busybee fluffy rambles

Just some updates about the pertinent things.

I’ve been building some simple acoustic panels to improve the acoustics and aesthetics in my recording studio. Mostly the aesthetics, really, but still.

I have a pretty good process for something that’s easy and cheap to build. And it doesn’t hurt the sound, at least.

I managed to actually get a lot of stuff done today, and I’m feeling quite tired, but in a good way.

• Assembled three of my acoustic panels for the studio (and then ran out of adhesive, oops)
• Assembled my new fire pit ring (still need the brick surrounds and probably some gravel for the bottom)
• Set up a photo shoot for album cover art (pending the completion of the acoustic panels and some general tidying up of the studio space)
• Got caught up on a week’s worth of dirty dishes (oops)
• Made some more tiny tweaks to the album track ordering, and got a couple folks signed up for the listening beta (but I could still use more!)
• Glazed my two pots
• Also somehow managed to get some piano practice in, too???

I took some time off after my first big progress day to regroup, since I was having a bit of soreness and a pain flareup, and also didn’t really know what steps to take next. I did do a little bit in the interim but it wasn’t worth documenting.

Anyway I finally figured out which steps to take next, and I got a lot done today!

The air was clear enough™ today (AQI in the upper 80s, which is still no fun for me to be outside but that’s good enough for being in the basement) and I got goaded along by some folks on the Song Fight! discord to “just do it,” so I decided to start the process of reorganizing stuff.

My ongoing anxiety regarding recording studio computer stuff has continued. Yesterday while doing day 1 of Novembeat I found that my 2016 MacBook pro is still just like… way too slow to make music on (especially if I stream at the same time). And then I saw that there’s a bunch of deals on 2020 MacBooks happening right now.

I was about to buy a 2020 MacBook Air with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD, but then found out that Apple had a deal on refurbished 2020 MacBook Pro with 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD for only a little bit more, and the refurb price is less than the equivalently-equipped MacBook Air’s price. So that’s what I ended up ordering.

Studio

My basement studio setup is coming along slowly but surely. I ended up buying a used ADAT preamp to expand my existing audio interface (rather than buying a new interface/patchbay/etc.) and it mostly works great, although I’m going to see if I can hack an S/PDIF decoder into a word clock source for it so that the 18i8 can be master (which makes a couple of things easier to deal with).

For now I’m using my old MacBook as the recording computer. It only has a 500GB drive, though, and I couldn’t find the power adapter for my external HDD enclosure, so I decided to try just running Native Instruments off of my NAS over gigabit Ethernet. Nearly every install failed with a nonsensical “malformed XML document” error, which turns out to be a known issue with attempting to install to a NAS. Oh well. Hopefully that PSU turns up soon. I’m sure it’s in the bottom of whichever box I end up unpacking last.

(The PSU isn’t anything particularly exotic in principle, just a 12V 2A center-positive wallwart, but for some reason all the 12V center-positive wallwarts I can find can’t accommodate its extra-thick center pin.)

But anyway, today I finally got to the point where I could hook up my piano, and so I played piano for the first time since April, which felt nice. I can’t believe I let it be this long. I guess I really thought the backyard shed studio would go a lot more quickly!

So, my trusty Presonus Firestudio Project is starting to give up the ghost, and it looks like the new macOS Mojave won’t support it anyway. And it’s my last bit of Firewire hardware so I’d might as well come limping along into the USB era, right?

UPDATE: It looks like I still have some time with this 10-year-old interface. Phew.