FRUGAL MARCH
Sunday, March 1st, 2026 04:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio33F and overcast today.
I made it through February, training myself to be more frugal, and today there was exactly the amount of last Tuesday's paycheck in the account... meaning I managed to stretch the paycheck before it until yesterday.
I paid the rent and the car payment. Nothing else is due until after the coming paycheck on the 10th, so car insurance and phone will come out of that, as well as credit cards.
And i'm now truly living paycheck to paycheck.
But rent is the big expense on the 1st. The car payment's only 180.00. The other bills, that come out of the 2nd paycheck don't add up to as much.
The real drain on my money is the cigarettes, now at a ridiculous 13.00 a pack! So the goal is to cut my smoking in half, and I'm getting there.
I'm not super worried, because if worse comes to worse, I can just get a part time job on weekdays before the main job, which I don't start until 3PM every day.
Something simple, and quittable, like running a register at a gas station, or stock room at a drug store.
But it hasn't come to that yet, so... for now I continue to focus on the album.
Last night's review of, Reavis and Clue Phone sounded good.
My only thought was that perhaps the guitars could use a final "clean up" EQ, at the end of the signal chain... That, "tone band" idea I'd been using before the pickup simulator idea.
The pickup EQs boost certain frequencies, and leave the rest alone (except for a slight HI and LO pass, on the fringes) so, there's nothing subtractive.
A cleanup EQ would just isolate the boxy/honky freqs, and pull them down a bit, leaving the rest alone.
But I'll worry about that after i've propagated the pickup sim model to the 12 songs.
Once they're all using that model, revisions to the pickup EQs, if needed, would be simple to do.
I think i'm gonna start today with, Other Friends.
Talk to you later.
Okay, Other Friends is exporting now as a new test WAV.
The pickup simulation model worked well in this song! At first I had my doubts, but I re-jiggered the distortion, and got it back to the nice thrash I had before.
This guitar line is a series of four-measure climbs from lower chords to higher chords, then back down again, so I set the pickup automations to start each of those sections with 90% neck & 10% bridge, then smoothly transition to 10% neck & 90% bridge.
This gives those passages a lot of beef to start with, and by the end they're very biting!
I did some volume automation, lowering the guitar about 20% in the bridge, and the interlude, where it's playing 80% bridge pickup, and for the interlude I also automated the distortion down about 30%.
The lesson I learned with this song is that automation can cause CPU spikes if there are jarring jumps between the end of one clip and the start of the next.
So for example in the type of passage described above, where the bridge pickup goes smoothly from 10% to 90%, that's not a problem. But it was a BIG problem to just leave it at 90% and let it try to instantly jump back down to 10% for the start of the next clip... because the guitars are already demanding a lot of the CPU, with the strummed-out chords of 3 and 4 notes each.
Thus FL has to do that and try to move two pickup EQ volume knobs instantaneously, in a huge jump.
So after the automation was roughed out, I went back and made sure each clip joins the next at the same levels, giving it a couple beats to transition into position.
I had a similar issue at the end of the interlude where several instruments hit their final note at the same time... which taxes CPU. I had to wait a couple beats after that moment, to transition the pickup knobs... in a gap where only the drums were counting in the next bit.
Okay, so... what next?
I think I'm gonna try... Tuesday Siren! That's got a lot of variation on the guitars, so it'll be a good stress test for the pickup simulation model.
Talk to you later.
I'm all clean & shiny, and the laundry's done, and put away... sitting here realizing the the best way to avoid smoking is to put an unlit cigarette in my mouth... at least while working on the computer.
I get too busy to actually light it, but since it's in my mouth, my brain is happy.
Okay, I've been working on Tuesday Siren, and this one really is the test for the model, for several reasons.
1) It's got two guitars; G1 for most of it, and G2 for a few critical leads. This means more automation than normal, but it's also been a challenge to get both to sound as good, and as distinct from one another as in the previous version.
2) The song's very customized, meaning no two verse or bridge parts (no real chorus) are exactly the same, or the same length. This means automation clips are not repeatable.
3) G1 has a wide dynamic range from one part to another... which will test the sensitivity of the pickups, I guess.
I started with automating G2, and i'm not quite done yet.
G1 stil awaits it's automation clips, for later tonight.
So far it seems to be going well, but getting the right mix of delay, chorus, distortion, and convolver settings was tough.
G2 has heavy distortion, as did the guitar for Other Friends, earlier today... and it feels like I can't hear quite enough difference between the neck and bridge pickups.
I could hear a difference between them yesterday, working on Reavis, and Clue Phone, but something about the heavier distortion makes it harder to audibly differentiate them.
So this points to more research on the pickups' freq profiles. The ones i'm using are based on the old humbuckers of a vintage Les Paul, and there's a lot of overlap between the two profiles.
Perhaps there's a different 2-pickup guitar to base things on?
It'll probably be late by the time i'm done with Tuesday Siren, tonight, so this entry will be it for this transitional weekend where February turned to March.
The forecast says it'll warm up a bit this coming week, into the 40s and low 50s, so that'll be nice.
And then next weekend will be the start of daylight saving time!
To sum things up for this weekend... I had an idea last Sunday to simulate pickups for the guitar. Attempts to implement that as a patcher preset proved impractically difficult, but I got the idea working this weekend and am now working on the 4th test-song, with this experimental new model.
Learning automation was a big breakthrough last weekend. This weekend, it's the dynamic motor at the heart of the pickup sim model.
I think the model is here to stay, at this point.
In general, it's leading to much more realistic sounding guitars, both because of real analog/electrical simulation, and also the dynamism of play.
It's also leading to a realistic consistency from one song to the next... it's the same instrument in every song, but with different effect pedal settings.
The only questions are really; 1) what's the optimal pair of pickup profiles? 2) is there an optimal cleanup EQ profile to be used globally?
But those are both things that can be easily changed after the infrastructure of this model is built... the two EQ slots instead of one... the consistent Sakura settings... and most importantly the automation clips.
I got a lot accomplished over my Standard Time, from late October, through to now.
So, this transitional period where winter's chill hangs on, before the plants spring back to life... is a good moment to be giving the guitars some final focus before the compression phase.
Okay, talk to you next Saturday!
°¦}
