Torched Laughter Studio Diary: Day 6 – I Can Only Laugh
Everything has been scrapped and re-recorded. I am exhausted. This post will exhaust you. Don’t even bother reading it.
Prologue:
I forgot to mention a minor incident that will dictate the chain of events that happened last night/this morning.
2 weeks ago I went over to a friend’s place. Said friend has a band and everything is set up in his basement. Needless to say, I just HAD to jam for hour and hours. Rid myself of some of the mental bile that tends to build up. Unfortunately I wasn’t wearing earplugs (which I always wear) and couldn’t gauge just how loud we were playing.
(Photo Credit: Lana Tutino – Ikonorchid)
In the end, the reward for a night of jamming was ringing ears and noticeable hearing loss. The hearing loss dogged me for a couple of days and then I thought it was back to normal.
Well, it went back to really normal last night.
I know this because I heard all this god awful noise on all the tracks that I did not hear over the past few days. Instead of trusting my VU meters, I trusted my then-handicapped ears. I had a sneaking suspicion for the past couple of days that something wasn’t right. And like a good western civilized human, I didn’t trust my instincts.
The decision was made to scrap everything.
I have no desire to work around the noise issue during the mixing process. No plug-in or fancy pants processor can fix the mixture of digital noise and room artifacts that infected the recordings. After accepting that everything will be done again (and thankfully, not much was really done as of yet) I had to solve where the noise was coming from.
Culprit #1
The computer. My abacus here is a collective of Egyptian slaves building pyramids. It’s ridiculously powerful for a PC. It’s also ridiculously loud. I find it ironic and fitting that the very machine that gives me the priviledge to record music is also the reason why it’s so fucking hard at times to record music.
In the past when I had another computer, I would just throw the PC into a rubbermaid tub and it would be quiet. This newer machine doesn’t like being suppressed. It instead gets louder to compensate for all the heat being trapped. Due to the hearing loss, I didn’t hear just how loud it got.
But there was an effective solution, albeit crude. I put the computer in the bathroom and shut the door. I watched the VU meters drop drastically. Happy dance. There is always going to be a certain level of hiss/noise because the rooms are not acoustically treated. But that’s fine. I seriously doubt, dear reader, that you give a shit about a little bit of hiss. If you’re a hipster, you probably welcome it as it reminds you of the good old days of cassettes.
Culprit #2
Focusrite TwinTrack Preamp.
I have rarely used this preamp, but it’s the main vessel for the recording because it’s stereo. The `out’ on the back was sending digital noise to the computer. Not happy room hiss noise; the noise of when you turn your computer speakers all the way up and you can hear those anemic tron-like sounds when you minimize/maximize windows. That’s solid-state electronics for you.
Thankfully, there are multiple outs on the back. So I tried another set that required another set of cabling and converters. Poop, out of converters. Off to Radio Shack. An hour of driving later and I’m back.
Finally, almost time to record.
What the….
After all the re-arranging of gear and yet maintaining an almost zen-like state through all this ridiculousness, The Focusrite decided to show me one of its swell idiosyncracies: One of the channels crackle. That means the channel is unusable. The preamp is now mono. I.don’t.want.mono. I have 2 AKG C1000’s that want to work together. Not let one take fucking turns while the other enjoys a Union break.
I haven’t the time to tear the stupid thing open and try to either fix or clean the connections. I routed one of the mics to another mono preamp. It does the job. Good.
Focusrite, you’re an unruly little man. If you weren’t so rectangular, I would roll you down the hill like a cheese wheel into a swamp.
All this moving around and fixing stuff took about 3 hours of time. I was pretty beat after it all. But the real work had to be done. After an hour just decompressing I went at it. 10 hours later and bleary eyed as the sun rose, all the tracks that were discarded were redone as well as some extra stuff. The results are great. And I’m still on schedule.
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