Spent a couple hours running up and down from the workbench in the basement to the second floor bedr...studio trying to get my old cheap usb-midi interface working right. Seems that for five bucks you can get one with the cables soldered improperly (out-out and in-in; not good) I fixed that but it made no difference so it was all a waste of time. I have a good Yamaha interface that works great but was hoping to have one for each keyboard.
The idea is to back up all my patches and be able to edit them in the PC instead of the instruments. Without having to unplug everything. This is me just being OCD for a little bit.


THE
LOOPBACK
AARDVARK

You guys are making me re-live so many nightmares right now.

This is all why I make music on my computer in my room by myself.

Be there at 6, might be there at 6:10? With the singer I dealt with being there at 6 might mean he'd show up at 9:10, 3 days later, drunk, saying...wut??

I also had a friend who built a recording studio in a basement. He was partnered in that endeavor with another friend who owned the house. We recorded there 3 or 4 times. We were the band that they used as guinea pigs when trying to get everything running.

My friend was very much into recording and running a studio. Apparently the other friend, who owned the house, was NOT as into it and only a few months into the project he decided he was moving out of that house and in with his girlfriend. Lethargic was wanting to record our only full length CD so we were forced to rush into the studio with no drummer and songs only half the band knew.

The thing is, MY friend, unlike your friend, is NOT lazy about it. At all. He is the exact opposite. He is anal retentive and OCD about everything. I would LOVE for him to be a little lazy instead of being an insane perfectionist maniac.

Up until now we had let this guy do whatever he wanted with mixing our stuff. But I grew to hate what he did. It was always too tinny. You could never hear the bass or kick drum. So I told him to fix that shit this time. And when he let us hear his first mix of a couple of songs. It was perfect. It was exactly how I wanted it to sound. We were all thrilled. It sounded completely bad ass.

But....we had a deadline for when the studio was closing. We had to be done and out of there by whatever time it was. After hearing that first mix and what he was doing, we approved and went home, leaving up to finish up the other songs. After we left, he stayed there, and instead of just mixing the remaining songs, he FIDDLED with the mix for hours. Mixing and remixing and remixing. Right up until the last possible second that he was kicked out of the studio.

The problem with this is that he stayed so long he didn't even have the chance to dub the thing to cassette or CD for us to HEAR. All we had was the original reel to reel tape of the recording and the final mix on a god damn DAT tape. Yes, we needed a DAT tape if we got the CDs pressed but...how the fuck do we hear it ourselves??

We didn't. Because we couldn't find a single person with a DAT machine. It took 3-4 years before I found somebody who would dub this stupid thing. The band had been well broken up by this point. And then when I finally got to hear the thing it was heartbreaking. Because once again Mister Perfectionist had sat there and fiddled with everything until it sounded like absolute shit. The bass and kick were gone again. It was just a tinny fucking mess. Had we spent all that money to get the CDs made and then found out this is what it sounded like I would've strangled the guy.

re: my friend's basement studio

The only time he's ever down there is when I'm over. I can tell because all the empty beer bottles are still where he left them. The overhead lights have been broken for over five years. He set up one of those tripod worklights like the construction people have. It's not fixing stuff that drives me crazy. Half of the audio cables are unusable unless you jiggle them from time to time to keep the broken wires inside the plug ends touching. Then there's the clutter....
I grew up recording in converted bedrooms and the occasional garage, when the weather was nice and the traffic out front wasn't too bad. Now here's this practically soundproof basement with all the room to move around a body could want and it's being wasted because of apathy.

re midi:
my keyboards don't have the usb style plugs, they are all too old but the round style plugs work fine. Once I bought a real USB-MIDI interface things worked much better than the old way. Now the only thing stopping me from becoming J.Giles is time and ambition. It's fun hooking all of them up together for really layered and weird sounds.

In regards to MIDI, maybe (surely) things have changed, but back when I was dabbling with it the biggest thing I remember was that I was always reconfiguring my soundcard and cables to the point that it was always a pain in the ass to get things back to normal when I was done. This was back in the days when MIDI cables were 15 pin cables and not USB so I'm sure it's different today.

I would love to just focus on one thing for a while but I get interested in so many different things that I end up just dabbling in them.

AArdvark wrote:venting here

Every time I go over to my friend's place to jam I am always saddened by the unfulfilled potential. That is, I come home feeling depressed because the studio is always a shambles, a mass of random gear and other detritus scattered about the place. It takes a good half hour to plug stuff in a workable configuration and then it's fun for a while, until we actually try to do something constructive, like maybe record music.
In response to that, I keep my home configuration as neat as I can but the creative spark just isn't the same.
The one time I tried to show him the wonders of midi. He shook his head sadly and said that he could never learn how to mess with something like that. I have midi hooked up at home and usually find it really cool to work with.

I've mentioned before that a friend of mine used to run a local music recording studio. I used to love going there to hang out and assist with recording. A lot of the time I just sat behind my friend and watched him work the board, but if there was something he had to do in the recording room I would run the board or help him do punch ins and stuff. Very simple things. I loved hanging around that guy and the studio. He knew more about audio recording and quality than I could ever dream of knowing.

The part that drove me crazy was that I am very Type A and he is very Type B. If he said "be there at 6pm" I would be there at 6pm and be ready to go. Being there at 6pm for him might mean get there at 6:10 with dinner in hand, then do some piddling, then eat dinner, then do some more piddling, then listen to some music, and finally do some recording by 8pm. It used to literally drive my crazy to the point where I felt like I was going to explode because things took so long there. I was much younger then and felt like he was doing these things because he disrespected my time, but in retrospect I think it was just because that's how the guy was. And it was his studio so I pretty much had to adapt to his schedule, and did so for as long as I could before my head exploded.

I love the potential of midi. I dislike the fact that I'm not using it for anything other than simple experimental stuff.

Been downloading midi songs and pumping them through my Yamaha keyboard then playing along with them on guitar. Works fairly well. But there's so much more.

I thought I had the copyright on shaking my head sadly when trying to record. haha

I have tried countless times to get more into midi than the basics. It just makes my head spin.

venting here

Every time I go over to my friend's place to jam I am always saddened by the unfulfilled potential. That is, I come home feeling depressed because the studio is always a shambles, a mass of random gear and other detritus scattered about the place. It takes a good half hour to plug stuff in a workable configuration and then it's fun for a while, until we actually try to do something constructive, like maybe record music.
In response to that, I keep my home configuration as neat as I can but the creative spark just isn't the same.
The one time I tried to show him the wonders of midi. He shook his head sadly and said that he could never learn how to mess with something like that. I have midi hooked up at home and usually find it really cool to work with.