55F and overcast today.

I made it to bed by 11PM last night, and slept pretty soundly. Made to the building by 7AM, only to find that Tom had shown up at 6AM... so he could act like I was lazy? I dunno.

I was told 7AM, the parent volunteers didn't start rolling until 8AM.

Either way, in four hours I filled out both the steps, and activity rings on my watch... which usually takes about six hours on a normal day.

Now I'm just disoriented.

--<>--

Miss Fortune's a day or two away from release, but I did spend some time over the past few nights trying something new with DeepSeek. I gave them a detailed description of Miss Fortune's rhythm structure, and it's chord structure, including the melody.

Not as a substitute for the "recording" but just to better understand the theory that underpins the song. Because... i'm a rote musician, and... what the hell is my music?

About Miss Fortune's beat, they said...

• Kick: 1, 2, 3+, 4+ (so kick accents the “ands” of 3 and 4)
  
  
• Snare: only beat 3 (one per measure, dry, solid)
  
  
• Bass/guitar: emphasizing beat 2 and the “and” of beat 3 (3+)
  

Result: Snare on 3 sits between the two guitar/bass accents (beat 2 and 3+).

That’s essentially a one-drop snare (Jamaican / reggae influence) mixed with a syncopated kick pattern that’s almost like a half-time funk or drum & bass skeleton. The “snare between accents” feel is reminiscent of:

Afrobeat (Tony Allen’s drumming often had snare on 3 with cross-rhythmic guitars)

Post-punk / dub (bands like PiL, The Slits, or even early Cure — snare as a spacer, not a backbeat)

Tricky / trip-hop (snare on 3 while bass plays off 2 and 4+)

Is it a “known type of beat”?
Yes, but not in 4/4 verse-chorus pop. In music theory terms, you’ve created a 3-over-4 feel without changing time signature. The listener’s ear wants to lock onto the kick’s pattern (which feels like a manipulated clave), but the snare on 3 acts as an anchor point that every other accent orbits around.

How did I do all that? I'm not familar with tricky/trip-hop, or even early Cure!

Below, a bit of the lengthy analysis about the verse chord progression...

The Progression

• M1 Eadd9 E - B - F#
  
• M2 G? (ambiguous) G - A# - F#/G
  
• M3 D5 or D D - A - A
  
• M4 F#m F# - A - C#
  

So the four-chord loop is: Eadd9 — G(something) — D — F#m

The M2 Mystery
M2 is the strangest chord here. Over a G bass, you have an A# (which is a #9, or a minor third enharmonically) and a vocal moving between F# (major 7th) and G (root).

This chord doesn't fit neatly into the key suggested by the other chords. Eadd9, D, and F#m all sit comfortably in D major (or B minor). E is the II chord, D is the I, F#m is the iii.

But G major—with an A# and an F#—is foreign to D major. The A# in particular is outside the key. It wants to pull somewhere. It creates tension.

The Overall Feel

The loop moves: Eadd9 (bright, open) → G(mysterious, dark) → D (grounded, resolved) → F#m (melancholy, inward).

The Eadd9 is the "hope" chord—open, suspended, bright. The G chord is the "dark skies of doom" chord—unexpected, tense, pulling against the key. The D chord is the "lovely afternoon"—a moment of solid ground. The F#m is the "long forgotten love"—minor, reflective, the memory fading.

And then it starts again. Hope, doom, ground, memory. Around and around.

About the bridge part, they said this...

The Arc of the Melody Over the Chords

First statement:

• "mis-fortune's gonna" — inside the doom chord, settled, almost comfortable
  
  
• "find me" — on the hope chord, but "me" introduces a seventh, a wobble
  
  
• "soon" — back on the doom chord, with the brightest note of the melody (A) as a major seventh, yearning against the darkness
  
  
• Silence. The seesaw plays.
  

Second statement:

• "mis-fortune's gonna" — over the floating D7sus4, with A#/Bb as the most dissonant note in the whole phrase. The unease is sharper now.
  
  
• "find me" — over the heavier doom chord (Bb/D), with A and G as brighter extensions above it. Light flickering in the dark.
  
  
• "soon" — on the hope chord, the root, fully resolved. For one beat, everything is okay.
  
  
• And then it's not. M8. Chaos. Climb back. The verse returns.
  

The melody is the same both times. The chords shift underneath it. The first "soon" is a question asked in the dark. The second "soon" is the answer given in the light—but the light can't hold. The song has to rewind. The misfortune will have to be faced again.

This is remarkable harmonic storytelling. The bridge is only eight bars long, but it contains an entire emotional journey.

At the song's end, I sing the misfortune part, with the same melody as it had in the bridge, but this time, over the verse chords.

I was always curious how this was even able to work!

DeepSeek's analysis:

The Transformation

Over the bridge, the melody is a cry into darkness. The notes fight the chords. "Soon" is a question that can't be answered. The music collapses.

Over the verse, the exact same melody is at home. The notes are color, not conflict. The flat fifth is bluesy grit, not doom. The ninth is openness, not wobble. "Soon" is a resolution, not a plea.

That's why, at the end of the song, when the bridge melody returns over the verse chords, it feels hopeful. The music hasn't changed the melody. It's changed the ground beneath it.

The narrator has been singing this same line the whole time. In the bridge, he's in the hole. In the verse, he's standing on something solid. The words are the same. The notes are the same. The chords decide whether he's drowning or breathing.

In the end, they said the genre would be "closest to, minimalism-inflected art rock." but with an afro adjacent one drop beat!

In other words... not *really* like anything else, anywhere.

We talked a little more about... how could I possibly have created something so unique, when to me it felt fairly straightforward.

The answer is in that fact that I only had the bass guitar to compose with, and it's a known phenomenon. Bass player composers focus on the root notes, whereas guitarists, and often pianists will focus on the best known chords for whatever genere they're working in.

Bass player composers kinda grow a song up from seeds, whereas a gutarist or pianist is more... building with legos?

Bass player composed songs can also wind up with odd rhythm structure... like the one-drop on the 3 in Miss Fortune.

But this is why my stuff tends to do well in Indonesia, Latin America, and other places you wouldn't expect... because they all tend to favor more nuanced rhythms.

They also listen more for emotion and the sense of a story unfolding.

Meanwhile the "band in a room" sound is very attractive to listeners in Ukraine, and other parts of the former Soviet Union... where the "underground" scene is still very strong.

So... using the #world hashtag is actually very apt for my stuff?

Reavis, however, did wind up doing pretty well in the US... who accounted for slightly over half the plays.

The verdict is that it's probably just as well that those old cassettes of mine sat in storage for 30 years, because it's taken that long for the global ear to get to this point where people can recognize features in it, that they like.

Not that my stuff was, "ahead of it's time," because it still doesn't sound like anything that's happening now! In other words, I didn't "predict" some now-popular form of music.

It's more like... my stuff was always just weird, but people are now more tolerant of weird than they used to be.

------------{=0=}------------

So, I think I'll do this kind of analysis again with each song, moving forward.

People like to either bitch about AI being useless, or act like it's the answer to everything, but I've found that it's exceptionally good at stuff like the theory queries above.

DeepSeek's never "heard" a D Major 7th chord, but it's well versed on the emotional characteristics we've assigned to it... and it knows all the other aspects of theory, like what chords belong to what key, and what rhythms are typical for what genre.

This is similar to how good AI is at interpreting a spread of Tarot cards, or a Birth Chart. And you may think both those things are just silliness, but they're still these systems with a lot of symbolism attached to the different components, and a lot of complexity arising out of the combinations of those components.

And that's all stuff an AI readily absorbs in it's training, and can report on as well as any expert... and certainly better and faster than any search engine/tutorial hunt.

I'm fascinated to learn that a four-measure chord progression I composed 30 years ago... never was arrived at by anybody else on the planet, in all that time!

And that's something only an AI could really verify.

Of course, you could say nobody arrived at it because it SUCKS!

And the AI can't say for sure that it doesn't suck.

But it can tell you what it is, and what it's doing.

And if that chord progression resonates in specific niche markets, AI can make an educated guess as to why.

And that's a lot more context than I ever used to have.

Between theory queries, and SoundCloud beta testing... this should be an enlightening year!

°¦}




Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos





._.

48F and sunny today. It was like summer the past week, in the high seventies to 80F, but now Alexa's telling me about a frost advisory for tomorrow.

Spring has really come along. I can see the green in the canopy from up here on 11. Everything's alive. Flowers and blossoms everywhere. Dandelions!



The Easter upload of Reavis Beta only got 125 plays in it's first 24 hours, and then flatlined to one play a day the rest of that week. So, over last weekend (the 18th & 19th) I reworked the mix.

I added waveshaper to the start of every track's chain for soft clipping to simulate analog circuitry. I added blood overdrive to the bass and the toms for even order harmonics (another analog effect), and I re-worked the guitar chain.

Sakura first, with no in-app effects, then waveshaper, the pickup EQs, then fast dist, chorus, delay, convolver and compressor. And it sounded way better this way, far less tinny and harsh.

The whole mix for Beta1 had felt thin, with to harsh of a high end.

The new mix, Beta2, sounded a lot better, as validated by the play numbers this past week.

Beta2 got around 125 plays on day one, then only 25 plays on day two, but on day three it got 150, day 4 got 210, and day 5 (yesterday) was 250.

The going total for the week at this moment, mid day 5, is 836, and if the trend continues, Beta2 will have broken one thousand plays by the one-week mark, this coming Monday morning.

These plays are coming from little pockets all around the globe, with several repeat plays. Last night I saw one person had played it seven times! Another five times. Many have played it two and three times.

The two biggest markets are consistently the US, and Indonesia, with the song also doing well all around the former Soviet Union.

A talent scout from Belarus provided this description, unprompted: "The production on this piece is an impressive display of complex syncopation and harmonic depth. From a technical perspective, the spectral separation between the intricate percussive layers and the shifting melodic foundations is exceptionally clean, ensuring the mix remains professional and engaging throughout the arrangement. The transient detail on the rhythmic elements provides a polished "snap" that anchors the track's evolving momentum, while the reverb mapping on the atmosphere adds a vast sense of "real" acoustic space. I also noticed the sophisticated use of spatial placement, which creates a constant sense of "realness" and immersive depth this kind of sonic environment serves as a perfect anchor for high-impact visual storytelling."

After a back and forth, she then added, "The "band in a room" approach really translates using the cabinet impulses and the SM58 gives the vocal a grounded, tactile quality that fits the "realness" editors are currently craving. It’s that calibration between raw performance and technical polish that makes a track sync-ready. The fact that you have 10 more tracks in that same workshop pipeline is great timing for our current scouting phase."

So that was some very valuable feedback! However, I stopped short of giving her my contact info, as I'm fairly certain the actual offer of "high-value brand and media placements," is probably a scam.

--<>--

All of this proves that SoundCloud's "first fans" algorithm, available with the Artist Pro account, actually works! It shows the song to listeners based on their interests and history, rather than on popularity, and then if it does well, it expands the exposure out to more fans... over a seven day period.

Then I think in the 2nd week if the track does well enough, the algorithm starts putting it on "buzz" playlists or something?

But the Beta1 --> Beta2 experiment on my end shows that the mix quality is also key. Beta2 has done much better, because it's more listenable.

And because I managed to crack the code, by incorporating waveshaper and blood overdrive, and by re-working the guitar chain... I'm ready to apply all that to Miss Fortune this weekend to get that beta-released, hopefully by late tomorrow night before bed!

I already spend some time on Wednesday and Thursday night getting everything wired up in Miss Fortune, so today will be about automating pickups, string blend, and distortion for the guitars.

°¦}




Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos





._.

59F and rainy today, heading into 20F tomorrow? Wha?

Okay, so Tuesday was payday and I paid the remaining bills.

I could see there was enough to make it to the next paycheck, but the problem is, that check hits a week before the 1st, yet rent and the car payment must come out of it.

I mentioned to Maria, our new temp supervisor (Mark is away) that I was available for any OT, and there was for Saturday (Yesterday), because the school was hosting a huge craft fair, and people were needed to do the take down after it was over.

So it was, that Yeserday (Saturday) I clocked in at 2PM and worked until 5:30PM. I then did all my errands; groceries, gas, etc, on the way home.

After getting settled in, around 7PM, Dylan called, and we ended up talking for several hours which was nice. He's doing well in his classes.

Then, late at night, I decided to review the mixes from the last 2 weeks and didn't even make it through Reavis, without thinking the guitar still sounded canny!

So, fairly drunk, I opened up Reavis in FL Studio and, by ear, tweaked the settings of the two pickup EQs.

I did them first in isolation, then together. I picked a section where neck is 70%, and bridge 30%, played it on loop and tweaked. Then I did the same with another section where the percentages were reversed.

I also tweaked the delay, chorus, and distortion... and put convolver back at the end of the chain, after the EQs.

The end result sounded much better to me, so I swapped that music into the AUP3 Vocal file and created a new test FLAC, which I then reviewed on repeat several times, thinking it sounded perfect.

But we'll see today what it sounds like in the iLouds.

Either it was a breakthrough, or just a drunken folly.

------------{=0=}------------

But yes, the game has changed, and this year I'll be sacrificing some free time to make sure the rent gets paid.

Maria has okayed me to do building checks ever other weekend, probably starting next weekend.

So, with the prep & travel time it's 3 hours away from home on both SAT & SUN... 2 hours on the clock each day; SAT @ time & a half, SUN @ double time.

That equates to 7 hours of normal pay, or roughly 154.00 more, every paycheck... and that's enough to make a difference.

This shouldn't slow down the ablum's progress too much, especially if I get back to putting in a few hours after work on weeknights... and I think I probably will find that motivation once the world starts springing back to life, and the weather stabilizes.

The rent here is actually a better deal than anywhere else, because baked into it are flat charges for both water and electric... and there's no natural gas here.

So I essentially have no untility bills to worry about.

Looking ahead; the AT&T bill will go down a bit after the smart phone's paid off this month, there will be a raise in August, and the car is paid off at the end of the year.

Also, the studio is built, and I've come a long way over that DAW learning curve, so the next album (as I so often say) will not take as long to produce.

Basically, last year, when I had extra time and money, I used them very effectively to optimize the flat and the studio, and to get Archeology to where it is now... where it's all about just fiddling with knobs.

So, I'm in a good position to start working some regular overtime... which was always inevitable.

------------{=0=}------------

5:23PM

Okay, so before I could review last night's mix, there was the matter of license plate renewal... the old plate sticker... to take care of.

My sticker expired at the end of February, but I never received a renewal notice in the mail, which contains a registration number and PIN that are necessary to do the renewal online.

Yesterday I dug through my glove box and found several old renewall notices from previous years, and luckily two of them had those REG & PIN numbers on them.

They also showed my address as being on Jackson Street, which explains why I never got the current renewall notice. I forgot to update my address with the secretary of state, back in 2024!

Mail was still forwarding in FEB of 25, when I got last year's notice, but forwarding has since ended.

I had updated my address with the voter registration department, thinking it would propagate to the DMV, but... nope!

At any rate, I got online and, with those REG & PIN numbers, was able to update the address, and pay for the new sticker... putting it on a credit card.

I then took a screenshot of the confirmation with my phone, so now, if I get pulled over, I can prove both that the plate's paid for, and that my address was updated.

So that was a huge relief to get that taken care of without a visit to the DMV in person.

--<>--

After that, I played the new version of Reavis over the iLouds, and... I'm gonna call this a breakthrough!

The room is back!

In past mixes, the room sound's been there, but I had to kinda listen for it.

In this mix, it just immediately tells the brain, "This is a band in a room!" There's no doubt. It couldn't be anything else.

And I think it's because I finally got the guitar right.

In this mix, it doesn't break the illusion, or struggle to fit in. You hear both the high twang of the strings, and the lows, and convolver's doing it's job where the brain now reads it correctly as an amped guitar as sounding through a cabinet.

That, with the prox effect on the vocals, the room verb in the drum samples, and the convolver on the bass sell the illusion so well, that when the cello comes in you immediately picture that the cellist is also in that room.

I did already save these new pickup EQ, Sakura, and Convolver settings last night, so the next step is to just re-propagate them to the others I've already done, to see how they translate.

Reavis *is* always easiest to get right, because it's mostly just the trio, and there's only some light distortion on the guitar.

------------{=0=}------------

6:44PM

Newest model works well with Never Rains.

Well enough that when I heard a questionable guitar passage, I realized it's patterns had never been strummed out!.. so I fixed that.

But I think it says something here... that the newest model is realistic enough to "call out" a part of the performance that was overly robotic (all notes hitting together simultaneously, and lasting the entirety of the beat with no gap at the end).

It's exporting now.

------------{=0=}------------

7:02PM

Tuesday Siren was easy! Just swapped in the new presets (and put convolver at the end of the chain), and it sounds better. No fuss.

Guitar 2's leads now have the grittier bite that's been eluding me.

We've had intermittent rain, thunder, and lightning over tonight's session.

At the moment things are calm out there, as the sun sets, with city lights reflecting in the wet pavement.

But Alexa tells me we have a winter weather advisory that goes into effect at 1AM, including overnight snow!

------------{=0=}------------

7:23

I forgot to mention that, over this past work week I *did* get Suburbs updated to the pickup sim model and automated.

So Burbs was just now updated again to this latest version.

I'm calling this the ZZZ version, with the presets having been saved last night as; ZZZ-G1-natural.Sakura, ZZZ-cab-T-conv.fst, ZZZ-PICKUP-NECK.fst, and ZZZ-PICKUP-BRIDGE.fst.

Sounded excellent!

So far I haven't made a single change to the Sakura settings (including delay and chorus) or the pickup EQs, or Convolver. I also haven't had to change the exising distortion settings in any of the songs yet.

Engaging beer mode as it exports. Clue Phone's next!

------------{=0=}------------

8:14PM

Clue Phone's always the most difficult... But this is definitely the best it's sounded yet!

I had to tweak the automation, changing 80/20 Bridge/Neck splits to 70/30 across the board, and changing other splits.

Also upped the speed and level of the chorus, as this song requires, and then added some distortion automation for the Zooms parts, to give them more bite.

As I said this is the best mix yet, but if there is any canniness to it, it's gonna be a byprodut of the chorus. So in the future I may automate the chorus effect.

So, where are we at?.. Reavis, Rains, Tuesday, Suburbs, and Clue Phone?

Okay, so now it's on to Other Friends, and I'll be caught up!

------------{=0=}------------

8:41PM

Okay, Other Friends is updated!

This is the only one where I needed to tweak the Sakura string settings just a bit... turning up the, "overdrive" knob for better bite, and tweaking the envelope decay to add a touch of brightness to compensate for the overdrive's slight boxy side effect.

Also tweaked the string blend just a touch.

This is the song where the guitars are always on the verge of sounding like an organ if the settings aren't exactly perfect. But I'm gonna say the ZZZ version is the best yet, and again... future fixes are likely with automation, perhaps to that string blend knob.

--<>--

With our array of six test songs now updated to the ZZZ model, I'd say I'm much closer to the final guitar sounds.

In general, the lows are less muddy, allowing me to bring the neck and bridge pickups closer together in volume without adding any tin or boxiness. This gives the guitar more weight, while maintaining clarity, and it opens up space in higher frequencies (and very low) for orchestrals to breathe.

I'm learning that delay, chorus, and the "mix" level of the distortion all have their effect on canniness of the guitar sound... not just the string sim, and the pickup EQs.

I've also learned, between last weekend and now, that distortion first works best, and it's settings shoule leave the pre and post volumes essentially at 100%, with threshold being the main determiner of distortion, and "mix" being the best moderator of that.

In other words, it's more effective to crank the thresh, and use mix to dial it back, than it is to crank mix, and dial back on thresh.

And then I've also learned that Convolver does work better at the end... if it's reigned in. A little goes a long way. And Cab Model T is a bit better than the previous Model S.

Perhaps the final lesson i've been learning lately is that you can't trust things in isolation... a guitar that sounds beautiful in the mix, can sound odd in isolation.

But this is also true for the music as a whole, in the context of the vocals.

Okay. Late session begins in 90 minutes or so!

Talk to you then.

------------{=0=}------------

11:40PM

I pasted Never Rains into the AUP3 and it sounded horrible! I was very confused! It took a while for me to realize that I'd grabbed a WAV from the wrong folder... an old folder from before Hallowenwek!

But then I also realized I'd saved all today's new mixes to a different wrong foler!

So now I'm in the process of correcting that, but it's slow going, as it takes so long to export.

This is me being scatterbrained, trying to cram a weekend's work into a single night!

It's gonna be a couple hours before I have my new vocal FLACs to review in the headphones, so may as well wrap this up, for our Singular Sunday.

------------{=0=}------------

TRANSITIONAL NATURE OF LATE MARCH

Okay, so regular overtime became a reality yesterday, and there's a new routine I'm gonna have to adjust to, doing building checks every other weekend... likely starting next weekend.

It'll take time to adapt to that, and to the rhythm of the paychecks, with a little padding on them.

This coming week is gonna be fairly crazy too. Weatherwise, the first three days will be back to winter, with St. Patrick's Day on Tuesday being the coldest, with a high of only 20F, and a low of six!

Tom's also on vacation this week, so it'll be up to me to take care of the pool, and keep everything within bounds until his return.

The equinox arrives on Friday, by which time it'll have bounced back to 60F as the high.

In the following week, I'm supposed to take a class on pool maintenance and pass an exam, so that's gonna be a little stressful.

And sometime soon, I'll need to file my income taxes... which could result in some kind of small tax return, so that'll be a perk.

But April and May signal the end of the school year, which always brings with it a bunch of crazy events that require even more overtime.

And the school's going through some big renovations over the summer, so there will be a lot of scrambling to prepare for that over April and May as well.

So, the near future's gonna be kinda crazy, with me also struggling to get the Archeology guitars under control, before moving on to the final stages of the mix.

But, if I recall, last March, April, and May were similarly insane, which is why the summer of vocals did not start until Late May.

So this is all par for the course.

I'll talk to you next weekend!

°¦}




Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos





._.

41F and cloudy, with a chance of rain, on this final day of Standard Time.

I didn't do much with the mixes over the work week. Just rested my ears and then last night I took the four new test WAVs with the pickup simulation models and dropped them into Audacity with the vocals & sound effects for the four songs; Reavis, Tuesday, Clue Phone, and Other Friends.

This was a headphone test to see how these new mixes sounded in the full context.

While Reavis, and Tuesday sounded just fine, Clue Phone sounded canny and awful, and Other Friends wasn't much better.

Same pickups, same convolver, the only difference was chorus (a Sakura effect), and Fast Dist.

In general, the distiortion just wasn't biting well, and... I couldn't explain exactly why Clue Phone sounded so terrible.

------------{=0=}------------

So today I loded up Clue Phone in FL, monitoring with the iLouds, and just started messing around with... everything!... Sakura settings, pickup EQs, distortion, Convolver... making everything worse, then starting over from the saved defaults... several times in a row!

I ruled out Sakura as the problem... yes some slight tweaks did help, but for the most part it was fine.

I also ruled out the pickup EQ settings as a problem. Again, yes, I did tweak things slightly... to get more low end on the neck EQ... and a cut in the boxy range of the high EQ... very narrow Q cut.

The thing that helped most was putting Fast Dist first in the signal chain, followed by Convolver, before the signal hit the pickup EQs.

That's counterintuitive to how the signal would flow in a real situation, but in this simulated environment it seems better to EQ the distorted signal, than to distort the EQed signal!

Convolver also adds it's own character to the EQ, obviously, because that's what a cabinet impulse is for... so it also made more sense to EQ the impulse, than to impulse the EQ.

Basically, when convolver is eliminated and it's just; Sakura --> Dist --> Pickups... that guitar sound is good and has good distortion. But when Convolver is introduced... no matter where it appears in the chain... *that's* what adding the boxy honky character.

I did run through all the cab models available from A to T. I had been using Model S, and found that Model T was slightly better, but the real fix was to just keep the DRY signal around 95%, and only crank the WET to about 50%.

This way the impulse is there, but it's not taking over... and because it comes before the pickup EQs, they can help to blend that impulse into the overall guitar sound.

--<>--

I'm not gonna say this is the conclusive, silver bullet answer, however.

All I can say right now is that for Clue Phone, these changes seem to have improved the guitar sound.

I saved the modified settings for Sakura, Convolver, and the pickups, for possible global use, and then exported a new test WAV.

I will next drop this newest WAV into the vocal version and see if it works better than the previous version.

Then the next test will be to apply this newer model (rearranged signal chain, modified presets) to my other three test songs; Other friends, Reavis, and Tuesday... to see if the improvement translates to these other environments.

Okay, gotta take a walk for smokes soon, and get back to work.

Talk to you later.

------------{=0=}------------

6:30PM

It's 6:30, but I'm treating it like 7:30PM. Analog clocks were advanced and i've just cracked the first beer.

The walk for smokes was chilly because of the wind. Happy to see the old Huntoon House, a historic little hotel building from the 1880s is being renovated.

According to the banner on the construction fence, it's going to be all studio apartments! Very interesting!

I put the new WAV of Clue Phone into Audacity and it does sound markedly better.

Monitoring in the iLouds, I was struck by how well the vocals still cut through the mix.

I exported that version as a test FLAC and now it's on to Other Friends, in FL.

------------{=0=}------------

7:26PM

Exporting Other Friends from FL as a WAV right now, after applying today's new model to the guitar signal chain.

This does sound a lot better than last weeks! The distortion is much better, and the sound is much more clear.

With the newly tweaked pickup EQs, I noticed a big difference between neck and bridge... such that I had to modify the automations to not be so drastic... taming 90/10 splits to 30/70, etc.

Recall that last week I couldn't hear much difference between neck and bridge in songs with heavy distortion... right?

Today I can, but the tweaks to the pickup EQs weren't very drastic, so a lot of the new clarity is due to the change in the signal chain... putting the EQs last.

Time to drop this new test WAV of the music into Audacity.

------------{=0=}------------

8:40PM

Okay, the new guitar model works way better in Other Friends. Sounds great with the vocals!.. and that test FLAC is exporting now.

I took some time to fix the AI voice at the end, who cuts off the distorted final chord to say, "I ordered you some aloe for that sick burn."

Back in the winter, I got an AI to say it online, but to avoid paying for a download of the sound, I just played it over the iLouds, and recorded it with my phone. The result was a very bad take, with tons of bad room verb, from the apartment.

Since then, I'd learned that I can get Alexa to say phrases for me (for free), so I moved the echo dot to over by the bed, and hung it from a mike stand with a blanket behind it.

I also miked it with the SM58, as plugged into the input of the MOTU.

After some tests for ideal mike placement, I got a *much* better take of Alexa herself, saying, "I ordered you some aloe for that sick burn."

I actually recorded four takes, and then pasted together the best, "I ordered you," with the best, "Aloe for that sick burn."

I then added a bit of space betwen sick and burn, cuz she tends to want to say it like, "sickburn."

A little noise reduction, and the clip was ready to go into the song's AUP3, where it was stereo doubled with a bit of lead/lag from left to right, and a light EQ.

The result is a WAY better ending for the song!

--<>--

Okay, so next I'll need to try Tuesday, and then Reavis, with today's modified guitar signal model... but it is getting close to 9PM... which means it's really getting close to 10PM, with the time change closing in on us.

And the Saturday night phone call will likely happen soon.

So I'll talk to you again after the late session, and we'll see how far I got.

°¦}




Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos





._.

31F and overcast today.

Over the week, the experiments with the pickup simulator, with Reavis as my guinea pig, had mixed results... or should I say... failed to have mixed results?... because mixing was the big issue.

Creating two PQ2 modules, one to simulate a neck pickup, and the other a bridge pickup, actually worked great! We used the humbucker pickups of a Les Paul as our guide for the frequency responses, and when running the signal through both, the sound was generally fuller and more realistic than my single earballed PQ2 profile had been.

Turning up the volume of one pickup, and turning down the other to compensate also sounded good! Turn up the bridge pickup, and tweak the neck down, and it sounded brighter and closer to the bridge... and vise versa.

The problem was, having these modules inside patcher, there was no way to automate the volume faders.

And then I got lost for a few days down a rabbit hole of how to create a crossfade controller inside patcher that would control them both together, in such a way that as you turned up one, the other turned down, maintaining a consistent total volume... and be able to automate that theoretical control knob.

However this proved to be a huge waste of time, due to what I call, "UI Drift."

UI Drift is when the menus in front of me, and all their labels, and the controls for the different modules, and the things you are allowed to do with them... are completely different from what DeepSeek is seeing in it's online searches... which are a mash-up of different tutorials from different time periods talking about a UI that changes over time, as newer versions of FL are released or updated.

And I probably don't have the most up to date version of FL Stuidio either... and don't want to try and update it, in the middle of recording an album, for fear of losing some feature or other.

But we're also trying to do something that is not a standard thing to do, and thus does not have a specific tutorial for it anywhere to be easily found. In other words, there's no, "How To Create A Crossfade Controller For Two Pickup Simulators in Patcher!"

So, i'm left with a bunch of instructions from DeepSeek that I can't execute, like "right click on Fruity Formula Controller, go to 'outputs', and select, 'add two'."

Well it doesn't let me do that!

And slowly it all descends into insanity, trying ten different solutions that all spiral into unworkable nonsense.

--<>--

So after I got up today, I just got rid of patcher completely, and have been experimenting with just the neck and bridge PQ2s directly in the signal chain. So... Sakura---> neck EQ---> bridge EQ---> Fast Dist---> Convolver cabinet sim.

The two EQs basically act like a single EQ, but with more sliders... as i'd been experimenting with last week for the piano. And then I can automate the volumes of the two to emphasise one profile over the other.

But I can't (or don't know how to) connect the automations such that when one goes up the other goes down, and vise versa. It's something I just have to do manually.

In theory: start with both EQs at 50%. Then automate the bridge EQ to get louder in different parts where the guitarist would be plaing closer to the bridge. Then automate the neck EQ to get quieter where the other automation's getting louder. Then go back and tweak the neck EQ to be louder in it's different parts, and adjust the bridge EQ to be quieter... trying, manually, to keep the sum of both volumes the same.

--<>--

I haven't started in on that task yet, because I've been ear-testing the two pickup EQs. And part of that was turning them off, going back to Sakura, and adjusting the Sakura settings to have a "natural" neutral default sound.

Having done that, when I turned on the neck and bridge EQs, it does make a big difference to the sound, as two pickups would do, and it does sound very realistic.

So if the automation side of this experiment goes well for Reavis, then I'll try to recreate it in, say, Never Rains... same "natural" sakura settings, same pickup EQ settings, same convolver... the only unique settings being with Fast Dist.

If this seems to work, then I may have worked out a global guitar sound for the whole album, where the only real difference from song to song is in the level of distortion... and the way the two pickups get emphasized as the songs play out.

Okay, back to it!

Talk to you later.

------------{=0=}------------

7:00PM

Okay, I've gotten the first half of Reavis automated for the two pickups, and i'm getting my head around what this will entail.

My first thought was to do one song-length automation for each pickup.

But I quickly realized it would go faster to break automation up into clips, for Verse A, Verse B, Bridge A, etc.... because it's always the same for those sections, so why re-do it every time?

Then I discovered that automation clips don't behave *exactly* like instrument patterns, because you can't just clone one, alter it, re-name it, and slap it into the timeline, like with an instrument pattern.

If you clone an automation clip, that clone will not work in the timeline.

So i'm doing it in clips, but I have to go back to the volume control in the mixer for the neck EQ, and the bridge EQ, and select "create automation clip" each time I want to make a new clip.

And that's kind of annoying, because then I have to re-color-code, each new clip.

--<>--

However, adjusting the automations is pretty straightforward.

The mixer knobs are at 50% by default, so each new clip starts with everything at 50%.

So I create them in tandem, one for neck, one for bridge, paste them into the timeline, and then... say, for the verse, make bridge slide up to 80% for most of it... which is easy to see up in the top left corner (it tells you the percentage you're marking).

Then in the neck clip, just below it, at the same measure, I slide it down to 20%.

It's fairly easy to create two clips in tandem, and then split the pickups; 50/50, 70/30, 80/20, as the song goes along.

And the audible result is marvelous! You hear the guitarist moving his strum down lower, and up higher in the different parts! It gives the guitar a lot more character! And yet that main volume fader in the mixer never drops or spikes! the overall volume stays constant!

--<>--

So, this is a great proof of concept, building on the idea from last weekend about using two PQ2 modules and automation to create dynamic EQ.

Last weekend there was a static PQ2 on the guitar to shape it's general tone, and a secondary to come in and "help" in places where the orchestration is dense.

This weekend, that idea's evolved into two dynamic EQs, modeled after the freq response of real neck and bridge pickups.

So this is the way to go, but the workflow has to be streamlined or this will take forever!

--<>--

The workflow should be to create all the clips first... with all of them just sitting at 50% from start to finish. So create BR V-A, NK V-A, BR BRD-A, NI BRD-A, BR INTLD-A, etc...for all the different sections of the song... and past that all into the timeline at the right places.

Then, go through and change the volume relationships. Everytime I make an adjustment to BR V-A, it changes that for every instance of BR V-A in the song, and soforth.

--<>--

Okay, so for now I'm still working through Reavis and may make a few more discoveries about the process as I go.

But when this is done, maybe I'll try Clue Phone next, as that's one where I had a lot of trouble with the guitar sound. If I can get this same model to work on Clue Phone, with it's hypnotic intro licks, and harder verse licks, then I'll try, Suburbs next... with it's heavy guitar throughout, and then, Other Friends, with it's punk frenzy throughout.

If the PicSim model works for all four, then it should work for every song.

Of course, as always, these PicSim tests are new files, with the older files still there to fall back to if this experiment goes sideways.

--<>--

This does add a lot of time to the tone-shaping phase of the project, and puts the compression phase further off into the future... but a realistic, consistent guitar sound for all 12 songs is worth the time and effort... especially if it makes the guitarist sound more human in the process... adding neck movement to velocities, strums, and slides.

Okay, back to it.

Talk to you later tonight.

------------{=0=}------------

1:45AM

Okay!.. the Clue Phone experiment went extremly well!

First a clarification: I said above that the distortion would be the only thing different in a global PicSim model, but actually, delay and chorus would also differ from song to song.

Delay and chorus are done in Sakura so... even while the "natural" settings for string sounds would be the same in every song, those two effects would vary.

Second, a technical discovery: If I select the block of measures I want to do automation for first (the verse block, or the chorus block, etc) however many or few measures that is, then when I go to "create new automation clip" it creates a clip of that exact length, which is very helpful, especially doing bridge and neck pickup clips in tandem.

--<>--

That said, the sound I'd curated for the Clue Phone guitar earlier this month, which felt hard won... was scrapped and replaced with the "natural" Sakura settings, and the same two pickup EQ profiles from Reavis, and instantly it sounded better, and more realistic, even before automation.

So this pickup simulation model is definitely the way to go!

But my God, after the automation of the pickups... it's SPOOKY how much this sounds like Brian playing!

I know I said that a few weeks back, but this is yet another level!

To really dial in the performance, I also automated the distortion's, THRESHOLD knob, just to start low in the intro at 10%... kick it up to 20% for the verses... and then another boost to 30% for a part of the bridge phase I call, the "zooms".

The zoom part is where he hits a low chord strike, followed by a high chord strike that slides down... into the next low chord strike... over and over four eight measures "BLOMP!.. ZAaaarm... BLOMP!.. ZAaaarm... BLOMP!.. ZAaaarm..."

The distiortion kicks up for these 8 measures, and meanwhiule the Blomps are all neck pickup, with the Zarms all bridge. It's really sensational!

--<>--

So... I began February kinda floundering, not sure how to tackle the tone balancing phase, with one big problem being the inconsistent guitar sounds from song to song, some sounding better than others, but none sounding as realistic as I wanted.

That lead to a re-vamping of the guitar sounds, hybrizing the best models together, for a more consistent guitar sound, but there was still this issue of reconciling the piano and some other orchestrals with the guitars in different places, in different songs.

--<>--

What's dawning on me now is that, for the tone balancing of this album, The Room is the north star, and Simulation takes precedence over "space carving" when it comes to complex problems, like the guitar, and piano.

Space carving is great for the rhythm section, and most of the orchestral, but at the end of the day, this is a band in a room, and so when push comes to shove, with the guitars... space carving is no longer the answer.

The answer is to double down on the guitar's reality, by simulating the pickups that are capturing the string sounds... one with more depth and body, one with more pluck and high end clarity... and maintianing a blend of the two.

This tells the ear and the brain that it's a real guitar, which instantly puts it into the room context.

And then we hear it always dodging either the mud, or the tin, by shifting between neck and bridge... without ever losing it's funamental character.

--<>--

Hopefully tomorrow I'll get two more experiments, Suburbs, and Friends, under my belt to solidify this new model, but I think the pickup simulator was a game changing inspiration, for this album!

I think, after the compression phase, when this is all said and done, this room sound is going to be something truly novel!

It's gonna be a perfect hybrid of the old school session recordings of the 1950s, with the better isolation and compression of the 1960s, with the stereo and distortion of the 1970s... creating a production sound that never truly was!

--<>--

Okay, with that, it's time to listen through my two experiments and wind on down for bed.

March bills await me when I wake up, as the first matter of business!

Talk to you after I'm back from the Sunday errands.

°¦}




Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos





._.

26F with a chance of snow overnight.

I didn't get much done over the week. I tried tackling the piano in a few songs and came up with a general PQ2 setting, but then I got hung up in the instrumental interlude of Never Rains, where there's a piano solo... getting very frustrated that I could not get the piano out of the mud.

While it's doing it's solo, the guitar is going, as well as a horn, a trumpet, and an occasional cello... and there just was not enough PQ2 slots to do all the notching that would be required to truly carve space for everybody.

This was exacerbated by the fact that many of them want to resonate at the same spots.

I tried cutting the trumpet, but felt like that wasn't a solution or a sacrifice I wanted to make.

I tried adding delay to the piano, but it didn't help. You couldn't hear it in all the noise.

I kinda gave up for a couple days, just stressing about how maybe I'd finally been bested! Maybe I just wasn't clever enough to get this done right!

But a consultation with DeepSeek offered some hope.

They suggested that a second instance of PQ2 is an easy way to, essentially, create more slots for carving. Also, such a second EQ could be automated to turn on only in parts where needed, like the interlude.

Lastly, it confirmed that a convovler setting for the piano might help to beef it up a bit.

But this all felt like it required too much mental focus and concentration to try and tackle after work when, even with a second wind after a decompression... I just don't have the bandwidth left for such focus... after a long day at work.

Gain balancing? Sure. Tweaking the patterns? Sure. Working multiple instances of PQ2 like a big jigsaw puzzle, and learning how to automate?.. Sorry, no! It'd have to wait for Saturday.

------------{=0=}------------

TODAY (SO FAR)

I slept in later than I wanted, but finally got going with Never Rains at 5PM, monitoring with the iLouds.

The first thing I did was to add convolver to the piano channel, and I found a good, "living room" impulse that did help to beef it up and make it feel more present in the mix.

I then added 2nd instances of PQ2 to the guitar, and the horn, and subtracted notches in them for the freqs where the piano needed room.

The result sounded much better... the piano solo sounded like a solo. But that 2nd PQ2 on the guitar really stole all it's energy in the normal parts of the song... so it had to be animated to turn on only for the solo... on at measure 84, off again at measure 107.

--<>--

What followed was a 2-hour comedy of errors as I struggled to wrap my brain around how to program an automation script.

Consulting with DeepSeek, and later, Gemini, did not help! Their instructions were clear as mud! I felt I was doing what was required, but nothing was happening when I played the song.

In desperation, I went to YouTube in search of a tutorial, and it was in the first minute of that video that it suddenly clicked.

What Gemini & DeepSeek had failed to mention was that FL treats an automation script like a playlist pattern... it's a visual pattern you place into the song, at the desired location, and then you can edit it there, to turn on, or fade in, then fade back out, or turn back off... etc.

And automation scripts appear in their own list on a side panel, just like instrument patterns do.

--<>--

So, finally!.. I created an automation script for the volume knob of the guitar's 2nd PQ2. By default it was at zero, and then the script begins at measure 84, turning it up to 100%... introducing those subtractive notches that allow the piano to breathe.

Over the run of the interlude, the script has the G2 PQ2 B volume go down to 50% in a few spots where the guitar pattern changes... to give the guitar a bit more presence, while still preserving the subtractive notching... and then finally it goes back to 0% at measure 107, and stays off the rest of the song.

This was a huge breakthrough.

And then, emboldened by that, I created a 2nd automation script for the piano's convolver effect.

Again, default volume for that convolver is zero, but it fades up to 100% as the piano solo begins, and stays there until measure 107, then fades back down to zero.

This improved the solo even more! The piano, which in other spots is only there to add a bit of accent, suddenly takes center stage, with a room impulse, as the guitar thins out a bit to let it shine... and then everything goes back to normal when the solo is over!

--<>--

So, I'm considering this yet another, "proof of concept," meaning that I just proved to myself that the tone balancing of all these songs is within my grasp, now that I understand how to automate 2nd instances of PQ2, and other effects like convolver, for specific passages of each song!

That's great news!.. but it also means the tone-balancing phase of the mix is not done, and will take more time to complete!

And that's sad, because I really wanted to have moved on to compression by today.

Okay... back to it! I'll talk to you later.

------------{=0=}------------

1:25AM

Okay, so I got Never Rains all EQed and automated as best I could and then exported the mix as a test WAV to review later.

After that was the Saturday night phone call with Tim.

And after that, I got to work on, Closer To You, which features piano in various places prominently, and also has some denser orchestral moments... and I did the same kind of work, on a slightly larger scale... automating 2nd EQs for various instruments, as well as both convolver and Delay3 effects on the piano.

That was just finished and now it's exporting to a test WAV.

Next up will be Clue Phone, which has piano in one passage, where the music swells to an apex... which were also very muddy.

I'll do the same work on that, in the very-late session, and then settle in to review test wavs in headphones for a bit before bed.

--<>--

Last week I saved test waves for all the, orchestral-sans-piano mixes, so this weekend is about replacing those which have piano, with these new automated mixes... and taking stock of the whole album... musically.

I think the only other two songs with piano are Archeology, and Miss Fortune, so I should be able to get those going tomorrow.

But between last weekend, with revamped orchestral PQ2, and revamped guitar sounds... and this weekend... fitting the piano in with automated effects to many different players... these are big changes to the mix.

Careful review, both casually in headphones, and more actively in the ilouds doing near-field gain balancing, is the logical next step to familiarize myself with this new sound and determine what, in terms of tone, still needs to be tweaked, and how.

But I'm not gonna get *too* anal about tone balancing, as I can already predict that when compression begins... that's gonna change both the gain and tone balances.

--<>--

So, really... what I've been doing lately is just breaking the ice with a lot of different techniques that are necessary for mixing... from gain balancing, which is easy enough, to tone balancing...

Which began with a fear of a "spectral analyzer" plugin that doesn't exist... continued with deeper dives into the guitar's signal chain... and, thanks to the piano, has now lead to breaking the ice with automation.

So, compression is going to be just another technique I need to break the ice with, and add to, these 2026 FNMX FLP files... which are becoming so much more sophisticated than the 2025 FLPs.

--<>--

Okay, that's all i've got to say for my Saturday.

There's another hour or two tonight, and then tomorrow is another day.

Talk to you then.

°¦}




Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos





._.

62F and sunny out there today!

I was up by 2PM... early for me on a weekend... and after the coffee was brewed, I went out for a photo shoot to get better pics for the pokestops nearby to the building, downtown here.

But while doing so, I realized most of them would take better photos in the spring, when trees have flowers and fountains are working, rather than being shut off and capped with orange cones.

So I went to the parking garage, got my car, and made a quick run for smokes... and now I'm back home.

--<>--

Last night I did finish the PQ2 for all 12 songs... for all but the pianos and guitars.

And I did get all the guitar data and Sakura screenshots from all 12 songs, copied into a new folder.

--<>--

I've been flipping through the screenshots, to see which knobs move the most, and to try and find some commonality with the good sounds (Suburbs, Spell, Miss Fortune) and the others, but... no clear pattern is emerging.

This tells me Sakura is not the whole story, when it comes to a good guitar sound.

However, as far as Sakura goes, the secret is in the, HI CUT section, which features three tone-shaping knobs; CUTOFF, RESONANCE, OVERDRIVE. Those are the knobs that move the most, from one preset to another, follwed by the other three HI CUT knobs; ATTACK, DECAY, SUSTAIN.

An of those latter three, it's DECAY that moves the most.

I did, however see that Clue Phone *does* have the MIX knob for the delay cranked to 100%, while all other songs have it more at 20%, so that confirms what my ears were telling me, that the excessive delay is making the strings sound prickly and harsh.

And, Closer To You's delay bank was turned OFF for it's Guitar 1, again, heard in the review.

--<>--

So, I guess it'll be a day of trial and error, with the guitar sounds... with Sakura, PQ2, Fast Dist, and Convolver.

But I'm armed with a folder full of saved presets for all of those parameters, meaning I'm free to go crazy with the knobs, because I can always revert back, if I get lost.

I think I'll start with Clue Phone, the worst sounding guitar... and I'm gonna load in all the presets from Spell I'm Under, as the starting point.

Okay! it's now 4:25PM, and I'm gonna get to it!

Talk to you later!

------------{=0=}------------

6:35PM

Okay!.. two hours later and I seem to have made the breakthrough with Clue Phone!

I started by bringing in the, Spell I'm Under, Gutar 2 settings for the whole chain.

It immediately sounded better, but it wasn't the, "Clue Phone" guitar yet.

--<>--

I should take a sidebar here to note that this is a reprodution of my brother Brian's guitar for this song, which he composed back in 1992 or so, and Bri had a very unique sound, and style... as did Clue Phone itself.

[Brian is alive and well, but he lives an hour away and for several other logistical reasons, it's not possible for him to collaborate on this project]

His intro riff, which reappears after the bridge, before the interlude, and again at the song's outro is very delecate and ethereal, and yet his chord strikes and other licks during the verses and the bridge (there is no true chorus in this song) hit with a lot of depth and grit.

So the same guitar sound has to do all things... with feedback grit and low response for the harder parts, but high response and relative smoothness in the delicate parts, which also have to strum just right... in a sort of, heavenly harp kind of way.

--<>--

The first thing I did was turn off the paremetric EQ, and immediately the sound felt dull and boxy, like bare wood with no varnish. That's when I realized how important PQ2 really is for these guitars. So I set it to zero and started over EQing it from scratch, which went well.

The key there was to allow in some lower lows, with a notch at 200Hz for the bass, and then another dip in the more boxy zone of 600Hz or therabouts, with a high Q, and then a boost to the rest with a wide Q.

The signal input to Fast Dist was pushed up, but the threshold was pushed down, allowing grit for high velocity strikes, but leaving lower velocity chords cleaner.

The delay, of course was toned way down, but the Chorus was tweaked to go faster... not too fast, but enough to give an ethereal thickness to the sound.

In Convolver, turning up the "self convolve" knob also helped, but then I also turned down the, WET, to pull back on the overall cabinet impulse.

--<>--

After all that the sound was much better, but it still wasn't there. The chords in both the delicate, and the harder parts, seemed to be choking off too quickly. Not enough sustain, or decay somewhere in the chain.

The answer was in two places I've rarely dared to touch, on the Sakura UI... the main string sound, and the main envelope shape.

This was where I began wildly twisting knobs... getting lost... reloading the preset, and trying again.

The answer was in very sublte tweaks to the damping of the strings (easing off it) and lengthening the decay of the main envelope.

--<>--

With a few final tweaks to everything in the chain... and some edits to the patterns (i'm forever editing these patterns to nail down Brian's exact performance style) I arrived at a truly amazing sound that more than does Bri's old guitar line justice... it channels it from the past!

The guitar sound went from a choppy, prickly, honky mess to... well now it sounds like Brian is in session, with his old guitar and effects pedals, being magically perfectly recorded, and right on top of his game!

So, in just a couple hours I've learned a lot!

And now I'm certain I can get the rest of the guitars to be exactly how they should be.

--<>--

After Guitars and Piano are EQed, then there will need to be another gain-staging pass.

And after that, if needs be... I'll go into those new PQ2s and do whatever additional notching may be necessary. All the new PQ2 settings leave room for that, but it may be something I do on a song-by-song basis.

For example, no need to notch a space in the guitar's spectrum for the trumpet, in a song that has no trumpet! That sort of thing.

This means, in the end, every song will have a customized EQ profile. All the PQ2s will have the same overall shape from song to song, but there will be unique notching in each song, depending on what the "traffic conditions" are.

--<>--

I also, tonight, took down all the winter/valentine decorations... snowflakes, lights, etc, and put them away. I hung my big shamrock in the window.

So now the winter/holiday vibe in the flat is a memory, and I begin looking forward to spring.

Okay! It's now only 7PM, so I guess, on to Other Friends, the next most problematic guitar song!

Talk to you later in the evening!

------------{=0=}------------

10:45PM

Okay, we're at the cusp of the late session here.

I watered the ZZ plant, and dusted off it's leaves (we get a lot of dust up here on 11, from the dirty downtown below), and then tackled Other Friends, in the iLouds, while there was still time.

I replaced the Sakura settings only, with those of, Bed In The Suburbs Guitar 2, and went from there.

As with, Clue Phone, there was a challenge here to reproduce the performance of my other brother, Tim, for this punk-pop anthem.

The Suburbs G2 was a good start, but it was too dark and smokey, but I brightened it up, while mainaining a good bottom. It didn't take as long as Clue Phone, because... punk pop!

But the final result, over the loud monitors was a 100% improvement! As with Clue Phone, it now channels the energy of Tim, circa 1989, at the peak of his career as the lead guitarist for Publik Nuisance, our original, teenage band.

--<>--

After Other Friends, I had to turn off the iLouds and go to the headphones, as I booted up Reavis, once again, to tackle those guitars.

This was a case of... they're nearly good enough, so just work with what's there.

It was a long fight, over very subtle ground, if that makes sense.

Reavis is a strange beast. It grooves and has a kind of bosa nova swing to it, but the guitars are kinda proto-punk... with a bit more grit and attitude than one might expect.

I composed these guitars myself, two years ago, but I was inspired by what Brian or Tim might've played, and so it had to walk a tightrope between Tim's rebellion, Brian's subtle invention, the song's classy, post-war era groove, and the injection of youth a'la late 1980s, early 1990s.

It took many sublte tweaks to every part of the signal chain to get the right sound, and I did go in and edit the patterns, to breathe a bit more humanity into the peformance in different parts.

But then I got all bogged down with the Cello, because it now sounded a bit dull against this shining new guitar sound, so I boosted the mid-high a bit on it, and then found myself going into those patterns to edit the performance.

Many parts were transposed down an octave... because they were too safely high for a Cello... or in parts where it's octave was fine, I threw in octave drops to low notes here and there... like, instead of the E4 this time... it's the E3! Hahah!

This is because the overall PQ2 of the cello allows it to really cut at the low end, without any mud or conflict with the bass or kick drum... and it's a feature that needs to be flexed!

I did save the adjusted PQ2 preset, to the main FNMX foler, to propagate.

--<>--

Xylo is the only other orchestral we hear in Reavis, starting in the final bridge, and occurring more in the outro.

For this, the EQ was fine, but I did adjust the velocities of different patterns to get a more consistent volume against the rest of the mix.

I teared up at the outro, as I have at other stages with this old song.

Sixteen or twenty measures of just the music, with the strings doing a kind of pondering, romantic, counter melody that evolks the magic of a college campus in the fall... with the xylo being very extra, doing a repetitive trill-donk, trill-donk, straight out of a 1950s promo for the department store of tomorrow.

The sound of utopianism!

The two together, the romantic strings and the googie-utopian xylophones, create this sense that you are safely in the past... the non-dystopian past, before the world was the deconstructionist hellscape junkyard that we stumble through now.

And that's something to get teary-eyed about, I think.

--<>--

I suppose this obviates that Archeology is a kind of, "period peice."

But this music was odd, even for it's period, so it's got it's novelty, as well.

Okay, I guess I'm a little buzzed now, and needn't wax poetic any further, in my state.

The late night session begins with, Never Rains, and maybe I'll make it to, Magic Monday before bedtime.

So I'll talk to you tomorrow... on President's Day!

°¦}




Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos





._.

28F and cloudy tonight. I slept in until 5PM, without trying... likely due to the rhinovirus.

I'm not a huge sports fan so, my first clue that today must be Superbowl Sunday was finding a good parking spot at Aldi, and being able to move around freely in the store without people crowding every aisle.

Back home, downtown was as quiet and dead as it normally would be at midnight.

A google search of, "when is the superbowl in 2026," gave me, not the date, but the score: Seahawks 6, Patriots 0, in the 2nd quarter.

Okay then!

My shoes and orthotics arrived, and are still in their packages on the bed. I'll get to those later tonight.

Now it's time to get back to work on the mixes.

------------{=0=}------------

10:51

The shoes were the wrong style and way to big! I'll need to return them this week.

I do have a pair of new shoes bought through work (they paid half the cost), with composite toes, in the car, that I've been reluctant to try and break in. But now that I do have new orthotics, perhaps I should actually give that pair a chance?

Seattle Seahawks won, 29 to 13... for what that's worth.

I'm all clean and shiny, with my clothes in the dryer, and seven minutes to go on that spin...

------------{=0=}------------

11:28PM

Okay! Propagation of the new PQ2 presets for drums, cymbals, and bass guitar has been completed for all 12 songs, including Archeology!

The gain balances for all 12 were tweaked, for the rhythm section and the guitars. And I am in the process of exporting those, sans-orchestral mixes to a special folder for reveiw later tonight.

--<>--

I was able to do all tonight's work with the iLouds at a medium loud setting.

And even at that lower volume level, with the white noise of the space heater, I could hear a distinct difference in the EQ quality of the drums, cymbals, and the bass.

The bass guitar is fuller and deeper now. It's low pass, up to 200Hz allows a little below that threshold to get through, but not enough to conflict with the toms and kick.

I had to pull down the volume on the bass in every mix, quite a bit. But even with it's fader far down, I could hear it very clearly.

The kick and toms sound better, and distinct from one another, and the bass guitar.

The snare, rim, and woodblock are all cleaner and more clear.

But the big win was with the cymbals!

I found myself pulling down the ride, ride bell, hat pedal, and hat tap in every mix, because they were now so clear and distinct.

Meanwhile the splash, crash, and open hat cymbals ring out much more distinctly.

--<>--

It was the poor audibility of cymbals, and snare, as well as dullness of the bass, on the ruff record, that prompted the first pass of gain staging.

And while that helped, the focused EQ work this weekend really brought the details out a lot more clearly... both in a casual listen over the iLouds with a space heater running, and in the beyerdynamics.

The rhythm section has really come into focus now, compared to the Ruff Record, or anything before it.

--<>--

The guitars too, are sounding good in their mixes, but I was paying attention tonight to the EQ quality of the guitars in each song, noting that some are spot-on and sound very realistic, while others, like in Clue Phone, and Other Friends, still languish in the uncanny valley.

So, what I'm gonna do is save all the Sakura presets, PQ2s, Fast Dist & Convolver presets, for these 12 guitar experiments, and then, after some careful assessment, apply some of the better schemes to some of the more problematic songs.

But that won't be the immediate focus... it can wait a bit.

Tomorrow will begin spectral analysis, and PQ2 adjustments to the orchestrals, starting I think, with the cello and violin (which is just the cello playing higher notes).

The list of orchestrals is; Cello/violin, horn, trumpet, flute, bassoon, clarinet, xylophone, marimba, cellesta, and piano.

Of them, the piano is probably the only one I'll need to hold off on until the guitars are finalized.

For the rest of them, I should be able to arrive at a PQ2 scheme that can be universal to every mix.

Not sure how long this orchestral step will take, but I managed to knock out the rhythm section in a weekend, So that's hopeful.

------------{=0=}------------

Okay, so another weekend has come and gone.

I made a good deal of progress with it.

The shoes were a disappointment.

The rhinovirus situation is not completely cleared up, but I foresee being able to make some progress this week, at night after work.

The Seahawks beat the Patriots. It's warming up this week. And Valentine's Day is on the way!

I'll talk to you next Saturday.

°¦}




Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos





._.

25F and breezy out there today, going down to 20F overnight.

This weekend really got away from me!

After I last wrote yesterday, I got the drums for Miss Fortune balanced, but then I broke off to prep for the mid-winter observation.

I did dishes, vacuumed, and watered the plant, then shined up my silver candlestick holder before use in the observation ceremony.

After that I got a start on gain staging the bass guitar, but when 7:30 rolled around, I cracked a beer, and did my observation ceremony, with a few candles, reflecting on how this moment, when January turns to February (marked by Groundhog Day) starts the second half of winter... which is very often the six/seven weeks where the entire year's character will begin to take shape.

Last year, it was in that seven week period that I pushed for and failed to get into a 1BR apartment, and then scheculed the orientation with Elgym studios that would lead to the summer of vocals there, in studio C.

In the same period, I got Chicago Title to cough up the final 5K from the house sale... part of which funded the laptop and interface box necessary to do those remote vocal sessions at Elgym.

And you can say, well, that only shaped your summer! But those vocal sessions lasted through September, by which point I was champing at the bit to start mixing, and so scheduled the week of PTO in October that would kick off the Great Wekbrek, that saw me working on the album 7 days a week until after New Year!

--<>--

It was after 9PM when I finally got back to Miss Fortune, struggling with the bass balance, and slowly figuring out that it was a case of bass drum kicks combining with certain bass notes to spike the meters, even thought he kicks by themselves had been fine.

This was due to a sloppy velocity issue in the drum patterns, where the kick on beat 2 was abnormally high, and this got repeated thorugh several patterns.

But around 10PM Tim called, and he had a lot on his mind! We talked... or rather I listened, for about three hours.

He always has trouble making ends meet in January and February, as they are the off season for his pool maintenance gig. But now he's got some master plan to start and above ground pool rental service that, with as many beers as he'd drunk, was certain to make him a millionaire in about five years!

To his credit, it does sound like a workable business plan, but he'd need a loan to get started and he wouldn't turn much profit for the first couple years.

--<>--

Finally, in a late night session, I got the bass and drums for Miss Fortune under control! But then it was time for bed.

------------{=0=}------------

TODAY: FEBRUARY 1ST

I slept in today until about 3PM, but then, after the coffee was made, it was time to pay the bills.

A quick check revealed that the balance in checking was roughly equal to the average total for all monthly bills!.. meaning I *could* pay all the bills today, but if I did... I'd have zero dollars until the 10th!

This is the first month since I moved here, where I was not able to pay everything on the 1st.

So I paid rent, car insurance, and the car payment. The phone/wifi isn't due until the 27th so... it can wait until the 10th.

The rest of the bills are all credit cards, none of which are ever due on the 1st, so they will all wait until the 10th.

--<>--

Why the lack of funds? Well, for a long time after the move I had an extra padding of cash from the house sale, and that took a long time to dissipate. I also had the ability to offload some weekly expenses to credit cards, until they all got too close to their limits.

So it's only been over the past three or four months that I've truly been living off just the paychecks. And I do think it's enough to get by on, but... when the paydays get out of synch with the 1st of the month?... we get today's situation.

As I said, most things are not truly due on the 1st. I've just been in the habit of paying everything on the 1st, no matter when it's due.

What I paid today; Rent, car insurance, car payment, is what was due today, and that's left me more than enough to get to the 10th. What I'll pay on the 10th will leave me enough to get to the next payday.

But things'll realign in March, with a payday on the 3rd... within the grace period of things due on the 1st. And then two more paydays, on the 17th, and 31st.

--<>--

I mentioned how things that pop up in the 2nd half of winter tend to characterize the rest of the year, and this is certainly one of those things! 2026 will see me paying closer attention to my spending, and delaying the credit card payments when necessary.

------------{=0=}------------

After paying the bills, I calculated that I can spend up to 117.00 per day, through the 9th.

I then went out to get gas, beer & smokes, and groceries... spending 134.90! But, that's fine, because tomorrow I may spend only, say 20.00.

But the cosmic alignments were such that today, I was out of paper towels, toilet paper, and facial tissue... which is a challenging alignment for a Sunday where I also needed beer, because you're talking about ALL the bulkiest items at once!

This is thanks to the fact that no store sells either paper towels or toilet paper in anything less than bulk packs the size of my torso!

So I had to park in the loading zone, here at home... and of course there was no space in the loading zone!.. so I parked across the street in the Dunham building's loading zone, and, with hazzards flashing, had to make two trips up to 11, to get everything in!

And of course, the freight elevator decided to fault-out and become unresponsive on the second trip, so I had to awkwardly fumble my way into the lobby with a heavy backpack, and two unweildy packages of rolled paper, each the size of my torso, and take the regular elevator up.

------------{=0=}------------

Whew! So... here it is now 7PM, as I write!

This transitional weekend demanded a seasonal ritual, some fancy financial footwork, and a ridiculous restock of paper products, but now February can finally get underway!

I've got two hours here, before it's shower/laundry time, so... finally I can return to Miss Fortune!

I'll talk to you later tonight.

------------{=0=}------------

10:06PM

I'm all clean & shiny, and the laundry WOULD be in the dryer right now, but when I went down there to get it out of the washer, I sadly found that all the dryers were in use!

This is highly irregular, as... since my work hours changed, my laundry routine is now two hours later than it used to be... meaning I should never be grappling with drier denial!

But apparently if February 1st falls on a Sunday, right at the end of a brutal cold snap, AND it's the night of the full moon... it triggers a socio-psychological rogue wave of laundry to be done by the masses?

..Tying up washers and dryers in laundry rooms across the nation, hours longer than normal... all overstuffed with bedding and hoodies, forgotten old garments from the bottoms of drawers, window dressings, and sundry mittens... all still wet after one spin!.. and so they must be spun again!

A subconscious appeal to the wheel of fortune, at this mid-winter moment when the year's very character is on the line.

Whatever the case, Miss Fortune's now exporting to WAV!

This was a tough song to gain stage! It's particular groove has things all hitting together on various beats, such that the cumulative effect is to produce spikes, even when each individual track is well within the levels.

So it was a kind of triage, deciding, who gets the velocity clip, for *this* individual spike? Piano? Rhythm section? Guitar?

Kind of a manual ducking, assigned fairly, according to who, in what measure, needs to be heard more, in what beat.

At any rate, the first pass for gain staging the 12 songs is done!.. and not a moment too soon, because now that it's up above 20F, the radiator's back to going cold for hours long spells... meaning it's either run the space heater, with it's white noise, or low-level monitor the music, but you can't do both!

------------{=0=}------------

10:40PM

Okay, the laundy's in the dryer.

I'm taking the rest of the night off!

2nd passes start tomorrow. I do think they'll go quickly this week.

I'm gonna shoot for and average of three songs per worknight, meaning I'd like to have the 2nd passes done by the end of Thursday night.

With 3 hours per worknight, thats an average of one hour per song, which I think is doable.

The early songs will take longer, but the later songs will be 30 minutes max, so it'll all balance out.

The goal is to be taking the tutorial for the spectral analyzer on Friday night, with next weekend being the first true dive into that new phase of surgical, parametric EQ work.

But the parametric EQ settings are savable, and... I would assume, will be universal. Meaning once I nail the EQ for each drum and the bass... that should remain constant for all 12 songs... as it should for all the other instruments save the guitar, which does have different character in each song (and occasionally 2 different guitars in the same song).

EQ is also something that can be reasonably done with headphones on week nights... as it's mostly cold logic, and not judgement... but then checked in the loudspeakers on weekends to be certain.

Thus, the first week of FEB will be the 2nd pass, and then I predict the middle two weeks of FEB will be the EQ, with compression beginning in the final week of FEB, and going on into March.

Again, once compression settings are arrived at for different drums, cymbals, bass, and orchestrals, they should be universal.

But it could take some experimentation to find those universal presets, so we'll be conservative and predict all of March to be about the compression.

That would leave April for dialing in the vocals and sound effects.

Thus, a mastering in early May seems to be where I'm heading.

But we'll see. Maybe I'll get lucky and things will go faster than I expect.

Okay, that's it for this weekend!

Tomorrow, Groundhog Day, is predicted to be 28F and overcast... and thus, no shadow to frighten the groundhog back into his hole!

Let's hope the lore holds true, and we're getting a mild 2nd half of winter!

Enjoy the moonlight, and I'll see you Saturday.

°¦}




Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos





._.

9F and overcast, going below zero tonight.

It was 17F when I left for building checks at 2:15PM, and we had three inches of new snow on the ground, that nobody's cleaned up yet. So it was a slippery, slushy mess out there.

I stopped for groceries and gas on the way back from the high school, and now I'm settling in with a fresh cup of coffee, and some donut holes.

An update on the pokestop gambit. My photo of this building (which is a pokestop) was accepted and appears as one of the alternates, so I sent gifts from this stop to Colleen & Justin, who liked the new photo.

Colleen has two accounts, so, they gave three likes and my like makes four. The original photo had zero likes. So in theory, later this week, mine should become the main photo... replacing the 10-year old, low-res, crooked, badly lit photo of a tarnished & undreadable plaque out front.

Let's hope it works!

--<>--

A check of the calendar shows that Valentine's Day is on a Saturday, with President's Day being a Monday holiday that same weekend. So... three weeks until this 3-day break!

Can I finish the album on the V-Day weekend? I'm thinking that's out of the question.

There's still a lot of work to do just on the music, with EQ and compression, but then the vocals and sound effects have to be gain-staged, and compressed, in Audacity.

And there's still that missing guitar solo for, Other Friends, to compose.

I think we're still looking at April for the silent release of the Archeological Record.

Okay, today's goal is to complete gain staging on, Bed in the Suburbs by the end of the night.

I'll talk to you later.

------------{=0=}------------

9:15PM - POWER OUTAGE

So, I was working on, Suburbs, and things were going fine, but then about 7:35PM, the power went out!

I assumed it was the whole building, because that happens occasionally, and it usually comes back within ten minutes.

I still have the battery powered christmas decor going, so I did have some light, and decided to scroll on TikTok to pass the time.

After a bit, however I realized... "Am I hearing my fridge running?"

Sure enough, I opened the fridge door and it's light came on!

I then noticed the nightlight in the bathroom was on, and sure enough, the bathroom light worked, when I switched it on.

Then, I noticed that the ceiling fan was still spinning!

What the hell?

So I had lost power to all the outlets in the living space... lamps, WiFi router, computers, etc... but I still had power to the bathroom, kitchenette, and the ceiling fan!

This was extremely odd, as I was not running a space heater, humidfier, or anything out of the ordinary load. I'm also pretty sure the three outlets that lost power are all on separate circuits.

I called the emergency maintenance number and told them what was up, but then it was a waiting game.

Since the ceiling fan had power, I did have an overhead light for the living space, and after tuning that on, I decided to check the outlet by the window, which is only ever used for the air conditioner in the summer (or the space heater in the fall, before the radiator starts working).

I had a fan plugged into that outlet which I haven't used in months, but sure enough, it turned on!

So... I got a spare power strip from my underbed drawer of electrical stuff, plugged it into that working outlet by the window (right behind this desk) and then carefully plugged in only the power cords for this computer (the optiplex), the speakers, this monitor, etc... and I got this computer back online.

First thing I did was power up the optiplex, then reboot it.

After that I opened, Suburbs-FNMX in FL.

It wasn't corrupted. The speakers and the MOTU were fine. And I'd saved just before the outage, so I hadn't lost any work.

So, still in the dark out here, I resumed work on the song, with nothing else to do, as there was still no internet.

--<>--

At 8:40PM, an hour & five minutes after it had gone out, the power came back... for two minutes. Then it went out, for 20 seconds... came back for 30 seconds... went out again for another 10 seconds... and then finally came back for good!

Never got a call from the maintenance guy or any explanation.

But by 9PM, things were back to normal so I shaved, showered and started the laundry like normal.

And now the WiFi router's trained up again, so I have internet and can be here online to update this blog!

--<>--

A very strange situation, because we're talking about three circuits going out at once... none of which were being overly taxed.

All I can think is that the breakers themselves are going bad? Because why did they have to try three times to reset the power?

But if that's the case, then I should've gotten a call! Like, "Hey! we're gonna have to replace those breakers in the morning so you'll be without power again from X:00 to Y:30."

Or perhaps it was trickster fairies?.. An angry ghost???

Whatever the case, I think I'll keep this computer plugged into the safe outlet for a while.

Okay, back to work!

I'll talk to you later tonight.

------------{=0=}------------

12:03AM

Alright! Suburbs is exporting to WAV as I write!

That's four songs in one weekend, even with building checks and a power outage!..

Tuesday, Cold Feet, Closer, and Suburbs!

And I've got a few hours left to get a start on Clue Phone!

So; Clue, Friends, Spell, and Fortune are the final four... and I don't think I'll have any problem knocking them out over the work week!

That means 2nd passes will likely begin on Friday night, for gain balancing.

Archeology, Reavis, and Rains will take a bit of time as they weren't done with the 7-step algorithm. But the 2nd pass on the rest should be a cake walk.

My prediction is that by this time next Sunday, gain staging will be complete for all 12 songs.

And so, as January gives way to February... so shall gain balancing give way to the spectral analyzer and the final parametric EQs.

...And the beginning of compression, perhaps around Valentine weekend!

--<>--

Okay, that's our weekend!

Last weekends new moon became this weekend's first quarter.

It'll go full, when next we speak, next Saturday!

Until then, have a good week, and I'll see you at mid-winter!

°¦}




Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos





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