SFX Tuesday
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2025 08:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio |
80F this evening, going down to 60F overnight.
Yesterday (Monday) was the penultimate day of classes, with exams going on and the students getting out just as I arrived at 12:45PM.
This morning was the first Tuesday of the month, the day the tornado sirens are tested at 10AM, so I had my alarm set to get me up at 9:50AM, to get my phone ready to record them out the window.
After recording them, I reset the alarm for 11AM, and went back to sleep for 50 minutes.
With coffee brewed at 11:20AM, I called Fernando to ask about the AC deal.
He said he'd emailed a form last week to everybody, that I have to fill out, to apply for AC, and to sign, before I'm in the cue for the install.
I found the PDF form in my email, but didn't have time to do anything with it, before heading to work.
At work, I found out that we'll be at Dandelion Elementary on Thursday and Friday, to move crap out of the classrooms so the carpets can be removed... just like last year, at Ferry Elementary.
I'd be exptected at 9AM, both Thursday and Friday!
So I decided to leave early today at 6PM, in order to get to bed early tonight, and get to work tomorrow at 11AM, in practice for being to Dandelion, at 9AM on Thursday & Friday.
I also got a notification from Ebay that my sound effects tapes had been delivered... a drunk order I'd made two weeks back.
That was because I'd been thinking I wanted a howling wolf to end the song, Archeology and had looked around online for a free sound file of one, but couldn't find anything.
My brilliant solution?.. to get a bunch of old sound effects tapes on Ebay and digitize them!
I ordered them and then forgot all about it in the morning.
So tonight, I clocked out at 6PM, and was home before 6:30PM.
First thing was to grab the Ebay tapes from the mail room and bring them upstairs.
Next thing was to get the PDF form for the AC, print it up, fill it out, staple the two sheets together, put them in an envelope, and drop it into the mail slot for the manager's office downstairs.
Armada's, "cooling season," for Allerton Tower, is; JUN 01 ~ SEP 30.
No pro-rating! Doesn't matter if you wait until July, you still pay for the whole cooling season, which is $300.00.
You can either pay $75.00 per month, or pay the whole $300.00 up front, which I chose to do... though they'll bill me at the tennant portal, after the form's processed.
This year I bought an actual exhaust fan, to install in the window next to the AC.
Last year I had this shitty rig with a small fan that had it's front cage removed, which was duck taped to a hunk of foam board with a circle cut out of it.
This new little exaust fan has louvers that close when the fan is off, and should be much easier to install, without any foam board around it.
So I'll be able to exhaust the cig smoke like last summer, but when I'm gone, the louvers will be closed, making it easer to keep the place cool.
Not sure whether to close the bathroom vent or not.
Last year it was rusted shut all summer.
This year, we'll see.
So with the AC form taken taken care of, I came back upstairs and vacuumed, in case they do the install tomorrow... and then looked at my 8 sound effects tapes from Ebay.
Two of them are nothing but bird calls, so... not very useful for the album.
Two more are just ambient tapes; babbling brook, and rain storm... also probably not super useful.
Two more are just random nature sounds, but have no track list, so there might be some useful things on them, like howling wolves or whatever.
One is just a good old, general sound effects album that I recognize from the old days, that will be useful.
And the final one is one of those, "sounds to haunt your house by," tapes from K-Tel that the cool people used to have playing over loudspeakers outside on Halloween!
That might be useful, to work into an opening montage for, Archeology, the song, with other of my own sounds.
I got the Tuesday siren recording off my phone and onto the studio computer, but it's kind of shit, because of all the air noise, traffic noise, and dam water noise.
You can hear the sirens, but there's no way to really clean up all the noise!
After that I experimented with a way to use the old USB cassette player with the MOTU, rather than just going with it's native usb audio signal.
And it's working!.. I'm digitizing the Halloween tape right now, and listening to it in headphones.
I have a cable going into the little headphone jack on the cassette player, which splits it out to stereo RCA, female jacks.
Attached to those are two RCA to mono 1/4 jacks, which then plug into the Left and Right inputs of the MOTU!
So, this is how I'm gonna digitize tapes from now on.
Still get motor noise from the cassette player but... what're ya gonna do!
Someday I'll buy a good cassette deck, but they'r expensive as hell!
So that's my Tuesday evening!
Gotta be up early tomorrow, and earlier on Thursday & Friday.
Expecting the AC install before the weekend.
Got the sound effect/ tape digitization game up.
And I'll be back in Studio C on Saturday!
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