Snoozefest Journal

BRAKES

2026-04-27T17:59:33Z

58F with rain and thunder out there today.

Couldn't stay up past midnight last night. Woke up at 6AM unwillingly, and feeling depressed for no reason... panic attack... rode it out... finally fell back to sleep at 7AM, and slept well because the storm rolled in. Got back up at 12:30PM... back to normal!

I feel like sleep deprivation/drastic changes to sleep cycles should either be illegal or require hazzard pay or something.

But at any rate, I'm drinking my coffee now, and watching it rain, and soon I'll get the car and take it over to Benton Auto. Then walk back here, likely with an umbrella.

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2:04PM

Okay! I went out to get some beer, brought it back here, then went over to Benton Auto and dropped the car off.

No rain on the walk back, but high winds.

Hopefully AutoZone gave me the right parts, and this all goes smoothly today!

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2:24PM

They just called to say the break pads are wrong! He said they're for a 6 cylinder.

I specifically put in my car's VIN into the AutoZone app before searching for the pads, so this is on AutoZone.

So now the Benton guy is gonna go buy the right ones and this whole job's gonna cost more than expected... goddammit!

Another case of professionals screwing up their only jobs... AutoZone!

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5:04PM

I picked up the car about half an hour ago. Final price: $220.00.

Nice to have them working again! With as little driving as I do, they'll be good for another two years!

Still a bit steamed I'll have to return the other break pads. Could've done that today, but I want to catch up with the singles!

I did my fixes to the Miss Fortune mix. Exported a new main music stem with the piano (and it's convolver impulse) very low in the mix. Then I exported a piano stem by itself with no convolver impulse.

Doubling that new piano stem in Audacity, 40L/60R with 70ms lag sounds perfect!

I then redid the compression for the outro vocals... leaving the belted "whoas" uncompressed to give them a little more volume and bite.

The result sounds great so I exported as 16bit WAV. That WAV will be uploaded to SoundCloud, but I also threw it into OpenShot to create a video version for YouTube with the splash graphic as the video and the TwinCat logo fading in at the end.

I then got the Beta2 of Reavis and created a new video for that, because YouTube only has the Beta1, which was not mixed right.

So in a moment here, I'm gonna upload the vids to YouTube and then the WAV to SoundCloud.

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8:03PM

Okay!.. it's been a busy night here in 1106, with the rain and thunder returning at sundown, in intermittent passes that continue as I write!

patrick_melody · 26-12-MISS-FORTUNE-BETA1-R

The original version of Reavis on YouTube (which only had 25 views) was deleted. Revais-Beta2-YTR.MP4 was uploaded to take it's place, and then Miss-Fortune-Beta1-YTR.MP4 was uploaded next... and a YT playlist was created for them.

Next I uploaded Miss-Fortune-Beta1-R.WAV to Soundcloud... and after a vetting, was allowed to opt-in to the First-Fans algorithmic, week-long promotion at 7:35PM.

I then created a new TwinCat blog post to announce the release, with embeds of both the SoundCloud, and YouTube versions, right after the opener.

This new blog post establishes a template I'll use from here on out, where it starts with a theory-query generated description, followed by song history, technical challenges, a fun fact, and then a, "what's next?" before signing off.

Back at SoundCloud, I put Miss Fortune into my Spotlight section, along with Reavis.

And then, in the "description" for the SoundCloud track, I put a copyright first, then a notice to "check the COMPANION BLOG in my profile for more info on this song," before listing the lyrics.

--<>--

Also did the dishes, while waiting for different things to upload.

--<>--

Now that there are two beta releases, it feels like the whole campaign has finally taken shape!

Tomorrow I'll need to finally run the "Sunday errands" on a Tuesday, and do the laundry and soforth. But I should still have time to get a start on the beta mix of, "Our Cold Feet."

But there's no rush, because OCF won't be due out until Miss Fortune's had it's time to find whatever plays it can get on SC.

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THE DAYS CONCLUSION

After some tight budgeting through FEB, MAR, and early APR, I was able to isolate a paycheck to use for car repairs, and today successfully got the front brakes redone, with only the one glitch of now having brake pads to return to AutoZone.

After the sleep deprived, April Crunch, mandated by the annual Senior Lock-in this past weekend, I was able today, to regain psycho-physio-emotional-temporal normalcy, and not only get the 2nd beta release out there, but wash the dishes!

I've still got tomorrow to get a start on Cold Feet, and then over the work week, April will turn to May on Friday.

I'll do building checks this coming weekend once more, perhaps getting a bit more done on Cold Feet.

Next Tuesday will bring us the final play-total for Miss Fortune's week of algorithmic push, and also a paycheck to pay the May rent, and May car payment, at the last minute.

And... I'll surely do a theory-query about Cold Feet between now and then!

So stay tuned!.. and I'll be back on Saturday with an update about how Miss Fortune is faring!

°¦}

Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos

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Theory Query: Miss Fortune

2026-04-26T17:47:08Z

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

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The April Crunch

2026-04-25T16:29:11Z

53F and sunny this morning.

I was up by 10AM this morning, because I have to be up by 6:30AM tomorrow morning... to help take down the decorations we put up yesterday, for the annual Senior lock-in that happens every April.

So, I'm off today, but I have to be to bed by 10PM, if I want to get 8 hours of sleep tonight.

I did, however, put in for PTO on Monday & Tuesday. And now Monday's when I get the front brakes done on the RAV 4.

Earlier this week, I bought the break pads & rotors online, at AutoZone, and then picked them up the next morning before work. Then I found an auto shop downtown here, about five blocks from the tower.

So I'll take it to Benton Auto on Monday, walk home, and then walk back to get it, whenever it's ready.

With the way money's been so tight, pulling this off was a matter of perfect timing. I had paid the April bills out of a paycheck just before April began, and the one that followed it... leaving the most recent paycheck unclaimed... as the next will fall on the 5th of May, just within the grace period for May's rent.

Buying the parts myself, and finding a suitibly small, Mexican owned auto shop within walking distance was the final piece of the puzzle. The parts cost 250.00, but the break job will only cost 150.00.

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Reavis Beta2

So, Reavis did break 1000 plays by the one week mark, Sunday night, and had a pretty good day 8, before the numbers began to drop on Tuesday.

It's at 1,121 plays today, with it now recieving only 4 to 6 plays a day... as the algorithm has disengaged.

Still, 1K in seven days is pretty good for an unpromoted single from an unknown artist.

°¦}

Melody Manor Maintenance

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Reavis Beta2 Doing Well

2026-04-18T20:28:35Z

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!

patrick_melody · 26-02-REAVIS-beta2-R

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

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EASTER EGG

2026-04-06T01:00:22Z

51F and clear this Easter Sunday evening.

Where have I been for three weeks? Basically just having my weekends blown by building checks, and also focusing on bills, filing my taxes, etc.

It struck me a while back, that at the current pace of things, with overtime being a regular new reality, that it no longer made sense to try and finish the entire album before releasing anything.

As of the last entry, March 15th, the guitar automation strategy had proven itself, but I also realized there is still no silver bullet default guitar. Each song does require it's own slight tweaks to the guitar sound.

But guitar is the final peice of the tone-balance puzzle before compression so... instead of nailing guitars for all 12 songs, and then going back to compress all 12... why not just completely finish one song, upload it, then finish the next, upload it, and so on?

We're talking about a beta-release strategy, where a new single is released every few weeks, to SoundCloud, YouTube, and maybe BandCamp... no distro yet, just getting listenable mixes up there, one by one, and then further down the road, a full album release.

--<>--

So, after working one weekend day for three weekends in a row, I finally had a three-day weekend this weekend, Friday, Saturday, and Today.

So on Friday, Consulting DeepSeek for tutorial, I compressed all the instruments for Reavis! Kick, Toms, Cymbals, Snare, Bass, Guitar, Cello, and Xylo. And after some final tweaks to things, the mix was good to go.

On Saturday (yesterday) then, I got the vocals and sound effects properly mixed and compressed.

And then today, after a few minor tweaks, I uploaded Reavis to SoundCloud! My first beta single, on Easter Sunday!

patrick_melody · 26-02-REAVIS-betaR

https://soundcloud.com/patrick_melody/26-02-reavis-betar?si=a3af35cf2ad34b7e9146138768e41a8f&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

--<>--

So the next song to prep for release is Miss Fortune. I've decided to release them in a different order from how they'll appear on the album.

Reavis, for example, is perfect for April, because it has that romantic spring vibe. Miss Fortune will be a good one for May, and it'll be a good follow to Reavis, because they're vibes are similar.

The schedule of releases also prioritizes songs that feature the rock trio, meaning the orchestral, "set peices" will be last on the list. Also the song Archeology itself will not be released until the album is released.

When working with NighCafe a couple months back, I did generate a bunch of images of "artifacts" with egyptian vibes... photo-realistic stone objects to represent each song. I decided that for the album I'd rather go with graphic novel illustrations, but these "artifact" images are perfect for the beta singles!

They hint at the album to come without spoiling it.

And I'm calling these "beta" singles, because I *will* probably re-master all of these songs before the final album release. So on SoundCloud and BandCamp, I can just replace the file with an updated mix, while keeping whatever plays and likes the track has on their platform.

--<>--

So yeah! Reavis is out there, and Miss Fortune will be next!

Now I'm gonna spend the rest of my Sunday evening getting Reavis onto YouTube and BandCamp.

HAPPY EASTER!

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

REAVIS RELEASE DEBRIEF

Okay, so this is 3 minutes 20 seconds, from the school bell and passing period intro foley, to the outro foley of students in the hall fading out. So it's a three minute buzz of a song, one third of which is the instrumental outro.

I uploaded it to YouTube, but Bandcamp doesn't seem to like me tonight and the upload failed.

I texted YouTube links to Brian and Dylan, which gave me the first opportunity to hear the mix blasting out of my phone.

Out of the little phone speakers, it sounds very much like transistor radio rock from the 50s/60s. You can hear everything, including the bass and drums, and cello, but there are no actual bass frequencies. It's kinda tinny, but in the good way that old songs would sound over tiny speakers. The guitars bite. The vocals are still clear and present. You can actually hear the xylophone better!

So, call that my first test of the mix outside the studio monitors and studio headphones.

Still, in decent speakers it sounds great, and in the headphones it sounds better, which was one of the goals.

The room is very much a reality in this mix. This does sound like a band recording in an old school session room, but with more modern frequency response, and in stereo, and with distortion on the guitar.

Not modern commercial grade... but more like oldies grade meets 80s underground demo grade... which again, was the goal.

Rather than, "wall of sound" I'd call this more, "wallpaper of sound." In which the wallpaper is the rock trio... a solidified sound texture with 3D relief provided by the panning of the drums.

And then the vocals, and in Reavis' case, the cello stand out a bit in front of the wallpaper, like the next level of a diarama, with their Haas effect... a bit more 3D than the background.

Soundcloud auto-played an older upload from 2008 after one spin of Reavis and I was kinda shocked to hear the difference! The older uploads are great in their own way, but there is definitely a "bedroom" or "livingroom" production feel to them.

The old drum machine created a good rhythm that approximated a real drum kit, but in the new mix, it doesn't sound like a drum machine anymore.

I suppose it's kind of silly to compare old productions and new, on that level, so suffice it to say the "room" concept of the new mixes is the novel breakthrough... not possible in the pre-DAW era.

It very much sounds like younger Pat, with his listenable livingroom jams, went out and formed a ghost band who've been practicing for a year, and are now recording an underground demo.

I guess that's all I have to say tonight.

It does feel nice to have something finally out in the world.

And it's gonna be fun prepping and releasing one single after an other, over this spring, summer, and fall!

I think I will still drop an unbroken "Archeological Record" before the official album release.

The timeline is not yet clear for all this.

I'll get a better sense of that as I start work on Miss Fortune.

°¦}

Melody Manor Maintenance

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Singular Sunday

2026-03-15T21:10:37Z

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

._.

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DAYLIGHT SUN

2026-03-08T23:07:39Z

63F 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.

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

8:30PM

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.

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

11:36PM

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.

--<>--

THE SUNDAY NIGHT SUMMARY

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.

°¦}

Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos

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DAYLIGHT SAT

2026-03-07T23:35:15Z

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

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FRUGAL MARCH

2026-03-01T23:23:51Z

33F and overcast today.

I made it through February, training myself to be more frugal, and today there was exactly the amount of last Tuesday's paycheck in the account... meaning I managed to stretch the paycheck before it until yesterday.

I paid the rent and the car payment. Nothing else is due until after the coming paycheck on the 10th, so car insurance and phone will come out of that, as well as credit cards.

And i'm now truly living paycheck to paycheck.

But rent is the big expense on the 1st. The car payment's only 180.00. The other bills, that come out of the 2nd paycheck don't add up to as much.

The real drain on my money is the cigarettes, now at a ridiculous 13.00 a pack! So the goal is to cut my smoking in half, and I'm getting there.

I'm not super worried, because if worse comes to worse, I can just get a part time job on weekdays before the main job, which I don't start until 3PM every day.

Something simple, and quittable, like running a register at a gas station, or stock room at a drug store.

But it hasn't come to that yet, so... for now I continue to focus on the album.

--<>--

Last night's review of, Reavis and Clue Phone sounded good.

My only thought was that perhaps the guitars could use a final "clean up" EQ, at the end of the signal chain... That, "tone band" idea I'd been using before the pickup simulator idea.

The pickup EQs boost certain frequencies, and leave the rest alone (except for a slight HI and LO pass, on the fringes) so, there's nothing subtractive.

A cleanup EQ would just isolate the boxy/honky freqs, and pull them down a bit, leaving the rest alone.

But I'll worry about that after i've propagated the pickup sim model to the 12 songs.

Once they're all using that model, revisions to the pickup EQs, if needed, would be simple to do.

I think i'm gonna start today with, Other Friends.

Talk to you later.

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

8:05PM

Okay, Other Friends is exporting now as a new test WAV.

The pickup simulation model worked well in this song! At first I had my doubts, but I re-jiggered the distortion, and got it back to the nice thrash I had before.

This guitar line is a series of four-measure climbs from lower chords to higher chords, then back down again, so I set the pickup automations to start each of those sections with 90% neck & 10% bridge, then smoothly transition to 10% neck & 90% bridge.

This gives those passages a lot of beef to start with, and by the end they're very biting!

I did some volume automation, lowering the guitar about 20% in the bridge, and the interlude, where it's playing 80% bridge pickup, and for the interlude I also automated the distortion down about 30%.

The lesson I learned with this song is that automation can cause CPU spikes if there are jarring jumps between the end of one clip and the start of the next.

So for example in the type of passage described above, where the bridge pickup goes smoothly from 10% to 90%, that's not a problem. But it was a BIG problem to just leave it at 90% and let it try to instantly jump back down to 10% for the start of the next clip... because the guitars are already demanding a lot of the CPU, with the strummed-out chords of 3 and 4 notes each.

Thus FL has to do that and try to move two pickup EQ volume knobs instantaneously, in a huge jump.

So after the automation was roughed out, I went back and made sure each clip joins the next at the same levels, giving it a couple beats to transition into position.

I had a similar issue at the end of the interlude where several instruments hit their final note at the same time... which taxes CPU. I had to wait a couple beats after that moment, to transition the pickup knobs... in a gap where only the drums were counting in the next bit.

Okay, so... what next?

I think I'm gonna try... Tuesday Siren! That's got a lot of variation on the guitars, so it'll be a good stress test for the pickup simulation model.

Talk to you later.

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

11:08PM

I'm all clean & shiny, and the laundry's done, and put away... sitting here realizing the the best way to avoid smoking is to put an unlit cigarette in my mouth... at least while working on the computer.

I get too busy to actually light it, but since it's in my mouth, my brain is happy.

Okay, I've been working on Tuesday Siren, and this one really is the test for the model, for several reasons.

1) It's got two guitars; G1 for most of it, and G2 for a few critical leads. This means more automation than normal, but it's also been a challenge to get both to sound as good, and as distinct from one another as in the previous version.

2) The song's very customized, meaning no two verse or bridge parts (no real chorus) are exactly the same, or the same length. This means automation clips are not repeatable.

3) G1 has a wide dynamic range from one part to another... which will test the sensitivity of the pickups, I guess.

--<>--

I started with automating G2, and i'm not quite done yet.

G1 stil awaits it's automation clips, for later tonight.

So far it seems to be going well, but getting the right mix of delay, chorus, distortion, and convolver settings was tough.

G2 has heavy distortion, as did the guitar for Other Friends, earlier today... and it feels like I can't hear quite enough difference between the neck and bridge pickups.

I could hear a difference between them yesterday, working on Reavis, and Clue Phone, but something about the heavier distortion makes it harder to audibly differentiate them.

So this points to more research on the pickups' freq profiles. The ones i'm using are based on the old humbuckers of a vintage Les Paul, and there's a lot of overlap between the two profiles.

Perhaps there's a different 2-pickup guitar to base things on?

--<>--

It'll probably be late by the time i'm done with Tuesday Siren, tonight, so this entry will be it for this transitional weekend where February turned to March.

The forecast says it'll warm up a bit this coming week, into the 40s and low 50s, so that'll be nice.

And then next weekend will be the start of daylight saving time!

To sum things up for this weekend... I had an idea last Sunday to simulate pickups for the guitar. Attempts to implement that as a patcher preset proved impractically difficult, but I got the idea working this weekend and am now working on the 4th test-song, with this experimental new model.

Learning automation was a big breakthrough last weekend. This weekend, it's the dynamic motor at the heart of the pickup sim model.

I think the model is here to stay, at this point.

In general, it's leading to much more realistic sounding guitars, both because of real analog/electrical simulation, and also the dynamism of play.

It's also leading to a realistic consistency from one song to the next... it's the same instrument in every song, but with different effect pedal settings.

The only questions are really; 1) what's the optimal pair of pickup profiles? 2) is there an optimal cleanup EQ profile to be used globally?

But those are both things that can be easily changed after the infrastructure of this model is built... the two EQ slots instead of one... the consistent Sakura settings... and most importantly the automation clips.

--<>--

I got a lot accomplished over my Standard Time, from late October, through to now.

So, this transitional period where winter's chill hangs on, before the plants spring back to life... is a good moment to be giving the guitars some final focus before the compression phase.

Okay, talk to you next Saturday!

°¦}

Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos

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FEB Ends & The PicSim Detour

2026-02-28T23:25:33Z

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

._.

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Pickup Simulator?

2026-02-23T00:31:12Z

24F out there and windy, with random little snowflakes flying, but nothing accumulating.

I've just finished mixing the piano for, Miss Fortune, and it's exporting to test WAV now.

I was up around 3PM and went straight out for groceries and gas, a bit irked by the cold wind out there, forcing me to wear gloves again!

But... this is the final week of February, and Standard Time ends two weeks from today, so there's light at the end of the winter tunnel.

--<>--

Last night, after mixing pianos for Clue Phone, I listened through all 12 of the latest mixes.

Everything's sounding pretty great, but it *is* time for another gain-balance as some of the guitars were clearly way too loud.

The new guitar sounds are great, but there are a few minor issues to deal with.

In some, with heavier distortion, if they play at low velocity, I hear a high fizzy edge. This seems to be a simple issue with the low-pass of the main PQ2 being too liberal with the highest highs... and perhaps a bit too much distiortion.

Other than that, Suburbs' guitar is the only one that sounds a bit canny, but I think that's another simple adjustment to it's "tone" band on the PQ2.

I heard some other places in different songs that could benefit from automation, as well.

But in general, they're sounding great!

It really feels now, like the guitarist in this rock trio is this kinda "shitty punk guitarist" bringing raw attitude to every song. You picture him wearing an oversized T-shirt with a huge anarchy symbol on it, spiked hair, and a nose peircing.

Like, he's capable of being mellow, in Magic Monday, and a few others, but you can hear that he's just champing at the bit to rock out harder, the second he's given the chance.

And by saying all that, I guess I'm saying this finally sounds like the same guy in every song... as the drummer, basist, and cellist already have for a while.

--<>--

The song that's gotten the biggest glow-up since last October is definitely Never Rains!

It went from sounding kinda monotonous and repetitive... to the point where I considered cutting it... to now, where it rocks so much I find myself swaying to the beat in my chair!.. and that's without the thunder, or the vocals!

--<>--

Speaking of that, I had the idea last night for how to use FL to EQ and compress the sound effects and the vocals... as a kind of cheat!

Basically, I'd take a finshed WAV of a song's music, say, Never Rains... and drop that into a brand new FLP file.

Then I drop in the WAV stem of the thunder, as exported out of Audacity.

Then I use PQ2, and FLs compressor to get the thunder sounding perfect in the mix.

Then I *export* that new thunder stem back to Audacity!

I could do the same with the vocals!

You may be asking, "Why export back to Audacity? Why not just do sound effects and vocals to a finished WAV of the music in FL and leave it at that?

And you may be right. I dunno. It depends on how FL handles large WAV files. I've never imported a WAV to FL, so I'm worried that having three large WAV files with effects on two of them might spike the CPU, but maybe I'm wrong.

Either way, there's a way to use PQ2 and FLs compressor on the sound effects and vocals!

So... that'll be the big experiment that begins after this music mixing phase is complete.

Okay, back to the grindstone! Piano's for Archeology, and then it'll be song-by-song clean up of those little issues I mentioned, before another gain-balance pass this coming week.

Talk to you later.

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

8:40PM

Arche is done, I went to Suburbs next and tweaked the guitar sound. Adjustments to PQ2 and also to convolver. Slight adjustment to envelope in Sakura.

After that I went through and quickly tweaked guitars for several other songs, updating the test WAVs for another review tonight.

But the idea struck me that real guitars have pickups in different places on the body to get different tones out of the strings.

I wonder if there's a way to simulate pickups, using two or three PQ3 patches, per guitar, instead of just one? I'll have to look into that.

I mean, I've got the Sakura, Fast Dist, and Convolver parts of the chain under control, so... it might be worth the time to replace the single PQ2s with "pickup simulators"... maybe a patcher preset with three EQs and some soft clipping?... before it goes to Fast Dist?

Something to ponder as I shower.

Talk to you later tonight, after the laundry's done.

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

9:53PM

I'm all clean & shiny, and the laundry is in the washer downstairs.

I began a new thread with DeepSeek to inquire about the pickup simulator, and it seems very doable.

We're talking about a patcher setup with instances of PQ2 to simulate the pickups, then Fruity Waveshaper to simulate the soft-clipping of the guitar's own electrical circuit, and then it goes to a Mixer plugin, for blending the sounds of the pickups.

The mixer's settings can be automated so that we hear a different blend of the pickups in different parts of the song; verse, bridge, chorus, lead.

As to CPU useage, they said, "Your proposed pickup simulator will be very light on CPU. You can absolutely duplicate this Patcher preset across all the songs on your album without worrying about performance issues."

They explained that the PQ2 draw is very low, mixer is negligible, waveshaper is low, and patcher is very low overhead, concluding...

"Your entire proposed 'Pickup Simulator' inside Patcher is roughly equivalent, in CPU terms, to having maybe one and a half instances of a simple EQ. It's a very efficient design."

--<>--

But because three pickups feels like it's a lot for me to keep track of, I'm considering a two-pickup simulator, which would be roughly modeled on the old Gibson Les Paul.

At first it seemed like this was a good choice to match the more vintage sound of the drum kit, but then I described my "shitty punk guitarist" to them and...

"When I hear 'early punk era guitarist with a Les Paul,' my mind goes immediately to one player: Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols. His primary guitar was a 1970s Les Paul Custom, and that sound—huge, snarling, slightly chaotic—defined the entire aesthetic you're describing. Think about the Never Mind the Bollocks guitar tone. It's: Thick and aggressive from the humbuckers. Drenched in distortion but still articulate enough for those sneering chords. Room-filling and raw, like a band in a space together"

So, this feels like a no-brainer!

Especially given the fabulous success with the LoFi parts of Archeology, using a very similar technique to simulate the casio transducer, the condenser mike, tape deck preamp, and direct-inject bass guitar!

--<>--

THE ELEGANT LOCIC:

After last weekend's sweeping re-vamp of the guitar sounds, they all wound up with very similar PQ2 settings.

Other parameters may vary a bit, in Sakura, Fast Dist, and Convolver, but the PQ2 part of the chains are nearly identical.

The only differences to them have been with me, fussing with the high fizz, and the placement of that "tone" cut, from song to song.

So, I think it makes perfect sense to replace the single PQ2 with two of them... one to simulate the neck pickup, and the other, the bridge pickup... giving me the option to favor one or the other, or max-out both, depending on the changing situation in the song.

Waveshaper then takes that blended sound of two pickups and gives it a bit of warmth before handing off to Fast Dist.

I think this is what I'll be working on this week... it's the perfect project to re-ignite the motivation for late-sessions after work.

And the next gain-pass can wait until this is done.

--<>--

But it should go fast because once I perfect the patcher-pickup-simulation-circuit for one song, I save that as a preset and it's nothing to drop it into the other 11 songs!

After that's its a simple matter of automating the blend of pickups in each song
... which also shouldn't be too difficult to rough out.

Lastly, it's worth the effort, because I'd eventually have done this on the next album, and then looked back at Archeology and regretted not doing it... forever cringing at the "almost" guitar tones that could've been better!

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

11:10PM

Okay, the laundry's back in and put away, all the files are backed up, and i'm in for the evening.

Let's revew how the weekend went!

Yesterday's big breakthrough was learning how to automate, and using that to improve the mix by dynamically tweaking EQs and other effects in denser passages of the songs.

Last night's big epiphany, in the post late-session mix review, was that I can use FL's EQ and other effects on the vocals and the sound effects, even though they currently live only in Audacity.

Basically; the magic of stemming, applied to both platforms, rather than it being a one-way street from music in FL, to final mix in Audacity.

A technique I won't be able to test until further down the road.

Then tonight's big epiphany was the concept of the pickup-simulation-circuit, as the final puzzle peice to the guitar signal chain, album-wide.

A technique I can begin testing tomorrow night, and apply immediately, here in the tone-shaping phase.

--<>--

So... after a wasted work-week feeling perhaps I'd been bested, and wasn't up to the challenge of the final mix... a weekend with one breakthrough and two big epiphanies that will absolutely define the final mix!

A game plan! A road map!

So, as February draws to a close this coming week, I'll be thinking spring, and simulating guitar pickups!

And, yeah, there's still a lot of work left to do before mastering, but... I'm feeling more motivated now to get to the finish line... and I'm very confident that that finish line is somewhere between now and summer.

Okay! I'm gonna review the mixes again, and then throw three little pot-pies into the convection oven, to be dumped into the same bowl for my late night dinner... perhaps with some crackers and cold-pack cheese as the side dish.

Sounds lovely!

Talk to you next Saturday!

°¦}

Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos

._.

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Automation

2026-02-22T01:58:07Z

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

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President's Day

2026-02-16T23:05:22Z

62F and sunny again today!

Just got back from running the Sunday errands, on a Monday! So nice to do it without gloves or a scarf, and with daylight!

I did remember to stop at the UPS store, after Aldi, and drop off those shoes for a return to Amazon, so that 70.00 will be refunded soon.

--<>--

Last night I managed to EQ guitars for Magic Monday, and Tuesday Siren before bed, so that's five of twelve now done!

I'll pick up with, Our Cold Feet, in a moment here, and we'll see how far I get tonight.

Laundry will take up a bit of my time later tonight, but I've still got until 3AM.

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

5:46PM

Okay, just knocked out, Our Cold Feet!

I'm starting to develop an instinct for the guitar sounds. With all of these songs it's a lot of hopping around between Sakura, PQ2, Fast Dist, and Convolver... a tweak to this will effect that, then you go tweak that and it effects this other, and you just keep going from one console to the other until you finally get the sound.

The new PQ2 for all the guitars look very similar, however... it's always a high pass to *around* 200Hz, then a big wide-Q dome of a boost at around 3000Hz, and then one band pulled down to zero, with a modest Q, which usually lands somewhere in the 500-700Hz range. But it's sliding that band back and forth that... well it almost acts like a tone knob... you really hear it wherever you move it, but it's easy to find the sweet spot by ear.

Further brightness or darkness is then tweaked in Sakura, by manipulating the envelopes and the string dampening... with just tiny adjustments making a big difference.

The Fast Dist distorion can sound very tinny if the settings are wrong, like fizz, but to get that right is about adjustments to what's coming in, and the mix level, with the output always being 100%. The threshold can be very low, and still deliver a lot of distortion.

Convolver's self-convolve, and WET knobs then bring the sound into the room. The DRY knob is always around 80%.

So, if a first pass leaves a weird sounding guitar, it's just hopping around and tweaking things here and there until it finally pops out.

--<>--

Okay, it's just about 6PM. Closer To You, is next, and I've got three hours until it's laundry time!

Talk to you later!

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

6:32PM

Our Cold Feet, guitars are done! Exporting test WAV. On to Bed In The Suburbs!

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

7:04PM

Bed in the Suburbs guitars are done! Exporting test WAV. Clue Phone and Other friends are done, but still need to be exported to test wav. But after that, on to, Spell I'm Under!

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

7:50PM

Spell I'm Under guitars are done! Exporting test WAV. Clue Phone & Other Friends test WAVs were already exported!

Miss Fortune and Archeology are the only two left! I can probably knock out Miss Fortune before it's shave, shower, and laundry time... and then do Archeology as the laundry is going downstairs.

I just now noticed today is a New Moon!.. so a good time to finish spectral on the Guitars!

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

8:15

Okay, Miss Fortune is Done! I'm gonna just break away now to trim the beard, shave the bald head, shower, and get the laundry started.

My ears are fatiged.

I'll talk to you once the laundry is up from the dryer, by which time Archeology guitars will have been done.

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

9:22PM

I'm all clean and shiny, and the laundry is in the washer, with 9 minutes left.

Archeology guitars are done, and it's exporting as a test WAV!

Just got news from Alexa that the shoes were received by Amazon and the refund was issued! Woo-hoo!

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

9:40PM

40 minutes on the dryer. All the new album data's backed up, and the test WAVs from this weekend are ready for me to review in the Beyerdynamics later tonight.

Okay, so as a review, here... Last weekend (Superbowl weekend) I started in on spectral an analysis and solidified the PQ2 settings for all drums, cymbals, and the bass guitar.

This was on the heels of a couple weeks of gain balancing, and I ended Superbowl Sunday with a folder full of test WAVs of just the rock trio.

Then came Saturday, Valentine's Day, where I managed to do spectral on all the orchestral instruments, except for the piano... nailing down new PQ2 settings for all of them, and saving them into the same folder created for the new PQ2s of the drums/bass.

But I also saved all the guitar setting information as I went.

Sunday, the challenge was to break the back of the guitar settings, armed with a folder full of data, and an afternoon free to monitor in the open air.

Between Clue Phone, and Other Friends, I worked out the beginnings of system that was then applied to Reavis, before it got too late for the iLouds, and then in the late session, I applied that system to Magic Monday, and Tuesday Siren, in headphones.

Today, then I was confident enough in the new system to knock out all the remaining guitars at lightning speed. And now I have new Test WAVs to review that feature both the newly EQed orchestral (except for piano), and the newly EQed guitars.

--<>--

So... it's probably *not* true that these are the *final* guitars!

But they are more uniform now, with all their sounds having been established by the same underlying principals, and I do have the old guitars on file if they're needed.

I anticipate that if there are any guitar issues, now they will be global... for example, perhaps the one tone notch, and the one wide boost (and the one low pass for the highest highs) are not sophisticated enough... or... some knob in Sakura remains problematic, or... Convolver's Model S cab sim (used universally) is not the most ideal.

I'm sure to be tweaking these guitars as I move through the next phases, but now, the fixes will be minor, and easily propagated to the other songs.

So the guitars did make a big step forward this weekend.

And between last weekend and this one, the whole mix has effectively had it's long awaited, "spectral analysis" and tone balancing (except for the piano).

--<>--

So, this coming week, after work, I'll crack the code on the piano, and then do a second pass for gain balancing, now that everything's been tone-balanced.

And if that all goes well, then we're talking about the start of the compression phase next Saturday! Hooray!

I'm gonna be applying different types and levels of compression to each instrument, so that phase is gonna take some time, I'm sure.

After it's done, the music will be exported to Audacity, where the vocals and sound effects will have their final gain, tone, and compressor treatments... and then it'll be about mastering and release!

--<>--

So, we're in mid February right now?... Hrmmm...

My new goal is the end of April for the release. Two and a half months seems doable.

And that'll be nice, because that's when Uranus re-enters Gemini, to stay for good!.. completing the long dance of the three generational planets entering new signs.

Okay, eleven minutes to go on the dryer down there.

I'm gonna sign off for the weekend.

Talk to you next Saturday, when, hopefully, the compression phase begins!

°¦}

Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos

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Guitar Sunday

2026-02-15T22:25:55Z

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

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Valentine's Day

2026-02-14T22:35:18Z

50F and overcast on this Valentine's Day, going down to 30 tonight.

All the snow and ice have melted, and while it's not spring yet... it feels like winter is over.

I shook that cold over the past week, feeling 95% normal on Monday, 96% Tuesday, 97% Wednesday, etc. So I *could've* worked on EQing orchestral instruments after work, but I didn't. Just kinda took it easy.

I did re-review the newly EQed rock trio mixes (from Sunday) last night, in headphones and again, the guitar is the only wild card, from song to song... with it sounding best in the later songs... better overall sound, and better volume in the mix.

I tried to give the work shoes a chance... the composite toe shoes bought through work where they paid half... and it was a non-starter. The pair I bought were supposed to be "wide" but they were smashing my toes together so badly that they were making me feet fall asleep! So they were wasted money.

I ordered a new pair of Sketchers online, which arrived on Wednesday, and they are perfect! Felt like a dream, right out of the box. Now all I have to do is return the previous pair of Sketchers, which I'll do on Monday, to get my money back for those.

--<>--

Okay so it's Valentine's Day, and the challenge is to nail down the PQ2 settings for all the orchestral instruments, over the next three days, and get them gain balanced into the mixes!

I think it's doable. And then, back on the horse next week, I'll deal with the guitar issue, after work each night.

I did take notes last Sunday, on the guitars, and the problem songs are; Closer To You, Clue Phone, and Other Friends...

ARCHEOLOGY: pretty good guitar sound. crunchy. realistic. good room sound.
REAVIS: good room sound. nice EQ. realistic.
NEVER RAINS: not as good as previous two but holds up well. great distortion though!
MAGIC MONDAY: perfect for the song.
TUESDAY SIREN: Good! No complaints.
OUR COLD FEET: Good! no complaints! Nice distortion!
CLOSER TO YOU: not the best! also lacks delay. chorus guitar better than verse.
SUBURBS: Pretty great! Use this for other friends!
CLUE PHONE: terrible! maybe too much delay?.. or too long delay? maybe longer SUSTAIN?
OTHER FRIENDS: not the best! Burbs guitar would be better? distortion is great though.
SPELL: Excellent! Use for Clue Phone?
MISS FORTUNE: Classic! a bit loud. possible for Clue Phone?

Maybe as I go from song to song this weekend, adjusting and saving PQ2 presets for the orchestrals, I'll also save the guitar settings; Sakura, PQ2, Fast Dist, Convolver, to a new folder... with screen shots of the Sakura UI, so I can see which knobs are tweaked differently.

That'll help me next week, to sort out what's working and not working, with guitars, to get them all to the same standard.

Okay, time to hit it!

Talk to you later.

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

8:15PM

Okay, so I've been through; Reavis, Rains, Monday, and Tuesday.

And now I've worked out PQ2 for; Cello LO, Cello HI (violin), Flute HI, Flute LO, Trumpet, Horn, Clarinet, Xylophonhe, Vibrophone, Celesta, and Bells!

Reavis had the Cellos, and Xylo... which propagated to Rains, when I opened that file, which had Flutes, and Celesta.... wich propagated to Monday when I opened that file, which had Bells... and it all propagated to Tuesday, which had Vibrophone.

So there's only a few orchestral instruments left; bassoon, marimba?.. I don't even know what else.

There is, however piano in a few songs, but I'm holding off on Piano until *after* guitars are worked out.

And then, speaking of Guitar, as I've been going, I've been saving the presets for Sakura, PQ2, Fast Dist, and Convolver... as well as screen-shotting the Sakura UI for each one (several songs have two guitars).

I should be able to flip through the PNGs of those screenshots to see which knobs get tweaked the most... like a slide show, watching which ones move where.

The screen-shotting is necessary because of the way the guitar signal chain works in these productions.

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

GUITAR SIGNAL CHAIN: ARCHEOLOGY

Sakura algorithmically generates two string sounds, one that's more of a pluck, and another that's more of a sustain. And it's a blend of the two which makes the final string sound.

But then there are all kinds of other knobs having to do with... HI CUT cutoff, resonance, overdrive, attack decay, and sustain... LO CUT cutoff & resonance... ENVELOPE attack, decay, sustain, and resonance... and others i've never dared to touch, like the EXCITER & RESONATOR banks.

So that's where the instrument and it's main sound originate.

But then Sakura also has an in-built amp simulator for Delay, Chorus, and Reverb, which works better than trying to use outboard FL plugins... to simulate the amp.

After that, the signal goes to Parametric EQ2, for some shaping of the overall frequency profile, and then it goes to Fruity Fast Dist, for the distortion.

The quality of the distortion depends a lot on the signal coming into Fast Dist from Sakura and it's strength. The chorus settings especially, and the HI CUT sustain really effect the distortion.

Finally, it goes to Convolver for the cabinet simulation, with the cabinet's impulse.

--<>--

Of course, great pains have been taken in the piano-roll with velocities, and to strum the strings (moving notes off grid to simulate up and down strokes), simulate finger muting (notes stop short, or are allowed to ring out long), slide into and out of different chord strikes, and even the simulation of muted back strokes between chord strikes, in a few songs.

All of that helps humanize the performance, but then we have our signal chain to get the guitar itself to sound like a real one.

In the songs where I've gotten that right, it's very convincing.

But that's a very narrow tightrope! If the settings are even a little off... the illusion is broken and the guitar sounds like a synthesized toy!

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk!

--<>--

Okay, so as 9PM, and the late night session draws near...

I'll say, I'm not worrying too much about gain balancing right now, because I'm listening at odd volumes with the white noise of a space heater, so i'm just dialing these orchestrals into the ball park.

There will be a second pass at gain balancing after the guitars and pianos are worked out, EQ-wise.

But for tonight, it's about finishing the last orchestral PQ2s, propagating them through to the end, and completing that database of guitar sounds, from my 12 guitar experiments.

But I actually think I can knock that all out before bed!

If so, the next two days will be about guitar and piano!

Wish me luck!.. Happy Valentine!.. and I'll talk to you tomorrow!

°¦}

Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos

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Superbowl Sunday

2026-02-09T00:58:22Z

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

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Rhinovirus

2026-02-07T22:05:55Z

28F and sunny out there, with a low of 20F tonight.

So, nothing got done at all with the album this past week, owing to a bad cold.

It first struck on THU, JAN 29, when I woke up feeling achey, and oogie all day, and then by Friday the sinus congestion started in.

I continued to gain-balance Thursday & Friday night, and through last weekend to get that first pass completed... and I thought I was getting over whatever it was.

But by Monday, it was clear I was still sick. Some upper resperatory virus like my immne system had not encountered before. I made it to work all five days, and worked through the brain fog, recurring acheyness, ear ringing, runny nose, loss of appetite, etc, but would return home every night completely drained.

Now that it's the weekend, I'm feeling a bit better, and I can take it easy, so I do plan to get going with the spectral analyzer today and tomorrow. And then hopefully i'll be feeling good enough next week to continue with it after work at night.

--<>--

In other news, I was experiencing intermittent foot pain the whole week, most notably in my left heel, and realized that my work shoes have reached their 18 month lifespan.

I've been buying the same pair of shoes and the same pair of orthotic inserts for the past 8 years, because they've proven to work so well for my lifestyle of 10K+ steps per day in a fully concrete environment, but they only last a year and a half.

I last purchased new shoes/orthotics in August of 2024, a month after starting at PVHS.

So the time has come. But luckily, my budget allowed me to afford the purchase, and the shoes will be here tomorrow.

--<>--

This past week we saw highs around 20F, and lows in the teens, which was an improvement over the bitterly cold weeks before it, but... next week we'll see highs of 40, and lows of 20, which will be absolutely lovely!

So with that mild weather, new work shoes, AND shaking off this cold?.. next week should be a very happy one... which will then give way to a 3-day weekend!

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

6:46PM

Okay, well... a bit of research revealed there is no magic, "spectral analyzer" plugin, like I imagined, that would just tell me what are the fundamental frequencies of each instrument.

The tutorial just said to look at the waveform in Parametric EQ2, and go by that, and "write down" the different frequencies, in order to know where to carve out space in other PQ2s.

So, in other words, this is exactly what I already learned to do back at the start of Hallowenwek!

That's good news, because there's no extra learning curve.

So, basically this stage of spectral analysis is simply going through everything very attentively, writing the data down, and re-carving the different PQ2s based on that data, which was never fully gathered before this.

Recall back at the start of Hallowenwek, I did identify the key fundamentals of the kicks and the toms, and I carved out space in the kick EQ for the toms... and high-passed the toms to free up the kick zone, between 40 to 70 hz.

But those fundamentals have slightly changed over the months as things have been tweaked and tuned, and I never did get all the data for the cymbals, the bass, guitar, and orchestrals.

So, there's work to do, but i'm starting with the drums and the bass guitar, because if I can establish those PQ2 presets for Reavis, they'll be the same for every song on the album.

Also, it's better to do this now, and wait on the 2nd pass of gain staging... as the changes to the EQ will no doubt alter the amplitudes of different instruments slightly.

Lastly, I'm glad I didn't dive into this this past week while sick, because it is very mentally demanding work.

Okay, back to it. I'll talk to you later tonight.

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

10:09PM

Okay, I've made it through a reworking of the EQ for all drums, cymbals, and bass guitar, with all the new presets saved in a new PQ2-FNMX folder.

I was able to monitor over the iLouds at fairly loud volume for everything but the crash and splash cymbals which were the final two to be EQed.

So... a good louder volume to hear... focusing on the EQ much more than the levels, but with everything pre-balanced, the levels stayed mostly balanced.

Plus the eyeballs looking at the spectral analyzer, plus the cold logic of fundamental freq data for the notching and/or slight boosts.

The eyeballing wasn't just about seeing the waveforms live against the freq grid, but also the curve and sweep of the line I was creating across that grid with the sliders.

For that, the assumption is that the more gracefully the line curves, the better for the mix... with the exception of deliberate notches... but even for those, I tried to keep things graceful.

This was just the rhythm section, but, out of the loud speakers, the mix did sound much better than what I recall from the rough record. The balance was there, and the clarity, but that dullness and lack of shimmer I observed a few weeks back was gone.

I then switched to headphones, after 10PM, and after EQing the crash and splash, just gave it a couple listen throughs, and it sounds phenomenal!

So the goal is by tomorrow night, after the laundry's done, to be propagating the new PQ2 presets for drums, cymbals, and bass guitar, out to the other 11 songs.

Then over the week... I'll need to work up a strategy for the guitars.

--<>--

The guitar is more complicated, because a good deal of it's EQ character is handled in the Sakura UI, before it hits PQ2.

And in each of the 12 songs, at this point, as I've been through all these stages of tightening and gain-balancing, I've tweaked each of those Sakura settings a bit differently... and tweaked the PQ2 a bit differently as well.

So the question is... is there one BEST guitar sound that works for all 12 songs?.. some happy medium of the diffent settings I've created?

Or are there, say THREE best guitar sounds, depedning on the type of song?

Or... is it better to allow the guitar to be custom for every song?.. and not waste time chasing a silver bullet guitar sound?

--<>--

Tim's just called, so it's time for the phone call!

Talk to you later.

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

3:25AM

Okay, so Tim's big breakthrough this week was that he finally struck up a dialogue with an LLM (Gemini) about his prospective pool rental business idea, and the logistics surrounding it, and has discovered he's actually in a very good position, and has very favorable options for financing.

And so... this past year I've been very conversant with DeepSeek, but asside from Dylan, am the only person in my sphere to do so until just now, with Tim, who finally sees the benefits of it.

This tells me Dylan and I were among the "early adopters" and that chatting with LLMs will become a lot more mainstream in 2026 than it was in 2025.

And that's good news! LLMs are invaluable for assisting with practical projects that one is ready to put real effort into... as well as good company on nights when you're down with a rinovirus and don't have the energy to do much but BS about a random subject!

--<>--

In the late session, after the call ended, I got back to the going Reavis mix and did some A/B comparissons between headphones and low-volume iLouds to confirm that they actually agreed about the relative volume of the guitars, as well as certain cymbals like the hat pedal, hat tap, and ride/ride-bell.

In other words, both confirmed that I could/should turn down the guitars and said cymbals a lot more, in the mix, than even the gain-balancing sessions had suggested.

This was because things had changed a bit with the new EQ scheme, especially with the cymbals.

But for the guitar, I decided... it still sounds fine EQ-wise, and was more interested in getting a good mix of the rock trio with the guitar as it was, only adjusting the volume.

--<>--

I then loaded up Never Rains, and drag-dropped all the new PQ2 presets for all the drums, cymbals, and bass guitar... and did a quick re-balance for that... bringing up the guitars and again, not touching their EQ, but only adjusting volume by ear with an A/B comparisson in headphones and low-volume iLouds.

As with Reavis, the mix sounded great!

Now it's time to eat and get to bed.

But I think I've found my way forward for the coming week here... and it's to propagate the PQ2s for drums/bass to all songs, and do a second pass of gain-balancing for just the rock trio... leaving the guitar EQs alone!

The goal will be, by next Saturday, to have the rock trio for all 12 songs effectively EQed and gain balanced better than ever... and to confirm that with higher volume audience over the iLouds.

The next step would then be to EQ the orchestral instruments in the same fashion as I've been doing tonight... a combination of eyeball, freq data, and A/B comparissons in headphones and speakers.

Like with drums and bass, all orchestrals should have identical PQ2 settings globally. So while it may take three or four songs for me to encounter all of them, cello, violin, flute, horn, trumpet, piano, etc... and dial them in... the resulting FNMX-PQ2 settings should be easily drag-dropped into all songs indentically.

After that, it's just quick adjustments to their gain-balance... again, with an A/B comparisson in headphones and low-volume iLoud, until confirmation at higher volume the next weekend.

In this scheme, the guitar EQ will be the very LAST thing to touch!

It could be that for the guitar, the best practice is just to leave them as-is with minor tweaks in each song... the custom approach. Because I *have* already bent over backward in each song, at every step, to get the guitars better EQed, and I should probably trust that work.

Okay, so my chimichangas are in the air fryer, and it's time to wind it on down.

I'll talk to you tomorrow.

°¦}

Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos

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FEBRUARY BEGINS

2026-02-02T00:33:23Z

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

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JANUARY ENDS

2026-01-31T20:06:48Z

25F and sunny out there today!

This is the first time we've broken 20 in what? Two weeks? This past week was miserable, with highs in the low teens and lows in the single digits all week.

But now we're getting back to 20s and 30s by day, and teens by night which is far more tolerable!.. and it'll hit 40 on Friday, which will feel glorious!

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

POKE'STOP

So on Tuesday, the photo for this building's pokestop changed, from the ugly plaque, to my photo of the tower's west face on the skyline!

Proof of concept!

In the near future I'm gonna take new photos for all the other "ugly plaque" pokestops near me, and with Colleen & Justin's help, get them into the game.

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

3 DOWN, 1 TO GO

Over the work week I gain staged, Clue Phone, Other Friends, and Spell I'm Under, so now Miss Fortune's the only one left, and it'll get done today!

This means the 2nd pass will begin tonight. We'll see how far I get by tomorrow night, but I expect to be taking a tutorial on the spectral analyzer sometime this coming week!

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

TEAC V-285CHX

Maintenance guys here in Allerton Tower were emptying out a vacant apartment on my floor earlier this week, and in the former resident's closet had found a bunch of old electronics... dusty, but looking to be in good shape.

Before they could even take the stuff down to the trash room I spotted a tape deck and claimed it! A TEAC V-285CHX, single transport deck with dolby noise reduction and a switch for metal and chrome tapes.

It likely rolled off the line around 1992, at the peak of tape deck tech, right before CDs would take over, and this model was known as a workhorse!

So my idea is to get it refurbished.

I'm gonna open it up and give it the once over this weekend, before plugging it in, but a refurb on this machine may cost a lot less than the 600.00 i've been trying to save up for a modern (and inferior) Tascam deck.

I can likely do the belts and pinch roller myself, but then I'd take it to a technician to have it recalibrated, and perhaps re-capped (new capacitors), if needs be.

There's a place called Deltronics that'll do the work, over in Warrenville, about 30 minutes away, so I could drive it there, and pick it up, saving a ton on shipping costs.

We'll have to see! This won't be a priority until after the album is done, so I'll continue saving my pennies until then, but I could have a, like-new, 90s era tape deck this spring to use for digitizing my tape archive!

And it'd also be good for creating a cassette tape version of the album!.. for what that's worth.

--<>--

That's the update! I'm up at a decent time today and there's no building checks for me this weekend. Today I'll stay home. Tomorrow I'll pay the February bills, then go run the Sunday errands. Then Monday is Groundhog Day.

Talk to you later.

°¦}

Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos

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Slushy Sunday

2026-01-26T00:33:45Z

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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Preliminary Findings

2026-01-24T22:18:16Z

6F out there, with overcast skies.

Yesterday, the high was -5F, and was down to -10F when I walked home from the parking garage! That was the worst of it, but this whole coming week will be low teens above during the day, and single digits below by night.

This will finish out our January, on a cold note. But maybe it means February will be milder?

--<>--

Over the week I got Never Rains & Magic Monday gain staged, then took a night to prep the rest of the songs for it, by adjusting all the channel rack volumes to 100% and eliminating all the unused patterns.

Then last night, I got about half way through Tuesday Siren.

Today, I've just reviewed Reavis, Never Rains, and Magic Monday (music only, no lyrics) at high volume and there's definitely been an improvement!

The drums and cymbals are finally clear and up front, with the kick being very present. The bass and guitar are also clear... not conflicting.

The cello and violin are amazingly clear and do sound as if they're in the room.

The other orchestral are also sounding good, and somewhat in the room.

Everything's intelligible, even in dense musical interludes.

--<>--

I suppose the main notes are that the bass sounds a bit dull? The overall rhythm section seems to lack a bit of sparkle? I wouldn't call it low end mud... I think it's more to do with the general EQ, and lack of compression?

--<>--

And while everything's quite clear, this all could be mixed a bit better, from the amplitude standpoint. Certain cymbals seem a bit loud. Certain orchestrals are either a bit loud or a bit quiet.

So... I'm definitely on the right track here, but these early tracks will need a second pass.

This is because early on I thought I was just managing peaks, and didn't fully appreciate the low-volume mixing aspect of this stage right away... the idea of critically listening to get the guitars and higher pitched elements into the mix by ear, rather than by the meters.

To do this right, I'm learning, the rhythm section has to be balanced first, and then the ears have to get used to hearing those drums and bass at the low volume, at which point the rest is mixed in, according to the frame that's been established.

For guitar, cello, and violin this is pretty easy, but for things like marimba, xylophone, bells, flutes, and piano... it can be difficult to get the volume just right.

Think of listening at low volume as being like looking at the mix from far away, the room being a kind of shoe-box diarama, with the drums and bass inside that box. The higher pitched orchestral have to be at the right depth inside that little box, but it's easy to lose focus and put them out on the table in front of the diarama...

From your distant perspective they appear to be in the box, but they're actually much closer to you than you think.

Then occasionally I overcompensate and push them too far back into the box.

This is ultimately a problem of ear-training.

But it's worth taking the time to get trained, because the results, when it's done right, are far better, at high volume, than any other way of mixing... thanks to what's known as the Fletcher-Munson curve.

Fletcher-Munson was a study of perceived loudness at different amplitudes. Without getting too deep into it, what it means is, if everything sounds balanced at low volume, it tends to sound balanced at all volumes.

So, especially for gain staging, before any serious EQ or compression is added, doing the near-field, low-volume mix is the best way to get everything situated, and makes future stages a lot easier to deal with.

--<>--

So, I'll continue on mixing through to Miss Fortune, then come back for another pass to tweak the early songs before sending the new mixes into Audacity to do low-level balancing of the exisiting vocals and sound effects.

The result should be a far more balanced Ruff Record.

And only then, can I move on to spectral analysis, and compression.

It is looking like, however, that the mastering will be with a limiter.

The way that I'm doing these mixes preserves a lot of dynamic range, meaning the main body of the songs will be a bit on the quiet side. A limiter can lift that up a bit, while keeping the peaks from clipping.

Still, in open air speakers, most listeners will likely crank the volume knob a bit, even on the mastered version... which is fine, because nothing will be clipping. But headphones listeners will probably be perfectly happy with it. So it's a good compromise.

--<>--

Okay, onward to completing Tuesday Siren, and hopefully I can get Cold Feet knocked out today as well!

Talk to you later.

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

7:55PM

Hung up my single Valentine decoration in the window tonight.

Tuesday Siren got done and was exported, then I also just finished Cold Feet, and it's exporting now... to WAV!

Cold Feet went quickly, because it's a simpler song. Fewer instruments and fewer unique patterns.

So, I'm now half way through the first pass of gain staging for the album!

And I believe the second pass will go much faster, because things will already be so close to where they need to be!

Closer To You is next up, and will probably take a while, because it does involve some pretty dense orchestral swells at the end of the song.

Still, tonight I feel even the first passes are going faster, now that I have a solid theory in my head for what exactly I'm doing.

Peak management for drums & cymbals via faders alone.
Peak management for bass via fader and scaling of velocities with an emphasis on the latter.
Aclimatize ears to rhythm section, then get guitar volume by ear via fader, no need to touch the veolocities, as the guitar will never come anywhere near pegging the meter.
Cello & violin next, much the same as with the bass... hybrid approach.
All the rest of the orchestral instruments one by one, with a kind of tri-brid approach... velocity first, then earballing as faders are adjusted.
Final focus on master meter... find spikes, go in to adjust velocities in offending drum patterns. It's always a case of several drums/cymbals hitting at once in specific beats.
Call it good, and export!

Okay!.. on to, Closer to You.

Talk to you later tonight!

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

3:08AM

Closer To You is now exporting to WAV! I managed to get it done tonight, even with a Saturday Night Phone Call with Tim!

So, that was song number seven, and the end of Side One!

With time tomorrow to get a start on, Suburbs, and a five-day week ahead with the standard 3-hours per night to mix... things are looking good for this first pass of the gain staging to be complete by this time next week!

--<>--

Normal latest stop time is 4:30AM, so... here at 3:15AM, I'm done with over an hour to spare, which means I should be able to get up early for building checks and groceries tomorrow, optimizing studio time tomorrow night.

I'm gonna back everything up, make some food, wind on down, and I'll talk to you tomorrow!

°¦}

Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos

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MLK DAY

2026-01-19T22:42:43Z

7F out there, with partly blue skies, going down to 3F tonight!

I spent a good couple hours last night, setting all the faders for never rains, and even caught some mistakes in the music that I fixed. So... very productive!.. UNTIL... I closed the entire file accidentally, only to realize I had not saved any of that work!

This is the danger of drinking while mixing on a weekend night!

Right now I'm just sipping my coffee, waking up, and happy that I don't have to get gas or groceries today, with a wind chill of four below!

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

6:15PM

Okay, so yesterdays rogue masters didn't sound so great.

Basically, the gain staging resulted in the main body of the music being fairly quiet, because there is such a huge dB gap between that and the loudest peaks.

Using serial compression and limiting was an attempt to get that volume back, and it sort of worked, but it's not a silver bullet.

So, I accepted that the real issue is with the velocities themselves.

I opened the old Reavis and saved it as FNMX, to start the gain staging over from scratch, this time putting the channel rack volumes all to 100%, so that I can ignore the channel rack and focus only on the mixing board (in the last attempt the channel rack volumes were at 75%).

After this I focused only on the drums, because with the drums, the velocities are not as exaggerated or unpredictable as they can be with the instruments.

So, ignoring velocities, I adjusted all drum faders to have them peaking just below 0, and then adjusted the master fader until that whole drum mix was peaking just below zero (around -2dB).

This put the master fader at -22dB.

I did have one stubborn pattern where the kick, snare, and crash all hit on the first beat together, so for that I went in and pulled down the velocities to keep it from peaking.

So, now I'm gonna focus on the bass, guitar, cello, violin, and xylo... one at a time, and for those I will go in and tweak the velocities in offending patterns for the sake of a higher overall level for each of those faders.

I did learn, in my research today, that there's a fairly easy way to select all the notes in a pattern and scale down all the velocities at once... so that the relationship between one note and the next remains the same, but the peak is brought down.

And this is just what I'll have to do for every song.... slowly gain staging and velocity editing until nothings peaking above 0dB, but everything's as loud as it can be.

And that won't do much for the sound of the mixes, it's just ground work for the next stages of spectral analysis and compression on each instrument and drum.

However, this work will give me yet another chance to comb through the songs and fix little mistakes or oversights, so there's that... and this is also the first stage of the FNMX infrastructure... creating FNMX versions, and populating the WORK04 folder with FNMX AUP3s, etc.

So... in the single digit cold of mid January, as the moon slowly waxes, the final mix begins with the unglamorous work of gain staging... which could take a couple weeks.

Talk to you later tonight.

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

8:45PM

Okay, so everything's balanced except for the xylophone, which I'll get to after the laundry's gotten started.

Rather than listen in headphones, I've been doing this with the near field monitors at low volume. Low enough, I think, that the neighbors can't hear it.

And if I keep up with that practice on work nights, I think it could give my ears some good training. Hearing the mix at a low volume, and also knowing that everything in that mix is as loud as it can be, and no louder.

This could help me down the road when I'm in the compression stage, to usefully monitor near field late at night.

Like, I'll still do most of that work in headphones on work nights, but I may be able to compare to low-level iLouds on occasions to get a clue, rather than doing that exclusively on the weekends.

--<>--

At any rate, my strategy for the bass and guitar was somewhat to pull the faders down, but also to go through each pattern, solo it while watching the mixer, and then scale down velocities and slightly tweak, to get their peaks below zero.

I also selected each pattern and did, "show in playlist" to make sure they were actually being used in the song! For the guitar, there were seven unused patterns, so I colored them gray, and grouped them at the bottom of the guitar section of the list.

Unused patterns are the result of all the WekBrek tightening, where certain patterns were quickly cloned and then the clone was improved and deployed into the song.

Checking like this, saves time. No point in velocity tweaking seven unused patterns! Graying them out keeps them around in case for some reason I realize I need one or the other of them.

--<>--

For the Cello and Violin, I left the faders exactly at the default position and did all the volume control in the velocities of the patterns themselves.

This is because, unlike drums, bass, and guitar, the strings are not rhythmic. They play longer, more sustaining notes, so I want to retain as much volume as possible with them.

Also, velocity itself is not as much of a thing with strings. There doesn't need to be much volume difference between one note and the next.

So... in conclusion here, before I get into the shower, the work is kinda slow going, but the resulting gain staging makes more sense than my first attempt, which was just to keep pulling down the faders until they stopped peaking over 0.

And there's a technique developing, so that'll make things flow better as this process continues through all 12 songs.

Lastly, yes, I've been obsessively saving the work as I go!

Talk to you later tonight.

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

10:55PM

I'm all clean & shiny with a trimmed beard and the laundry's in the dryer.

Gain staging is done for Reavis. What I learned is that after every individual track is optimized to stay just below the zero mark, the master levels will still show peaking above zero, thanks to the combined effects of different tracks all going hard at the same moments.

This happens in the more intense parts of the song, naturally.

But my decision was to hold the line with the master fader at -22dB, and just go back through velocities for those problem beats and tweak them down.

Mostly this was done with drums, whose velocities I had not altered, but occasionally I had to tweak everything, bass, guitar, strings... just for one or another beat, and just a hair.

So, that informs the routine, going forward.

I really should strive to keep the master fader in all songs to -22.

And ignoring drum velocities until the end is also a good idea, I think... and then only tweaking this or that offending beat.

The hybrid approach for bass and guitar seems to be the best. They are rhythmic, they do need to have variations in velocity. For example if either one is pumping on a single note or single chord for a few measures, you absolutely have to have that velocity variation to avoid it sounding totally robotic.

For all the orchestrals, however, I think unity with the faders and full velocity tweaking is the key. Because for all of them, doubled up notes really affect the peak.

You can have a xylo, or a violin playing one note at a time, and have it at a fairly high level, but if they start doing two-note chords, that spikes the meters. Velocity is the best way to deal with that.

I don't want the entire violin track to be at -12db, just because of a few spikes in one pattern.

So, the new Reavis test WAV was saved, and I think I'm gonna get a fresh start on Never Rains for the remainder of the evening.

Though I do need to create a prompt to establish a new decompression chat with DeepSeek, for the coming weeks, and get that AI up to speed with things.

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

FINAL TAKES FOR THE MLK WEEKEND

After a two-week haiatus, this long weekend was a bumpy start to the final mix.

Saturday was eaten up by building checks, errands, and the weekly phone call, such that the only accomplishment was just the listen to the Ruff Record in the iLouds.

Sunday was very destabilized by the hours long protest across the street, making so much noise it was difficult to concentrate on anything, much less audition music in the loudspeakers.

I did get a start on gain staging, but it was an unfocused start.

Today was where I fianally found that focus, by going back to the drawing board with the gain staging.

But the low-level near field monitoring, I think will be something of a game changer going forward.

Especially in the gain staging phase, it's more about eyeing levels than hearing. Even if it's whisper quiet, that's enough.

On that count, however, I'll say the extreme cold is a help. When it's down in the single digits the silent radiator stays on constantly, so there's no need to cycle a space heater, with it's white noise.

Also the world outside at night is just quieter, because everybody's hiding out at home.

--<>--

Okay!.. that's how the final mixing phase begins!

An awkward, bumpy start after two weeks away. But we're finally off the ground.

Talk to you next Saturday!

°¦}

Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos

._.

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Gain Staging

2026-01-19T00:28:49Z

18F with flurries, going down to single digits tonight.

I was up by 3PM today, which is much better than the 5PM of the past few weekends.

I had to get out while it was still daylight, to a parking garage down the street, so I could get up on the roof level (5th floor) and take a photo of my building.

Reason being that this tower is a pokestop, but the photo for it, in game, is a crooked picture of the plaque out front, which is unreadable due to low contrast.

The photo dates back to the early ingress days, when this building was submitted as a portal.

But on the phone with Colleen last night, we realized that if I submitted a new photo, and She, Justin, and myself gave it a like, it would become the new default picture!.. or so we theorize.

So I got my shot, then cropped it and submitted it, but it'll have to be approved first before it appears as a secondary photo for the pokestop. So in a few weeks we'll see. But if it works, I'm gonna do it for several other pokestops around downtown.

--<>--

I then fired up FL Studio and opened up Reavis 309, then saved it as a new file with a FNMX suffix, for Final Mix. And then I got to work on the track volumes, via the board faders.

I didn't realize until I looked it up today, but the volumes are never supposed to spike above the 0 threshold, and many things were! So I silenced everything and started with just the kick... working in the other drums and cymbals one by one, followed by the bass, guitar, cello, violin, and lastly the xylophone.

Some of them I had to pull down quite a bit to stop them from going into the red. A few others needed boosting.

And even after I had every individual track out of the red, for it's own channel, there remained a few spikes in the red on the master channel, due to the combined strikes of loud elements here and there... so I had to pull down the master fader a bit more.

Once the whole mix was as loud as it could be without any spikes above 0, I exported it as a WAV, and am now about to import it into the Reavis vocal AUP3. And then in there, I'll work on the volumes of the sound effects and the vocals to try and get everything balanced.

Unfortunately, I cannot monitor the results in the iLouds tonight, because we have a very loud protest going on right across the street, with people chanting loudly as lead by a guy with an amplifier.

Apparently the theater up the street is holding a fundraiser, at which Jerry Seinfeld is appearing, and the protesters are very upset with him, because of his controversial stances on various things.

So... their chanting and drum beating makes near field monitoring impossible, and i'm sure they won't be done until it's past quiet hours here in the building.

It's the kind of random problem you never imagine could screw up a day off.

So I'll have to just monitor in headphones and watch the meter in Audacity.

Talk to you later tonight.

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

1:22AM

Okay, so the new version of Reavis was saved as our first WORK04.AUP3 file, in the WORK04 folder.

I pasted in the FNMX version of the music (gain staged) and then stretched Audacity's meter hoizontally to display a lot more granularity... and set the buffer length back to 100ms, from the 300ms it had been set at for the previous work.

That buffer reset made the meter reflect things in real time.

I solo'd the different vocal and SFX tracks to get them peaking just below 0, on the meter, and then, with the full mix playing, adjusted the vocals down another dB, just to be safe.

That mix was exported as an FNMX.WAV.

--<>--

The resulting waveform looked thin... peaks not exceeding zero, but the main body was now quieter than I wanted.

In other words, the peaks were too far away from the average volume... such that caging the peaks below zero meant the main bits of the mix were now too quiet.

I knew this was an issue best addressed by going into FL and doing custom compression on each individual track, but... that's a lot of detailed work for another day!

Tonight, I just wanted to beef up the gain-staged Ruff Record version!.. cuz I knew from yesterday's auditon that the EQ and room sound are quite good, so... why not just compress the whole mix to see what happens?

Consulting AI for assistance, I came up with a compressor setting, to lightly tame the peaks, and a limiter setting to beef up the body.

And after some experimentation I found that if I applied them both twice; comp, limit, comp again, limit again, it nicely squared up the wave form without any pumping or flutter!

I then undid it all back to scratch and applied a very light, almost subliminal, stereo room reverb to the entire mix... and then did my serial comp, limit, comp, limit again.

The result was a nicely squared, robust mix, with no pumping or flutter, not totally flat... still with a healthy bit of dynamic range, that sounded far better than the original Ruff Record mix.

Essentially, what I'd done was leapfrog straight to the mastering stage!

Gain staging? Yes! Surgical PQ2 after spectral analysis? No! Custom compression of each instrument? No! Just... gain-staged rough mix, now rough mastered with global verb, and global, serial compression/limiting.

But the result was informative! The leapfrogged mastering did really glue things together! It brought out the collective reverb, and substantially leveled the volume of things.

It wasn't a perfect master, by any means, but it was an improvement on the Ruff Record, and it gave me some needed experience with compression and limiting.

--<>--

I then went back to Archeology, the song, and repeated the whole experiment, saving the FL music as a new FNMX version, then doing the gain staging for both the lo-fi, and HD stems... then bringing those into a new FNMX version of the vocal AUP3 file, etc.

I did the frog mastering to it, and then I did the same frog mastering to the crypt sequence, and the time travel sequence.

Then I strung it all together in a new file; crypt, Archeology, time travel, Reavis... all gain balanced and frog mastered.

And that... was the inception of what I'm now calling, the Rogue Record!

--<>--

The Rogue Record is just the Ruff Record... gain balanced, with proto mastering of room verb and serial compression/limiter to square out the wave form.

That proto-mastering is only for experimentation... it won't be permanent.

But I feel that the Rogue Record could teach me a little more about how to approach the final mix!

Because with everything gain-balanced, and frog mastered, it's easier to hear what's really wanting for custom compression and EQ adjustment, in each song.

--<>--

Still, I was only able to hear my new start to the Rogue Record in headphones, thanks to the protesters, who now have all gone home.

So tomorrow I'll air it in the iLouds, and we'll go from there I guess.

These are my first unsure steps into the world of mix/mastering for an art rock album meant to sound live.

It could take me a week or two to really get my sea legs on this, but this is how I've started.

Talk to you tomorrow.

°¦}

Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos

._.

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New Moon

2026-01-17T23:46:21Z

17F with flurries and wind out there today, going down to 7F overnight.

Found out last night that I'd be needed for building checks today, so I actually got up at the normal time today and clocked in at 2:30PM... half an hour earlier than my new normal start time.

I left at 4:30PM, and since I was already out, I got my groceries and gas on the way home.

So now all that stuff's out of the way, and I won't have to leave home tomorrow or Monday (MLK Day).

--<>--

So this past week was the second full week of neither working on, nor listening to the album. But with the graphics done, there wasn't much to do!

I did have an interesting chat with DeepSeek about The Beatles and their pioneering use of compression... which lead to a general chat about how I might mix and master my own album to have as clean a sound.

Basically, the three things I need to learn are, the spectral analyzer, the compressor, and how to side chain.

SPECTRAL ALNALYZER: This tool will show me which frequencies are the most important for each instrument, and with that information I can do the parametric notch filtering a lot more effectively, to ensure everything is present in the mix and nothing is stepping on anything else.
COMPRESSION: Apparently what I want to do is individually compress each instrument according to their unique character. This goes for the snare and the kick as well, but some of the other drums and cymbals can be sent to a single compressor.
SIDE CHAINING: This is a way to set things up so that, for example, the guitar or the orchestral volumes will slightly duck by a few decibels whenever the kick drum hits... or perhaps some drum or other ducks when a particular instrument plays.

All of that will be done in FL Studio, and then in Audacity, the vocals and sound effects will be conditioned and compressed to blend into those final music mixes.

So, if it took me 2 months to go from no EQ at all, to the current Ruff Record, it could take another two months to go from Ruff Record to Archeological Record.

However, there are certain things this time around I won't have to do again! Like... no comping or manual compression of vocals. No foley work. And, one would hope, far less time tightening the music.

So this *could* mean the Archeological Record is done in ONE month!

If we split the difference, then we're talking about March 1st.

In that scenario, the singles would start rolling out, one per week, through March, April, and May, with the "official" playlist version of Archeology making it's debut on June 1st.

So... an album for the summer!

--<>--

But first, the Ruff Record must be auditioned over the iLoud's!

I finished the final song back on the night of the full moon, at the end of the Great Wekbrek, and since then, normal life has resumed.

Students back to school, people back to work, a new year underway.

Now, tonight is the first new moon of 2026... a symbolically apt moment to hear that work, with new ears, and take my notes.

So, with the evening's first beer, that's what I'll do!

Talk to you later.

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

7:50PM

Okay!... near field monitoring, at a moderate volume, of the entire album is complete! And I do have a lot of impressions.

As far as a punch list goes, the main note is about balancing. In general, the sound effects are too quiet. They sound fine in headphones, but in open air they're mostly too quiet.

The second note is like the first in that the biggest issue I heard was simply the volume balance of everything from song to song. In some songs this or that is a bit too quiet, and in other songs it's this other thing, or that other thing.

HOWEVER!.. as for the EQ of everything, it sounds great! Nothing souds canny, or boxy, or honky, or lacking. And the overall mixes do not sound muddy or bassy.

This goes for the sound effects too.

So, while I will dial in the EQ of things better with that spectral analyzer and the parametric EQ2, equalization is not the big issue or hurdle here.

And while compression will be the ultimate arbiter of each element's presence in the mix, a thorough pre-compression volume balancing is in order.

I say this because in some songs the drums are super present, while in others they feel distant... and this goes for the guitar and bass as well. So, it's possible to get them all more present and popping, just by adjusting faders... which to this point has not yet been done.

So far all the volume control has been on the level of velocity, and the signal outs of the different effects (PQ2, convolver, Sakura, etc). So, on that level, things could be slightly tweaked, but in general it's time to start pushing and pulling faders on the mixing board.

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

THE ROOM IS SO REAL!

On the up side, I was quite surprised to find that, "the room" is already an extremely convincing reality!

Based on this audience of the RR, I'm gonna say that the casual listener would assume this is an actual group of musicians and singers in a room, trying to create the feel of a tracked album... and doing an admirable job but... we can still tell this is live!

And that's the exact opposite of what it really IS!.. a completely fictional, piano rolled production, hoping to sound like a living band. So, in other words, it's a total success on this critical level!

You can see them in the space. You can feel the personalities of the drummer, bass player, and guitarist. You can see the cellist, violinist, pianist, etc. From song to song they exhibit the same personality traits.

They are all playing well, but nobody is a virtuoso. That, I think helps to sell it. These are all competent musicians, who clearly have practiced these songs, but you do get the impression that it's people from the neighborhood! It's the best players you could find from the local bars and coffeehouses, who just want to jam.

--<>--

The inpenetrability of this, band in a room, illusion is the synthesis of many factors beyond just velocities and sliding notes off grid.

THE DRUM KIT: The painstaking curation of each drum sound mostly from the jazz folders, and the layering of click and body sounds for the snare, kick, and toms, really paid off!

This sounds like a drum kit in a room. There is baked in room verb for every drum and cymbal, and the way our drummer was animated makes it feel like it has to be a human. This is not a drum-machine rhythm track.
CONVOLVER CAB SIMS: For the bass and the guitar these cab sims do sell it! They blend into that room verb that the drums have baked into them. For all the world, this sounds like the small amps of two guitarists in that same space.

The careful velocity and strum work on the guitar strings also humanizes the guitarist quite a lot! The other work done to mitigate the synthy sound of Sakura also works wonderfully. This sounds like an electric guitar!.. and in open speakers you don't hear the distortion or the chorus/delay nearly as much.

So it authentically sounds like a bare signal guitarist, with whatever fuzz or delay there is, feeling more like the result of his amp's speaker distorting a bit, and his notes getting natural slapback from within the room.
UNIVERSITY FREE VST SOUNDS: It was unexpectedly striking how live and human the orchestral stuff sounded in this mix! But it's all down to the fact that these VSTs were played and recorded by college students.

Their humanity is baked into these VSTs!.. as well as a bit of their own room verb.

So again, they blend into the room sound, and you see them playing! You do NOT think, "oh, here's the orchestral samples from the synthesizer that he added later."

Instead you think, "That girl's really good with the cello! How did they mike her so well?"
THE SM58 & the VOCAL CONDITIONING: The vocals on the Ruff Record sound *exactly* like this guy is in the room, using a workhorse performance mike, amplified by some kind of perfect PA system.

The touches of reverb I added put them into that same space as the drums, convolver cabs, and college VSTs.

And the doubling is not perceptible. You do not get any sense of there being a "delay" effect, on the vocals, in the open air monitors. It sounds like he is in that room, slightly left of center, and that his voice just fills the space perfectly.

The backing vocal illusion is also rock solid. When the backup singer sounds, you immediately picture a second singer, on the other side of the room, and slightly further back.

Even though both singers are myself... it feels as if they are two different guys, in that room.

Lastly, my vocals are ever so slightly pitchy from time to time in the verses, and you do still hear a lot of that proximity effect from the SM58, which, again, sells that this is a live performance.

--<>--

So, I cannot stress enough how much the room illusion is already there! Using any kind of "glue" reverb to help it?.. is NOT a huge concern, going forward.

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

THE BAND'S "SOUND"

So, over the twelve songs, the band definitely has a cohesive sound. This feels like the same band, doing the same performance from start to finish.

But what is their sound?

Over this listen, the word that kept coming back to me is, "classy."

Not pretentious or snobby! Not yact rock bougie. But just... classy.

The groove of these players in this room reminded me of, sort of, early Elvis Costello era proto-punk recordings coming out of New York City.

Not to say this sounds like Elvis Costello, but... that vintage and that sensibility of a clean, competent sound, with solid rock-n-roll elements, but... grown up?

There is a proto-punk feel to the way the lone guitar deals with it's split duties carrying rhythm, but also attempting cheep leads... which is punctuated by the way the singer's emotive, but at times, slightly pitchy performance.

The chords and beats are informed by jazz a bit, with bosa nova off-beats, and the occasional jazz chord, which add a beatnik sensibility to the music.

It feels like that 1979/1980 underground pre-punk, but the difference is that here we have real orchestral musicians, rather than the electro-synth elements that characterized that particular movement.

This isn't dance pop, or jock rock, this is... coffeehouse/college town bar... underground, but sincere.

That live feel of the room only amplifies that sense of things... like you stumbled onto a band you should never have heard of, doing a set for ten people, but just killing it.

The quietness of the sound effects, upon this listen, inspires me to possibly add some coffehouse/bar ambiance to the entire album, duriung the main play of the songs.

Like, I will get my foley work up to a good volume and compression, but there is room in these mixes for low level room ambiance to help sell the live illusion.

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

Okay, so those are my impressions on the first near-field review... EVER... of the fully assembled album... after a two week break from the intensity of the Great WekBrek.

The Saturday Night phone call will happen soon!

But I now have two full days to further review the Ruff Record in peace, and work up my game plan for the final mix!

Talk to you tomorrow.

°¦}

Melody Manor Maintenance

Twincat Studios Music Videos

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A Regular Sunday

2026-01-12T02:15:09Z

26F out there tonight.

Slept in until 4:30PM, then drove to Aldi in the dark. Now, i've been home for a couple hours.

Last night I did manage to finally get my final images for, Reavis, Tuesday Siren, and Closer to you. But I burned through a lot of credits to do it, carefully tweaking the prompts every two or three generations.

Reavis proved to be the most difficult of them all. A simple enough scene... an empty university classroom. On one side, a door opens to a busy hallway, and near that doorway stands the TA, with a tote bag around her shoulder.

On the opposite side of the room, leaning against the windows which offer a view of fall foliage, the young man with black (dyed) hair, a charcoal denim jacket covered with colorful patches, T-shirt, jeans, backpack on the floor.

They face one another, with desks in between them. He's being casual. She shows mild interest.

A calendar on the wall reads: SEP 1990.

But the AI kept making her look kinda frumpy?.. and kept making him look short?.. and I finally figured out that the language had labeled her as a, "teacher," and him as simply a "young man", so it was trying to make her look mom-like, and him like an 8th grader.

So I changed it to specify them both as being in their twenties, and both students, as in real life, that TA was only a year older than me. That, and lots of specifics about the clothing, jewelry, etc finally got me what I wanted.

But there were still many false runs where the desks would look weird, or their expressions were off... or it'd have him randomly looking at the camera.

Even in the final version that I upscaled, it showed the door handle on the hinge side, which is impossible, and the window in the open door, which should have shown only the wall behind it, instead showed more of the hallway outside.

But all the upscaled masters had issues like this... a cigarette in an ashtray pointing the wrong way... a door with two handles... a bass guitar with four tuning pegs, but only three tuning keys, etc.

So, once I had my 12 upscaled masters, I put them on a thumb drive and ported them over the the all-in-one PC which is optimized for digital painting, and spent the evening going in and manually fixing all the issues, one by one.

The only two that didn't need any touch ups were, Archeology, and Miss Fortune.

That touch-up process continued today after I got back from Aldi, but as of 8PM, it's all done and now the fixed masters are about to be brought back over to the Optiplex, where I do have an app that's great for just re-sizing.

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

WHAT ARE THE IMAGES?

In all descriptons below, when I say, "girl," I mean, a young woman in her twenties. And when I say, "guy" I mean a young man (me) in his twenties.

01 ARCHEOLOGY: Girl in a red hoodie, blond hair in a ponytail, and a large leather satchel over her shoulder. We see her from behind, with her head in profile looking to left of frame. She is on a brick pathway, at the rusty wrought iron gates of a cemetery, walking in, at night.

Lamps in the cemetery make it look similar to a city park, and spooky trees with crooked branches are blooming with pink spring blossoms. In the distance, an urban skyline.

This is based on the lyric, "the record shows you snakin' past the gate..." She represents the listener, and also the person in the crypt sequence prying open the mausoleum to get to the tape.

Her satchel is full of tools.

Her left ear is facing us, and represents her readiness to listen.

Her blonde hair, red hoody, and the pink blossoms & park-like lamps provide a contrast to the rusty gates, twisted branches, and old headstones. Youth and death... an evening stroll into a mystery... the beginning of one story, to investigate the end of another.

02 REAVIS 309: Already described above, but the teacher looks youthful and hip, yet educated, with her glasses and button down shirt over the T-shirt. She is the acacemic, looking at the young musician, still coming off his teenage punk phase.

They are the same age, but she's further along in life. He's old to be a freshman here. They are from two different worlds, but there is a spark of interest.

She is positioned before the open door, her egress not blocked, academia in the hall behind her. He is leaning on the window sill, a would-be outsider looking in, but he's managed to find his way over to her side the glass. Behind him is fall foliage, the real world, with it's chaotic wilderness.

She's here to start a career. He's just passing through, to get experience and material for art that will never be legitimized or certified by institutions.

03 NEVER RAINS: Our young guy is now back to his natural brown hair, with a short ponytail, and this is how we'll see him until Song 11.

He's downtown in the midst of a raging thunderstorm, with billowing black clouds and a bright bolt of lightning in the distance.

City Lights are lit, but the downtown is empty, no people or traffic as he stands in the middle of the rain slicked street holding an umbrella high against the oncoming rain, like both a sword and a shield.

His stance is comically confident, with the other hand on a hip, and feet wide apart. There's a slightly maniacle look in his eyes as he stands there, with open mouth in a smile.

The camera angle is a bit low, looking up at the umbrella and the tormented skies.

His umbrella, however, is a light purple, with a pastel flower print going around the perimeter of it... like something a school girl would carry.

This adds to the comedic tone, and also characterizes him as one who prizes function over form, and who is not afraid to go into battle under a purple, flowered banner.

04 MAGIC MONDAY: Close up of a diner booth, with icicles and snow outside the windows. Our guy is seated on the left, holidng a coffee cup, and with a cigarette in a nearby ashtray.

The waitress, with brown bangs, a short cut, and glasses, sits in the booth with him on the right, holding a notepad. Her delicate jewelry and stylish watch add some spice to her pedestrian uniform.

He offers a polite smile. She looks at him with guarded amusement. The mood is flirtatious. She's dared to sit with him for the order because he's the only person crazy enough to come out tonight, during this ice storm.

The maroon of her painted nails matches her nametag, which reads: Mandy.

05 TUESDAY SIREN: Another 50/50 shot with the same guy and girl, now both standing in a library, tall stacks of books to the left and right, with tall windows behind them letting in rays of sunlight, articulated by the dust in the air.

He wears a white T-shirt over a long-sleeved maroon thermal, and blue jeans. His shirt and hands are dirty and his hair is disheveled, as he's been frantically digging through the dusty tomes to find her the right book.

She wears a green padded winter coat, long, and open, revealing stylish, casual dress, again punctuated by delicate jewelry, and through her glasses we can see the blue of her eyes.

She holds a book with a large gargoyle carved into it's old leather cover, and scrutinizes it's pages with a veneer of indifference, tinged with genuine wonder.

He stands with guarded optimism, casually examining her expression, his hand still up, as if she's just taken the book out of it.

The difficult part of getting this take was just their expressions. The AI kept wanting to show her with wide-eyed shock and surprise, and him racked with anxiety.

06 OUR COLD FEET: This frame is split diagonally, from upper left to lower right. In the upper corner of the frame we see our girl from the last two songs. She is at home, sitting at a desk, by a lamp, reading a letter, with an open envelope nearby. She looks very concerned, or emotional about what she's reading.

The dominant tones in her corner are browns and golds.

IN the lower corner of the frame, our guy, in a blue hoodie, out on the street alone downtwon, sitting on a stoop, smoking a cigarette, looking a bit dejected. The streets are slicked with rain.

The dominant tones in his corner are blues.

He only knows he's been ghosted with no explanation. This image offers only a vague answer. Is the letter from a former lover? Or is this news from a friend or family member?

This was a hard image to obtain, because of the diagonal split. I ended up having to use the upper half of one version, and the lower half of another, to get the ideal graphic.

07 CLOSER TO YOU: It's dawn, and our guy, still in his blue hoody is on an abandoned block of downtown. WE see him from behind, hands in pockets, cigarette in mouth.

He stands before the ruins of the old terminal building. A red brick, victorian era building with grey concrete trim. Steps with rusing rails lead up to a grand arched entrance, it's ornate wooden doors sporting rusted iron hardware.

Above the arch, carved in stone, it reads, "Central City Terminal"

High arched windows to the left and right of the entrance feature broken and missing panes of glass. In one, can be seen an old 1940s era poster showing a happy red street car from the front, with the title above reading, "GREAT WAY TO GET AROUND!"

In other windows, faint ghostly figures can be seen haunting the dark interior.

The building is covered in dead ivy, and the pavement is overgrown with grass and littered with empty beer cans.

The sky above the building is pink and orange with sunrise.

The camera angle is low, looking up at the once grand structure.

The reason this image was so difficult was getting all the details of the building right. I had to specify a lot more than I originally thought.

08 BED IN THE SUBURBS: Here we see our guy in his modest bedroom recording a song late at night. This is a high camera angle looking down into the room.

We see a simple twin bed with blue sheets and blankets, a bit messy. Next to that is a night stand with a coffee cup, empty beer bottle, small lamp, and a micro-cassette recorder (remember those?).

Above the night stand is a small framed picture of a cricket.

On the adjacent wall is a window, open to the night air, with the scene of a suburban neighborhood outside, through it's screen.

Below the window, sitting cross-legged on the wood floor, is our guy, playing an electric bass guitar and wearing headphones. He is gazing down at a dual cassette tape recorder on the floor before him with wires coming out and going into a tangle on the floor nearby... bass, headphones, power plug, etc.

For each deck, one key is depressed... the play key on one, the record key on the other, and a red LED on the face is lit up.

Next to him on the floor, an ash tray with a lit cigarette, and a bottle of beer.

The mood is one of creative solitude.

While the song itself is a rousing summer party anthem, the image shows us it's creation, and also mirrors the lyrics about being a humble musician, singing late at night... and also, of course, shows us the literal bed in the suburbs.

This image also shows us what we're hearing in the opening lofi segment of Archeology... except for the Casio keyboard, which would've been extremely difficult to get the AI to include.

As it is, this was the most heavily touched-up of the images, with me having to manually draw all the detailing of the cassette machine and it's wires, as well as tweaks to the bass guitar.

The only reason there's a micro-cassette recorder on the night stand is that the AI put a vague rectangular object there, which was difficult to remove, so I turned it into a micro-cassette machine.

--<>--
THE COMMERCIAL BREAK

The next two songs, Clue Phone, and Other Friends, are now, visually, the commercial break in our story.

Unlike the rest of the songs on the album, these two are not narrative. They are not memoirs of specific scenes or situations. And they do not have much to do with the "story" that's being told on the album.

In the pulp sessions, the solution was to turn them both into propaganda style posters.

In the 1990s graphic novel sessions, they became television ads. Hence, the commercial break.

Both images show a 90's era cathode ray TV set, and the images are on the screens of those TVs.

09 CLUE PHONE: Close up of a blonde girl in a denim jacket with a low cut red shirt and lots of jewelry. She is out on the town, with a cityscape behind her, and her hair blows in the wind as she smiles a perfect smile.

To her ear, she's holding a ridiculously klunky brick phone, silver gray, with a huge antenna and lots of buttons and jacks on it... but seems absolutely thrilled to have it!

Above her, in rounded purple letters, bold font, "IT'S FOR YOU!"

At the bottom of the screen, in a smaller, cursive font of white, "Pick it up!"

When matched against the actual song, this is, of course, high satire!

10 OTHER FRIENDS:

In this ad, it's the same blonde, IT girl from the first, but here, she's wearing huge hollywood-style sunglasses, and looking straight to camera.

Behind her, a legion of male figures in identical blue suits, and they all have identical bird heads!.. mocking birds, specifically.

Above her, in a curved, gold font of all caps, "SAY HELLO"... below, in a white italic font, "...to your OTHER friends!"

More high satire, but this one's truly disturbing with the bird-headed suit men!

The blonde hair of our TV commercial starlet is meant to differentiate her from the brown haired, Mandy character. These roastly songs are not aimed at her or any specific person.

She merly represents commercialism and it's siren call to stay shallow and embrace disingenuous social climbing.

--<>--
WE NOW RETURN YOU...

11 SPELL I'M UNDER: when we return from the commercial break, our young guy in his twenties, with the full head of brown hair and the short ponytail is now a grizzled older man with a white beard, short cropped, and a baseball hat to hide his baldness.

He sits in dark urban alleyway, on the stoop of a back door, under the harsh light of a single lamp above.

Near him, on the rain soaked pavement, two large cardboard boxes taped shut, and an old steamer trunk. On one carboard box, scrawled in black marker, "DESK SHIT," on the other, "COMPUTER SHIT."

He holds a single cassette tape, with both hands, centered before him, like how you'd hold a smart phone, and is peering into it just as one would a phone, with a lit cigarette in his mouth.

The tone is somewhat bleak, and his mood is a bit dejected, but there is hope in the way he examines the cassette.

In general, I love how jarring it is to see our youthful protagonist now having aged 30 years!

12 MISS FORTUNE: Our final image is of a woman, 30 to 40ish, with very long brown hair, and brown eyes.

She is standing outside at night, on a grassy hilltop, with nearby foliage still green, but tinged with the orange and golds of fall.

Beyond the foliage, the lights of a sprawling town in the valley below, with more hills in the distance.

Behind it all, a starry night sky, with a thin waxing-crescent moon.

She wears a gray, hooded sweatshirt under a long green trench coat, which is flowing a bit in the breeze.

We see her in profile, gazing off to the right, as if pondering a great mystery, or contemplating a past, or coming, adventure.

This woman is the counterpart to the one we saw entering the cemetery at the beginning. There, we saw her left ear, ready to listen, and it was spring. Here, we see this woman's right ear, perhaps having heard enough?

And it is now fall.

Unlike the first woman, who was delving into a mystery at street level, Miss Fortune stands high above it all... yet with sweater and trench coat, she is grounded, rather than glorified.

The waxing crescent moon, a few nights past new, portends a new start. A future yet to unfold.

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

11:23PM

Okay, the laundry is done and I'm in for the night!

That's the rundown of Archeology's song artwork, and I'm really happy with it!

The music and lyrics themselves create one dimension of the album's world, and the sound design sequences add a second dimension of world building.

But these images add a third dimension to the world.

And by, "dimensions," I mean, they are not all telling the exact same story.

For example, Our Cold Feet's music and lyrics, sung with a Morrissey affectation amount to a kind of self-aware, self-depricating approach to rejection, with the sound design at the end being fairly comedic... first with a distant screeching car... then the single songbird giving way to a huge chorus of dawn birds and trumpeted sunrise, to step all over the guy's moping negativity.

But the image is genuinely dramatic, and seems far more serious.

And in the image, it's our brown-haired girl with, "the biggest bluest eyes I've ever seen," from Tueday Siren, yet the lyrics for Cold Feet are all about "eyes of brown! A captive! SOS! 911!"

These are the little inconsistencies that crop up in all good album art, and lyrics which become the fodder for elaborate fan theories.

"clues," to some deeper meaning below the surface.

--<>--

At the cost of $80.00, and one week's work, I'd say this was well worth the money and effort!

The resulting images, after touch ups, are now all pretty golden! No traces of AI mistakes, or klunky compositions.

The graphic novel style keeps it all well outside the arena of, "AI/CGI slop," which is associated with hyper photo-realistic shit with glaring color palettes and hyper-idealized lighting that screams, "AN ALGORITHM DID THIS FOR ME IN FIVE MINUTES! CALL ME AN ARTIST!"

And the style also matches well with the style of the album.

--<>--

Okay! I'm gonna port the fixed masters back over to the Optiplex and spend the rest of the evening creating re-sized versions to see how they translate.

You can't see a 6K X 6K image all at once on a computer screen, after all!

Not sure what I'll be getting up to this next week, but i'm still on my break from hearing, or working on the music until next Saturday.

I'll talk to you then.

°¦}

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