thoughts on the new son lux record

this disc is dramatically gabrielesque, and that's nice to hear in the wave of 80s copycats.

well, i've got the right sound back to start with, anyways. good start. hoping it sticks. if it does, i'll get some work done tonight. and that will feel good. very good.

my head is swimming, though, i'm going to have to calm down first.

if you've decided that i should waste the last few weeks that i have left....i can't understand how you can justify that position.

on second thought, i didn't have anything to back up - it was already scripted. so, it's been done. and it's reinstalling.

on the off chance that i'm fighting against some kind of outside force that is reading this, i want you to think about the lengths that i've gone to and ask whether you feel it's worthwhile to continue to interfere.

the next step is concluding that the hardware is broken, and that's going to put me in an essentially irresolvable position that's going to cause me to stop mixing anything at all for a very extended - and perhaps permanent - length of time. i'm on disability. it's going to take me a long time to save up to replace that piece of equipment. and, depending on my incoming disability analysis, i might very well choose to end my life, instead.

no good. i really don't want to have to reinstall, but i must. i feel i've done everything else that i can.

i should point out that i have an.,...it's not an image. it's a stripped down winlite image with heavy install scripts. it's not as painful as it could be. it's still painful.

i'm going to have to uninstall everything by hand first, to make sure i've got all the settings i need put aside. as mentioned, it's not a short process.

i'm still leaning towards blaming it on that codec install, but who knows, really.

well, i've now managed a little over two days of cold turkey. i've got to know the new son lux record a little better. i've worked my "watch later" list up over 2500 videos, which takes me until the end of 2014 and may very well last me until the end of 2016. if i last, myself, until the end of 2016...

that's now pretty comprehensively dealt with and it's time to get back to work.

i haven't left the house since friday morning. that's how it is when i'm not smoking. and, the machine has indeed been off for a little over 50 hours.

it's now time to take a deep breath and see what happens. i can have no patience. i must immediately begin the reinstall if anything is amiss.

stirring...awake...

i don't think i'll last long. long enough to eat. it's probably good to keep the machine off for a few days, anyways.

there's still that remote chance that it was overheating.

at the end of june, i sat down to quickly remix a number of old tracks into a record of instrumental industrial music. i ran into two problems. the first was that i was going to need to carefully time shift the individual parts into place. this was time consuming, but overcome. second is that my gear is randomly changing tonal qualities on me. i haven't really figured this out yet and do not know if it's resolvable.

i've decided i'm best off avoiding the entire thing for several days, and going back to it. i'll be catching up on my news feed over the next few days and re-approaching this on monday at the earliest.

in the meantime, this is the sum total of what i've been trying to put together over the last few weeks. the first seven tracks are likely perfect mixes. the rest of them are a little unstable, due to inconsistencies in the gear they were created on that have yet to be isolated, resolved and corrected.

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

8 days wasted on figuring out why i can't get consistency out of the gear.

those 8 days - and the ten before it - were supposed to be spent on quickly mixing an old project. that requires focus. and, focus is correlated with nicotine. i kept telling myself i'd be done tomorrow. and, it's now near the end of a month i wanted to be cold turkey over.

i have no confidence in the gear at this point whatsoever. i'm going to reinstall, but i'm almost certain that it's broken and the reinstall won't help.

so, i'm going to let myself de-nic now. which means the project is on hold for several weeks. i'm probably going to sleep for most of the weekend.

the fact is that this is very depressing, and the combination is that i'm going to be angry and grouchy.

except that when i sat down to do it, the device had lost all the bass it was demonstrating all morning and sounded like i was listening to it through a tin can telephone.

i'm going to eat. and then i'm going to prepare to reinstall. i feel i have no other option. i feel at this point that even if it were to be functional when i finished eating it wouldn't last long enough to be useful.

i'll figure out the amp issue after i reinstall. i need a consistent signal, first.

fuck it. i'm mixing schizoid. i'll compensate later.

and, now the device is inconsistent again. ugh. i may actually have multiple inconsistencies. or i may be driving myself insane.

the nad is actually really not very flat. it has a very compressed sound that i recognize as a vacuum tube because i'm a guitarist and guitarists have this romantic notion of vacuum tubes. i can see why this would be perceived as a good thing in a variety of situations. and i could even see using it as a mastering device. but that's a very bad quality to work into mixing into a digital environment, as it's going to smooth over the rough parts. it's immediately obvious.

i remain left with very few useful conclusions. the cord *seemed* to make a difference, until the device got weird. it's hot in here, i should let it cool off...

i'm just going through so many possible combinations that i'm unable to rule out the possibility that i'm playing tricks on myself.

if you've been following this page, this isn't the first time i've gone through these gear crises, and they seem to resolve themselves randomly. i rarely figure out what the cause actually is before it dissipates.

are there psychological factors? temperature? air pressure? neither has been stable here this month; we're going through extreme swings in temperature and humidity, jumping from what seems like october and back into july. existential loss? finishing these tracks as instrumentals is something i've been putting off for 15 years. &etc.

even if i conclude it's psychological - and that's a hard thing to even consider when you're sure you're hearing dramatic differences - i'm still stuck until i can be certain of consistency.

but i know that, previously, when i've realized it might be psychological, it tends to evaporate.

one thing that i will say is that i've heard enough of these tracks in what seems like their proper state that i can conclude that i will not be remixing the first seven tracks.

i just wish i could understand why they don't sound the same way every time i listen to them. it's really something that shouldn't happen. ever. a recording should always sound the same on the same gear. this isn't quantum physics. there are wavefunctions. they're causal. it's repeatably demonstrable. i should have consistency.

dammit...

i should chill out and eat.

yup. it's the cord.

or at least interference. which explains the randomness, and why it seems to work better at night.

excuse me while i line the walls with aluminum foil...

it wasn't happening before, so i probably just knocked in a weird position or something.

i should be able to get it right by playing around with it.

hopefully.

if not, the other cable seems to work better. which is a little counter-intuitive. i was connecting with quasi-fancy gold plated rca cords. the ones that seem to work better are a step down. the thing's just gotta conduct, and it's not like i'm putting it under any pressure, so i can't imagine how it could have gotten damaged.

naw. that didn't do it either. but i am pretty convinced it's something to do with the amp - either the circuitry or the jack.

i happen to actually have a better amp :)

i've been using an old jvc, which is pretty consumer grade. it's just what that system has had connected to it since...2007? about that.

i mean, all i was looking for was a flat signal. the quality of the amp was only important in so much as it didn't interfere with the signal. and, it generally didn't. at least until now.

around 2009 or so, my dad gave me a much higher quality NAD receiver. it was out of request for a very flat receiver to act as a amplification system for my pod, because i'd learned that the pod tended to sound bad through guitar amps, because i was sending an amp sim through an amp and it was just getting all mucked up. he knew audio gear better than i did, so i let him figure that out and the nad is what i got. it's been sitting in a corner for years, waiting for me to use it in a live situation. i can state at this point that that's not likely to happen.

but, an extremely flat receiver sounds just about perfect right now.

if this doesn't work, it pretty much has to be the audio cable. i've worked in tech support. you're supposed to swap out the cables first. nobody does. i'm going to laugh for the next twenty years if it's a cable.

how's this for a novel cause? always the last thing you check. and, i can construct a chain of logic, too.

a few weeks ago, i noticed my mp3 headphones were shorting a little and i wasn't sure if it was the phones or the player so i checked them through the amp in the studio. the amp is a standard 1/4 jack. both my studio phones and my mp3 phones are 1/8. so, i need an 1.8th-->1/4 converter that sits in the amp. they're those big plugs, you've seen one around. i had to take the studio phones out of the converter to check.

as i was checking to make sure it's not the amp before i reinstalled by swapping the phones direct from the mixer, i noticed it was a little dirty.

cleaned it off, and it *finally* sounds crystal clear.

hopefully that holds. but, dammit. who'd have guessed that?

 (it was the player that was shorting, not the walking phones. it's an old sansa. and it's ultimately probably just dirty, too, but i'm going to need some kind of cleaner to get in there.)

ok.

i'm being very cautious with this, but i do believe that i've established enough consistency in sound that i can start remixing some of the tracks that i uploaded last week, and that ended up with warped mixes. i don't know what the solution was, but it seems to be ok. for now, anyways.

i'm going to have to be very slow with this, and i'm kind of paranoid, so i'll have to be constantly checking on the laptop, which i believe is at least a neutral system [even if the hardware is kind of crappy]. hopefully, i should get a mix or two up today.

but, i'm at my last straw. if i have any evidence of warped tone levels whatsoever, i'm going to immediately pull the plug and reinstall.

further confusion.

i just got through the whole record over asio out the m-audio and it's remaining consistent. finally. i don't really get it. but i'm happy. now, i need to check that it's holding for the mixer.

now, i'm just confused...

the m-audio windows out started off ok, but got very thin by the end of the record. but, the whole crux of the problem is that i can't isolate what the mix actually sounds like. so, i cycled the amp and it righted itself. sort of. it was better, anyways. is it just the bloody amp? it can get dusty in here, i guess.

well, one way to be sure of that would be to recreate the problem through asio and then fix it, and i'm having difficulty doing that. now, it sounds great through asio. consistently.

if it turns out that i just need to dust the amp...well..at least it's an easy fix. but, ugh. and, if somebody decided to leave me alone? well, thank you very much.

it's time to sleep again. another wasted day with really no progress on isolating the problem. annoying...

unfortunately, at this point, what i've been able to confirm is inconsistency across both cards over asio. it's the same type of error - the bass moves from clean and crisp (which is what i want) to muddy and undefined, the high mids cut in a way that makes the guitars sound flat and a few other things. it's at least repeatable, if random. there seems to be about five different settings that come in and out without warning. i can get it to go back to "normal" by cycling, but it doesn't stay there.

i don't think this is repeatable with the m-audio card using the windows mixer, but i need to test it a little more strenuously. if i can't repeat it, i have to conclude it's a broken asio. this at least suggests the hardware is not broken, which is positive.

you normally fix this by reinstalling drivers. but, it's starting to seem as though the codec install broke something a little deeper that repeated driver reinstalls aren't fixing and that a full os reinstall is necessary to address. i mean, i'm pretty good in the registry, but it's a labyrinth that one cannot really navigate.

i can't mix on the m-audio card through the windows mixer - even if i'm able to determine consistency. it's just a lower quality signal path that just doesn't sound as good. i can't finish this and then reinstall, i have to reinstall first.

an os reinstall will cost me about a week because i have some scripts to update. but my hands are tied. i still have to determine consistency over the m-audio card via windows, but it's pretty clear at this point that the codecs fucked the registry and that's what i'm going to have to do to fix it.

i guess if i installed windows streaming stuff, it might have prioritized itself over asio and then not removed itself fully. best guess, anyways. if that's right then i should in theory be able to find all the right values in the registry and reverse them by hand. but, that would likely take longer to figure out than a reinstall will take.

the way it's cutting in and out is like it's being mapped wrong somewhere.

the cool edit experiment didn't have a large effect, but i did a second reinstall and played with some of the buffer settings in foobar and am getting closer to establishing a correct level of consistency. it's a time-based thing, so we'll have to see.

i've got the sequence lined up in cubase over asio to test it against. worst case scenario, i'll have to mix it from there. it's actually a relatively good strategy, because i can just fix the eq on a track by track basis, then import it into the original file.

this is annoying, but it's a necessity. slowly. surely.