Maugorn

I did NOT need the stoopid scare I got last night.

We put Mama Tiger into the shop on Tuesday to get a tuneup. Well, the mechanic calls back (it's getting inevitable now) and says that she needs more. Belts. All the belts are worn. Fine. Replace the belts. But not the AC belt as we never run the AC because it doesn't work. If it's broke anyway, don't fix it. But there's some sort of front end suspension problem. Many hundreds more dollars to fix. If it's not fixed, then van stays noisy and undsteady. Big Fat Hairy Deal. NOT a priority.

And here's the part I just don't know about: when I went to get her back, the mechanic ALSO mentioned that he'd like to check out my drive shaft. There's some sort of vibration that worries him, and he's worried that if what he suspects deteriorates, then I lose the drive shaft on the road someday, possibly flipping the van. That's the part that doesn't make sense. I mean he's right about the scary physics if it fails that way, but seriously: how often does the drive shaft in a van or truck actually fail?
But the checkup, while cheap, might lead to another costly repair. We budgeted for a tuneup. Over $1000 is not what we have to spend this month. (Plus, there goes my whole bank account again. No profit for me this quarter).
So we're waiting on the drive shaft, possibly with hilarious results. I have a list of "dire warning signs" just in case, but I want some more opinions, possibly expert ones before I do this.

But that wasn't the scare, oh no. There I was driving home last night from giving my lessons in Bowie when the van stalled at a traffic light. WTF? Didn't I *just* get a tuneup. Oh well, it's an old van, what do I expect? But I got it started again (after a BIG fight) and we get on the highway, when for no good reason, she stalls again. I'm coasting along in neutral at 50mph as I'm trying to restart, to no avail, and eventually have to coast over to the side. patches023 is called and eventually she comes and gets me. Then we arrange to have the van towed BACK to the mechanic because I really wanted to believe that this was just a tuneup gone wrong somehow.

Turns out that was true, and she's all fixed and running again now, with assurances that the cable to the ignition coil will not fall off any more.

I really didn't need that scare.

But again, even Mama Tiger's breakdowns seem to have a rhyme and reason to them, and a loyalty behind them.
It was SO much better for this to happen here, a mere 7 miles from the mechanic, than say tomorrow afternoon when I'm on I81 heading for my gig in Roanoke. This was annoying and sad and scary. THAT would have just been beyond tragic.

In the meantime, this evening, jmax315 came over again, with more progress made on the computer.
I now have a functioning USB hub on the FRONT of the computer, which makes resuming work ever so much easier.
I also have my monitor plugged into the DVI port, which is now an official upgrade.
Sometime soon, some of my email archive should become available, which is useful.

And I can burn CDs again. I have lots of copies of everything to bring with me.
Tomorrow before I leave, I'll be printing covers and labels on patches023's machine, which DOES work.

Soon, I'll have my "personal" archive back on Windows, and will have arranged for a new copy of Word to be there somehow.
Once these things happen, life will pretty much resume with some collateral losses.

But tomorrow, I drive down to the Stone Tower Glen gig, where I hope to have a good and profitable time!

Some of the things that have made progress this week are actually "Evil Laugh" good.

The First had to do with all things recording and soundy.
As I wrote last week, I did not know how to get my Roland VS1880 and my computer to synchronise during recordings thru the SPDIF ports. If that problem were solved, then I can finally do a functional, smooth upload of my current multitrack projects into the computer for editing, processing, mixing, effects, etc and FINALLY move my entire recording process into the digital domain, with no analog steps. So on Tuesday, Steve (my former musical partner from The Sacred Chao) came over and had a five hour (?!) wrestling match with the software and hardware and the interfaces, and finally got a solution to work. Yes, solutions to this problem are actually fairly common, thanks to MIDI, but there are multiple ways of doing it and multiple standards and multitudes of configurations and preferences and methods, so once it's working, it's great, but getting there is all too often, a path of pain and peril. There's no way in HELL I could have figured this crap out on my own. It's like I'm a freshman in college all over again. Anyway, the functional solution we found was in the Sonar LE software package that came with my spiffy new PCI card. For reasons we can't quite fathom, Sonar wants to be the "Master" to the 1880 over an MTC synchronisation link and -tada! (It didn't work the other way, even tho it would *seem* to make sense that the 1880 be the master if we're dubbing from it. WHHAT EVURRRR!)
Sonar looks to be a real nice sound editor/recording/MIDI package, and I'm probably going to be learning alot more about it and using it more in upcoming projects. Especially for the next step, which is mastering VST plugin effects, that will hopefully work better than the plugins I use in Audacity (which are good, but not great, and often tedious). I'll probably still be using Audacity for edits, and especially for smoothing over glitches and splices.
But as I said, just being ABLE to do this step (the dubbing from the 1880 onto the computer) represents progress that warrants BIG evil laughter.

And yesterday was spent in another all day "class" learning from jmax315.
The (1st version of the) website is very nearly set up. Just a couple of files to upload, and a couple of things that need to be "switched on" (if I understand the metaphor right), and the very 1st 1 page version of www.stevehaug.com will be running. Probably VERY SOON, like any day now. Again, this is "Evil Laugh GOOD".

Last night featured a very pleasant dinner with tafkad and his SO, with lotsa good Indian food and catching up and pleasant stuff.

Today, will mark (pending my clearing a path for the delivery guys) the arrival of our new front loading washing machine. That should mark not only an upgrade in our clothing cleanliness process, but also a vast improvement (and elimination) of occasional floods of laundry water downstairs. Yay!

Tonight, I will be cheering on sagesaria in the production of Tommy she's performing in.

Tomorrow, I'm hoping to go busking, which will make for some improvements in my cash flow, that be very very nice.

Next week, I get to take all these advances and apply them to a now even bigger backlog of work I want to do.

This time, I owe the victory to almost no effort on my part other than supplying info, asking questions and inept kibbutzing.

The Hero this week is jmax315.
He came and he kicked the ass of the problem that was keeping my soundcard from just booting up on the Linux partition.

It *was* actually supposed to just boot up, as thanks to the benevolent "ALSA" project, Linux drivers for the E-MU card actually do exist now.

What took him five patient and eerily cheerful hours to do was to narrow down and track down the final error: the bit of firmware that Ubuntu (because of their licensing policies) could not just include in their latest driver packages. But he totally tracked it down and installed it all, and now I have upgraded glorious sound on both partitions of my computer.
Midi I/O, Balanced Line level I/O and DIGITAL I/O! And my OS is upgraded as are numerous functions and packages. And the new release of Ubuntu has a *pretty* crane as it's screen background.

So alot of the time today was spent in conversation as we hurried up and waited for downloads and installs. And while we were at it, I learned a little bit more about setting up webpages.
And what's more, some of that knowledge was put to instant use.

I now own two domain names:
www.maugornthestray.com
www.stevehaug.com

No actual websites exist yet, but they will.

Progress.

And Jmax, Thank you SO much AGAIN for helping me fight this battle and win this round.

After a some considerable gnashing and finagling, I got my computer's audio upgraded.

My sound (on the computer) now goes in and out thru the fabulous E-MU 1212M which not only has impeccable analog in/out (balanced, even), but also Midi I/O, Optical I/O and S/PDIF I/O.
Fab no?
(If all this is babbly, I'll explain)

S/PDIF is one way of sending digitally encoded audio thru a cable. It's NICE. And my home Minidisc player has an output for it. This means that if I record a gig onto minidisc, I can then dub it onto the computer without converting it back into analog sound, and then digitising it again on the computer. Bottom line MUCH Less noise, and higher sound quality=
HUGE WIN!

So, I finally got it all to work.
Ta-da!
Yay. Go me!
One step closer to ruling the world. Bwahahahahaahhaahaahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

But it's come at a cost.
In order to make it work I had to uninstall the old sound card in the computer and essentially replace it with the two E-Mu PCI cards.

And E-Mu doesn't seem to have Linux drivers for the 1212M.
I've been pointed to the "ALSA" project who writes Linux audio drivers for other people, but they do not seem to have an E-MU1212M driver just yet.
My Windows functions are all fine, better even, more powerful than ever. (This card is NICE, and it's bundled with software and control packages that are NICE).
But I use my Linux partition to do *some* audio work (a recent upgrade in Audacity has fixed the problem necessitating this- I hope), but most of all- to do ripping and burning of CDs.
It's faster and more reliable and much less of a hassle, and important for my business.
I don't NEED the audio on the Linux side to do *that*, but it sure is NICE to have.
If I want to use my Linux Audio utilities again or anything involving sound, I need *some* kind of functional solution here.
I'd like to learn more Linux and I agree that it's more powerful and reliable than Windows. But I can't be having a supposedly "better" system be hobbled by a pro-audio upgrade. That's just silly. That's no good to me at all.

So here's a question for you technologically savvy types?

Is it possible to install a generic, "vanilla" type sound driver that will at least give the E-MU basic audio in/out? (Actually I'd settle for just audio out, if I must)
OR
Is it possible to reinstall the old soundcard and have ONLY the Linux partition use it?

I'm also still sick.
I'd *thought* I was on the mend (enough to sing on Saturday, well mostly), but I seem to have had a relapse. Tuesday was not a fun day. Very little sleep. Lots of coughing and wheezing and blah. Today the doctor said that I'm still running a bit of a fever.
We know this drill. Cold turns into malingering sinusitis.
I'm to take start antibiotics if I don't improve by the weekend.

So, the CD is really and truly almost done.
I am about to enter the very final phase where I see if I want any final tweaks to the edits and then set the levels of the respective tracks to :
-fine balance things between the instruments and vocals
-make sure they don't clip when I export them to .wav files
-make sure that they are balanced so that there aren't huge volume jumps between songs.

It's a tricky and almost tedious phase, but it mostly involves listening, making some notes, and doing some little tweaks.

To finally get there, I resorted to a big cheat.
The very last song I worked on was a take of Bowie's "Memory Of A Free Festival", a song that is very dear to me and invokes all the things I feel about having found various iterations of "my tribe" at cons, medieval events, pagan things, etc. The version I wanted to use was a very very good take that I got last year at Chesapeake Pagan Community's "Summer Gathering".
The problem was that I was having some weird sound issues in the pavillion I was playing in and my usual level and EQ settings went haywire and I wound up with a very tinny recording where the vocals were concerned. This was the song that drove me so batshit with the 31 band EQ. I would tweak things, and hear improvements, but then I would hit a wall and make things worse. I must have started from scratch about half a dozen times with that damn track, and I would have scuttled it but for it being such a good take otherwise, and it being so appropriate that I recorded it where I did. Also, I kept getting close, so damn damn close.
Ultimately, I got an EQ curve that DID take out just about all the stuff I wanted taken out, and did bring up just about all I wanted to bring up. But then it sounded just a little bit flat, and the fact is, that despite how wonky that pavillion made things sound, I was kind of grooving on the slap back echo of it's strange shape and the echoes I was getting off of the hill. Once I made it sound less tinny, I wanted it to sound more "live". The answer:
Reverb! Now if I were doing this analog, I'd just plug in my loverly coil reverb and -Tada!-
that would be it. But I wanted to keep things digital.

But the echo effect in my Linux version of Audacity (where all the good editing tools were) wasn't quite giving me what I wanted. So I exported the part into a .wav file (since the Windows Audacity couldn't read the version that the Linux version made) and then played with some of the fabulous plugins that I could download for the Windows version that I just can't seem to get loaded right on the Linux side.

A few hours(!- Why the fuck does this always have to take HOURS?!!!!) later, and I got something that I finally think sounds better than what I had. I'll still have to play with the wet and the dry tracks to get the right balance.

But the nice thing about reverb is that it can, while it spices up the sound and add alot of flavor, cover up little imperfections while it's at it.

So, I cheated. And as a result, I got something, that actually sounds (IMHO) a little closer to what it was like to hear it live, even tho the effects in the venue were all acoustic and not electronic.

While I was at this, I also added just a little bit of reverb to one of the guitar parts in a song that I thought would sound better with just a smidgeon of acoustic "space" in it.

I may do one more to a bouzouki part. And then, it's on to the final phase.

Sometime next week, I will have a new album out.

I spent Friday night in.
( guitar technical blah blah blah )

Saturday, I was double booked socially. First was the MDFF staff thank you party. It was at a great place (an ancestral home on the bay), but it was kinda sparsely attended. Many folks whom I hoped to see weren't there. Fortunately it was also very free of folks I'd wish to avoid, so that was a win. So I ate alot of barbecued things and devilled eggs and watermelon.
My sadness was that I'd had a melon to share too, but it exploded on my front steps on my way out the door, leaving me with nothing to contribute.
I had some pleasant chats and delivered some Pennsic-scrounged swag to the head of logistics (for repair and rehab into big new folding tables) and I was on my way.

Saturday night was the Storvik Post Pennsic Dessert Revel.
Much fun was to be had. Improbable stories of Pennsic were shared as were songs and lessons learned. I totally dropped the ball on the song I should have played. My new excellent find,
"Nasty Nell (The Mermaid)" would have dovetailed transcendentally well with some of the other bardic offerings, but alas, I still need the lyric sheet, which is among the things that I've actually unloaded from the van. As it was "Get Up Jack, John Sit Down" was well recieved and I played it well as well. My story of exploding asphalt was also heard with awe and admiration. (that story will be in one of my Pennsic wrapups).
Good music was played and dances danced, despite a seriously depleted band. But luscious_purple and I handled things competently and prettily enough. We later got some impromptu reinforcement on the guitar from a fellow named Wynn(sp?).
During the parts where I played my own guitar, tho, I noticed that some of the buzzing problem was creeping in, especially on the strings where I had feared the replaced saddle was too low. Dang! That would mean diminished sleep as there was a gig opportunity in the morning.
Oh, yeah, Dessert was had. (and had, and had some more!) Excellent yummy sweets were devoured, and tovahs gave us blackberries!(which are not quite yet devoured)

Afterwards, I got lost in some sweet conversation with luscious_purple by my van, where we attracted interest from local law enforcement, who actually turned out to be not the least bit interested in us after all, as they were looking for a perpetrator of some actual crime who had last been seen headed our way.

So I got home and after apologies for arriving so late, I had to commence into seeing what could be done for my poor guitar bridge. So I tried again to see if I could find that bridge saddle that I had carved before. Nope.
( more guitar geeking )
So, the bridge shimmed up, I went to bed.
( A productive Sunday )
And later Sunday night was Olympics until we crashed.

But successful.

Two very good and dear and supportive friends of mine are getting married on the same weekend as the Spoutwood Fairie Fest. They wanted me to play at the wedding but this gig is really to big and too important to miss.

So we came to a compromise: I would lend them some sound equipment so that they could have music, and I would personally record the tune that they wanted as their "1st dance". That way I could play for them remotely. The tune is from the Pennsic(and now)3LF repertoire, a beautiful Italian Renaissance dance called "Rostiboli Gioioso".

( A hard won victory. Read if you like gory technical details )
The weirdest thing, is that this session took a physical toll as well.
My thighs ache from holding the dumbek, and somehow on Friday, I hurt my KNEE, playing recorder. THAT is fucking weird.

I missed some fun things this weekend. I stayed in and "did my homework" instead of going out and playing. But I think in the long run, it'll be worth it.

On Friday, I pounced and payed for my new (to me) Minidisc Walkman.
Hopefully that "priority shipping" I payed for will get it to me soon.
Also (see previous post), I learned a whole lot about Minidiscs in general, and about Ebay.

Also also on Friday:
Dubbed part one of this last New Deal gig onto the computer.

Also also also on Friday:
Lots and lots of practicing for the vocal track I wanted to record. If I could get that one done, I might only need one more for the new CD! While I was at that practicing, since I was doing it in the studio, and since I thought I was sounding better than the previous take, I thought I would try actually recording some. I managed to get some lines that were better than the previous take, but some of the previous take was better than what I was doing Friday.
A few cut and paste operations later, and I had substantial progress on the first two verses.


Saturday:

I Got my vocal track recorded!
This was a LONG song, and it proved kind of tricky. So rather than even try to record the whole thing at once and do that over and over until I got a mostly good take and punch in corrections... I just attacked it verse by verse. I resolved to TRY and finish it, but if I started to find myself going back or deteriorating that I would not "tough it out" (which only sometimes works), but just quit where I was, make lots of notes, try not to alter the settings, and come back to it. I knew that approach had the drawback where I might not have the option that sometimes works in this situation where I ditch the hard thing in favor of something else for awhile. There's another song that the live tracks are pointing to as being very close if not ready to record. It's shorter and it might be easier, and it was very tempting to do that instead of 'the long slog'. But I've also been bitten by trying to "come back" to a vocal track after partially finishing it and doing something else in between. Sound and level settings and the sound of my voice can be annoyingly different in that scenario. So 'the long slog' it would be- for as long as I could stand it on Saturday and as long as it took to finish.

But my strategy and tactics worked! I took it one verse at a time, two verses per "session".
After I got the two verses to my satisfaction, I'd take a break. EAT, Check the email, read LJ, check on my Ebay stuff, play solitaire, and chill. Then back for the next two verses.
And tada! It actually started going a little faster as I went, and by mid-evening I had 14 verses (!!!!) of something I was actually pretty happy with! I'll need to listen to again (probably today or tomorrow) to see if some time and objectivity has me still happy, but I suspect that if there are any problems, they're very minimal.

After that, I snuggled up on the couch and watched _Dark Star_ with Sonya. Man! I love that movie! Then SNL.

Sunday morning:
I edited discA of that last New Deal set.
The aforementioned song that's "ready" to record was a standout track.
If I really want that song included in the new CD, I could use that live track.
But I really want the electric guitar track I recorded in the studio to be the accompaniment, so I'm gonna try it in the studio anyway. Nice to know tho.

Sunday afternoon:
jmax315 came over and third time's the charm getting Linux onto a seperate partition on the new computer. I now have the option when I turn my computer on of booting under Windows or under Linux (Ubuntu).
Thank you SO SO much!
I'm really psyched about this. So far, Linux has proven to be a CD ripping/burning environment that I can actually trust. And now that this is done, I can make some new batches of my current CDs so that I'm well stocked when it's time to focus on making the new one(s?). (very hopeful plural- I might get TWO new things out this spring!).
I look forward to seeing what else it can offer me.
There seem to be an awful lot of absolutely free apps that look very tasty.
NICE games too!
After all that, I went and wasted some time late in the afternoon playing some of them, much to Sonya's dismay come dinner time.
I'm sorry.

Darkover was just fantastic. Hectic, but Fantastic. Tiring, but fantastic. Draining, but fantastic.
A long time ago I learned that when I go to a con, there are alot of things that help insure that I have a good time at the con, but a pretty short list of things that were common to ALL of the times I remember being good: First and foremost, the tip top of the list was when I made new friends or enriched/deepened friendships that existed. As busy as I was at this con, that one thing kept happening , and it made all the difference.

( yeah, it's all about me, but it's my journal )

We had what looked to be a most excellently successful, and above all,
highly *unstressful* 3LF gig yesterday for a "Renaisssance Wedding".

At first it looked like our employer, a fellow who's trying to start up
a business planning such affairs was going to be over picky about having
us do what we do best.

Fortunately, as we suspected all along, the "Authenticity" factor was a lot
of random cut and paste, and pretty inconsistent, and was completely beyond
what the Couple and the guests could discriminate. The affair was pretty
chaotic too, so in the end, my beloved Melyanna and the excellent music
we make together in 3LF was viewed as Pretty and not as "a party crasher"
Translation: playing the guitar was fine after all, just as I suspected.

As part of the unstressfulness of it all, We arrived in plenty of time
to be all set up and to do some last minute rehearsing (of some things
we don't normally play) and warming up. silmaril was very
happy to borrow my renaissance recorder, and more happy still to have
some time to adapt to it, as it's breath requirements are very different
from the conical bored baroque recorder.

The affair was, as I said somewhat chaotic, and so we caught on pretty
early that we, being available (there) and ready to play would be drafted
into doing alot of filling in. That was fine, but at our "wrap up" tomorrow
night, I'm going to suggest that we all keep our tunebooks a little better
for "battlereadiness." There was a smidgen too much dead air as we shuffled
about looking for the next tune to play. When we play gratis or for "just
a little more than gas money" it's okay to be a little relaxed, but for the
money the Couple was paying us, we should probably be a little more "taut
and shipshape".

At the wedding, before we were unnecessarily chided by a self-appointed
martinet for "speaking of Out of period matters" in the buffet line (No
it was one of ours, not our employer, or even a member of the wedding party),
silmaril managed to tell me exactly what I needed to know about
power transistors.

Yes I was correct, it isn't done and can't be done with just two pins.
Signal has to come in and amplified signal goes out, but the power to affect
the amplification has to also come in. What I thought was grounding the case
was actually connnecting the case to the incoming power. That's why the
mounting holes for the screw are insulated from the actual case of the amp.
The screws form the electrical connection to the power on the circuit board.
That's also why the transistor itself has to sit on a little insulating wafer
made of plastic or mica. That's also why, while they are on the back of
the amp for cooling and access, the transistors are covered. There's a
live voltage going across that metal casing.

Duh.

Thanks, hon. Now I'm yet again better educated and more powerful.

Cost of advice: Free
Thwarting the mean-spirited machinations of an Authenticity Nazi: Priceless

Bwhaahaahahahaaaaa!

Speaking of meanspirited, I've clarified in my mind what I want to do about
anonymous posts. Thankfully the pest on the "Balticon part II" post is
completely wrong. If I screen for anonymous posts, I still recieve them, but
they're not published in my journal unless I "unscreen" them, which I can.
Given that all of the anonymous posting so far has been from people who
actually know me, but are just too chicken to say who they are, this will
ultimately not be a huge problem. The solution is simple. Since I'm making
my journal an open book and not censoring my feelings and thoughts, anyone
who wants to reply may. But if you expect these replies to be seen by others,
you need to be open too. Cognomens and handles are fine, but if you know
me, then I'll know that and your post needs to include some identifier in
the body if you don't happen to be an LJ user. I'm not trying to quash
"dissent". Somebody somewhere knows something I don't or has a viewpoint I
need to hear and I won't hear it if I'm not challenged or debated. I've
simply decided that if you're going to do that, that since I'm open and
honest, you will be too. I may need to hear what you have to say, and if
it's that important you can say it to my face. Otherwise, well, this is
my journal, and you rave and froth at me all you want in yours.
I will probably make occasional exceptions for a reply that is of particular
interest to me.

Short and sweet- replies from LJ users are not screened. Anonymous LJ posts
and non-lj posts will be screened. To be unscreened, all you have to do
is to let me know who you are. If you don't want the world to know who
you are, that's still fine, but *I* need to know if it's to go into my LJ.

I'll be putting this in my bio and will have a brief disclaimer pointing to
it in my posts from now on, unless there's some better way to get that word
out.

In other news, patches023 and I went out to see an animation fest
at the E St Cinema Saturday night. It was pretty good. There were, as could
be expected, excellent things that were exceedingly well done, some excellent
things that were crude and lo-tech, and some things that were also just plain
disturbing and wrong.

There was an annoying (to me) glitch in the program they handed out. I don't
know who made it up, whether it was the Festival, or the theatre, but some
where along this chain, there was a completely wrong translation of the title
of a piece from Germany. "Das Rad", the program claimed translates as "The
Stones". Sorry, but "das Rad" means "the wheel". It was an easy misteak to
make, as the film featured as it's main characters, a pair of sentient stone
creatures (living in geologic time) watching the development of human
civilisation after the inspiration to create the wheel, ostensibly from a
rock formation that was near them. I have a lot of trouble comprehending how
a program for an international festival could have a mistake of this nature
get into the chain and stay there thru the entire (and expensive) process to
make this very nicely printed program.

Oh no, "foreign languages" are a luxury part of education. We don't *need*
to really know them here in Amurricka. Besides, that kind of schooling is for
nerds and geeks, anyway. Who *really* ever uses the stuff that they learn
in German 101 in Real Life anyway? Rrrrrrrr.

Today, after breakfast, it's back into the studio to work on the guitar line
for "She Moves Thru The Fair" I almost had it on Saturday, but there was
an annoying glitch that kept me from loving it. So, back to beating on it
until I'm happy. This one's a tricky one, especially since the variables
are tenfold, my playing it on electric 12 string. It will be worth it. I
just hope that the distance between "almost" and "right" isn't as big as
it seemed on Saturday.