DAYLIGHT SUN
Sunday, March 8th, 2026 06:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio63F and sunny this... evening I guess. It should be 5:07PM, but we're all pretending it's 6:07PM.
I'm just back from the Sunday errands, with 72.00 left in the bank for tomorrow, and awaiting that paycheck to direct deposit at midnight, Tuesday.
Last night's phone call featured both Tim and Colleen. We kept it shorter, because of the time change.
I then updated the guitars on Reavis, and Tuesday Siren, and with those new WAVs updated the vocal versions, but I didn't have time to review the four songs.
But that's fine, I'm gonna go ahead and start propagating the new guitar signal model to more songs, and using them to create more vocal test FLACs.
I guess the idea is to update the whole Ruff Record.
Before I got all bogged down with the automated pickup simulations, I did those initial gain & tone balances to everything but the guitars... so the current mixes are far more evolved than they were back in early January, when the Ruff Record first came together.
I've been noticing, with these new vocal mixes, that the overall sound is quite good! I may be nit-picking about the guitars, but the rest of the mix, from the kick drum on up through to the vocals is all very clear and distinct.
But now that we're back into Daylight Saving Time, with money tight, and long weekends few & far between, I feel like I need an updated Ruff Record to keep up my morale.
The big push to finish the album started in late October, and I kept up the momentum, seven days a week, through November, December, and January, but then I hit the wall in February when I got that nasty rhinovirus, and since then I haven't been doing much during the work week.
Okay, anyway, time to get to it.
Talk to you later tonight.
Okay, Never Rains has now been updated to the pickup sim model, and everything's been automated.
The effect of the new presets on this song was to make the guitar sound... a bit more synthy, in parts... for some reason?
Loathe to change the EQ settings, I looked for ways to mitigate it with the delay, chorus, and distortion settings, and that helped, but during the piano solo, the synthiness of the guitar was still very pronounced.
I discovered that a simple tweak to one knob in Sakura fixed it... the knob that blends it's two string simulations.
Normally that's always at 100% resonant string, but automating that knob to let in the pluckiness of the other string simulator gave the short, choppy chords the muted flavor they needed to sound realistic.
This is the song where convolver is automated to kick on for the piano during it's solo, so... once again, it's automation to the rescue!
I'm sure now that this new guitar paradigm will see more fine-tuning over time, but it's working well enough right now to continue building the infrastructure into the rest of the songs.
Still I foresee that automation, of pickups, of distortion, of that string knob, and of other effects on other instruments... is going to make the work of compression a lot easier when that time comes.
I say that because right now, the mixes are already starting to sound, internet-presentable!
Okay, time for the shave, shower, and laundry. I'll talk to you later in the evening.
All clean & shiny, and the laundry's done and put away.
I spent the entire laundry cycle tweaking things with Never Rains, and am just finally exporting the new test WAV right now.
That song kicks so much ass now! So I'm looking forward to creating a new vocal FLAC with this newest version.
I'm pretty sure that rather than working on another, I'm just gonna be reveiwing the five that I updated this weekend; Reavis, Rains, Tuesday, Clue, and Other Friends.
Wish me luck, that I can find the spark to get a couple more done over the coming work week.
Okay, so two weekends ago, everything was tone balanced but the guitars and piano. I overhauled the guitar settings to get things more standardized and came up with a good static EQ for each guitar.
I also learned how to do automation, and used that to bring in secondary EQ on guitars, to duck out of the way of pianos that had automated convolver, and so forth.
Last weekend, I developed the pickup simulation model, which I wanted to be a patcher simulation, but that didn't work. So it became two EQs, both automated to maintain a net volume.
I deployed the new model into four test songs, and also standardized their Sakura settings for a default "natural" signal.
I reveiwed the four test songs late last Sunday night... music only... and they sounded good, at the time, but the heavy distortion in Other Friends, and Tuesday Siren made it difficult to differentiate the two pickups.
I rested my ears for the work week, and then on Friday night, I dropped those test WAVs into Audacity to hear how they sounded with vocals and discovered that Clue Phone and Other Friends sounded awful.
Yesterday (Saturday) experimentation revealed that the signal chain works better with Fast Dist first, then a more subtle Convolver impulse, with the automated pickup EQs being last... and I tweaked the freq profiles of the pickups to have less overlap.
With this newer model, I updated the four test songs; Reavis, Tuesday, Clue Phone, and Other Friends... and created vocal versions of all four. But it took me until 4AM to do that, so I didn't have time to review them.
TODAY, I applied the new model to Never Rains, and will create a vocal version of that, after I'm done with this entry... and then review all five songs.
LESSONS: 1) Fast Dist works best at the top of the chain, distorting the signal coming out of Sakura, with it's delay & chorus effects already acting like an amp simulator of sorts.
2) A subtle convolver then gives cabinet impulse to that "natural" signal that's come through delay, chorus, and distortion.
3) The two automated "pickup" EQs control the final coloring of the guitar's performance.
4) Automation of distortion, volume, and string blend throughout the song only help.
5) The mixes with vocals, are in general, far better today than they were at the creation of Ruff Record 1.0, over the holidays, and are starting to feel, "internet-presentable."
6) A Ruff Record 2.0 is therefore called for, in order to get a new global assessment of the album as a whole.
Meanwhile, winter transitions into spring, and the new year takes on it's new character... one where finances are much tighter, and the discipline of frugality is called for.
Luckily, I'm no stranger to living on a shoestring... I've done it in many previous chapters of my life, and I know the drill.
But, if frugality must be endured, then the timing could not be better!.. because the recording studio is fully rebuilt, and those vocal sessions were all paid for last summer.
In addition the apartment is fully equipped and appointed, I have my new shoes for the next year-and-a-half, and in general my life has fully stabilized after the big transitions of 2024.
So I think I'll be fine.
And with that said, another weekend has whizzed by, and March has ascended to it's cruising altitude.
Talk to you next Saturday.
°¦}
