I think the ability to record and produce your own material is a very valuable tool. But of course, I’ve got to actually write something to take advantage of this.