i'm procrastinating because i don't want to be further disappointed. but i need to get back to it.

there's an alter-reality update tonight at midnight: it is the date that i've penciled in for the release of my first electronic ep. that is dec 1, 1997. which means i'm pushing into 1998, and the real start of my electronic phase. this ep has about another month as the feature before i plow into the synth-pop.

that means i need to get these instrumental mixes done within the next month. everything has slowed down so dramatically this year; i'm kind of irked, but them are the apples. i just hope the gear co-operates soon and stays co-operative....

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inrisampled

belated, intentionally

hi.

a birthday call shouldn't be a negative experience, so i decided against it this year. i mean, the idea is not to torment you, it's to wish you well. freaking you out would be rather counter-intuitive.

but, i did want to let you know that i didn't forget. i just decided against it.

so, happy birthday.

j

see, this is how you'd assume it should work. it should merge at the master and go through the rest of the chain as one signal.

but, i seem to have disproven this. and, i have further evidence for disproving this - it's helping me explain something i never really understood.

if you place a vanilla bus right in front of the main mix, you'd think it should just be superfluous, because the main mix is combining everything, anyways. it's a virtual path, so you're not creating resistance or any kind of degradation.

but, every time i've done this i've noticed it isn't accurate. sometimes it's subtle. but parking that vanilla bus in there predictably changes the characteristic of the sound. i've never understood this...

...but perhaps the reason this is true is that it actually creates the merge operation that it seems obvious should be there but doesn't seem to actually be.

what that means is that if somebody wants the behaviour in this diagram, they should put a bus in front of the master out and send everything through it. that will merge the signals.

otherwise, this diagram should really be in parallel - at least up to the channel fader (which is right after the eq).

i've convinced myself that what was broken in the drivers was the separation of the tracks. the more i explore this, the more likely it is that it's going to start looking random.

i can't verify that cubase processes individual tracks before it mixes them, but it seems like an unavoidable conclusion.

it would then have to be that it broke at the mixing stage - that the tracks were corrupted as they were being combined, on a stream-by-stream basis.

this should be at the driver level, because it's what drivers do: they act between hardware and software instructions.

i'm still a little unclear on exactly how this works, but the inference is that the hardware must be streaming the individual parts separately; that the "mixing" isn't actually done in hardware, but in the listener's ears. like an rgb gun, or a computer monitor for that matter - it shoots out the different colours independently and allows the result to exist in observation. there's no violet inside your computer. there's only instructions on how to create violet on your screen.

if i can verify that this is true, i'll be convinced.

but, i don't think it's going to help a lot in reconstructing it. it means i'd have to run independent processes on each of the tracks, because the corruption is happening on the other side of the master effects.

so, today wasn't a loss. i feel i finally *understand* what's happening. that should help me put it behind me and move on.

talk about a weird error, though. no wonder i couldn't figure it out.

to keep to the colour analogy, i guess it would be sort of like that i had a dirty printer head, and i was getting splotches on the paper as a consequence of it - those splotches being strange frequency boosts.