Tetrachord

Personal Note
Don't expect everyone to keep up with your changes. People sometimes have this vision of who you are and it can be hard for them to see past it. It happens.

Technical Note
I keep getting search hits from people looking for info on the NRV10 firewire mixer by M-Audio and related stuff. If you landed here because of that and then were disappointed to find rants about cat/dolphin conspiracies instead, I apologize. The fact is I haven't much of a mind for technical matters and an even worse one for keeping records.

Here's the deal: the NRV10 has been great so far. I highly recommend it. In fact, as far as my recording setup goes, the only real problematic component has been Sonar. This is owing entirely to the monumental amount of shit I need to learn in order to use it properly. The program itself is great. The operator? Not so much.

Anyway, great mixer. Near-zero latency. Nice sounding preamps (I'm getting great bass sounds direct). Lots of inputs/outputs. No complaints. If you want to spend money on a Mackie be my guest, but I'm happy with what I have. With light project studio use I haven't experienced any glitches. Can't really speak to live use.

I guess call that a review.

Down Note
Commerce already owns the blogosphere. I recommend you take your idealism elsewhere.

Lighter Note
It'll be Halloween before you know it. Have you begun preparation? There are a few things brewing over here. Looking forward to creeping up the place and enjoying the greatest holiday ever invented.

Mark Your Calendar

Be it known that Monday, June 25th of 2007 was a mighty, mighty day.

Shortly after the joyous resurrection of the motorcycle my good friend, fellow motorcycle enthusiast, fellow musician and producer/engineer extraordinaire Mr. Scott Cann arrived to have a look-see at my recording setup. A couple of hours of trial & error later, the DAW was working flawlessly and--best of all--with virtually ZERO LATENCY.

Well, technically it's about 1.0 - 1.5 milliseconds, but that may as well be 0.0 as far as human ears are concerned.

For anyone reading this who may be interested in the technical details of the fix, basically what it came down to was removing the computer sound card from the signal path altogether. By attempting to monitor recording/playback through the computer speakers I was inviting latency and a host of other problems into the scenario.

This is how it runs now:

M-Audio NRV10 --(via FireWire)--> Computer/Sonar 6.0 --(via FireWire)--> M-Audio NRV10--> Headphones/Monitors

In essence, I'm relying on FireWire's (and my 3G processor's) inherent speed to allow me to monitor signal coming back out from Sonar and into the mixer. No sound card to slow down the signal.

Some other changes we made included the following (all of which are found under Options --> Audio Options in Sonar):

• Playback Timing Master and Record Timing Master were set to the same channel on the NRV10, rather than the soundcard. Because it's poop.
• We turned off Read Caching and Write Caching entirely after finding that this process was introducing digital noise (intermittent ticking sounds) while recording. Again, turning this off means I'm relying on my processor and RAM to do the heavy lifting rather than using caching to lighten the load. We're not sure why it caused noise but for now the problem is solved. There's the possibility that shutting off caching might cause problems with larger, multitrack files later on but we'll worry about that when the time comes.
• Turned off the 64-bit Double Precision Engine (didn't need it anyway, as I'm not running a 64-bit version of XP). Duh.
• Changed the sample rate to 44,100 because there's really no need to go higher for what I'm doing.
• Drank some Dos Equis
• Ate blue corn chips, bean & corn salsa and habanero cheese.
• Also, not sure if this made a difference, but Scott gave my motorcycle a test drive and gave it the thumbs up. I don't know. Could be a contributing factor.

Thank you very much, Scott. You're the man.

KASTLE TESLA CRACKLES WITH POWER.

That was close...

Sorry about that little interruption, there. I kinda spaced out and forgot to pay my bill. The website renewal, I mean.

Yeah, I actually have to spend a little money to do this. Isn't that amusing?

How about some updates?

Kastle Tesla
Having no end of difficulties getting the studio running smoothly. A well-hidden and tenacious gremlin who goes by the name "Latency" has hidden itself somewhere along the signal path. I'm normally pretty tolerant of strays and squatters, but he (or she) has got him(or her)self wedged somewhere that makes bass notes happen an audible number of milliseconds after I play them. That's not good.

Anyone reading this who has any expertise in these matters please contact me. I've done a bunch of research and everything short of actually contacting technical support for any of the devices/applications involved to no avail. I just don't want to make that torturous call, so I'm panhandling instead. Spare some knowledge, buddy?

Life in General
I bought a bike battery. It had the wrong kind of terminals. I brought it back. That sucked. I tried to charge my old battery. It dripped fluid (presumably acid) from the little vent thing. Kinda cool, kinda not. Still haven't tried putting it back in the bike. Not so sure that's a good idea. Definitely don't want to blow anything up.

Anyone who knows anything about not exploding bike batteries, please contact me. Acid burns make for cool supervillains, to be sure, but I'm just not sure my overall attractiveness level can withstand a hit like that.

I'm just not having a very good run at making things work these days.

Oh, well. At least the website is operational again.