Largest Mango To Date

• The Largest Mango Of My Life
• 3 Nights Taken Off

Well, anyway.

This Wednesday held the disappointment over having played back a recording I had made before going to sleep to discover that the drums were out of time towards the end of it. Of course, that was when I had gotten pretty warmed up and played some of the better stuff.


The problem is probably that it was a 40 minute recording.


When you are dealing with milliseconds, it just seems that, by the time you get to the 35 minute mark of a recording, some tiny glitch somewhere along the way has thrown one track a few milliseconds out of time with the other, just enough so that it, as in my case for example, it sounds like a horrible drummer is playing on the second track. A terrible drummer.


I'm suspecting that it has to do with the humongous size of the file required to store 40 minutes times 2 tracks of audio, there might be rounding off errors introduced.

Boy, am I learning a lot through trial and error.


By zooming in so that a half a second took up the whole screen, I was able to see that the drum was consistently landing a bit after the guitar was sounding on the first track. It stands to reason that if the guitar is playing "right along with" the snare drum, then the incidence of the two sounding simultaneously, should be pretty high. You're either smacking your snare drum right on the beat or you aren't. It will sound "right on," the way the drummer for the group AC/DC used to, if you are.

Granted, some of what accounts for musical "phrasing" involves musicians either laying a bit behind the beat or anticipating it, for effect, but, by finding a spot where the guitar wasn't doing this, and where the snare drum should have been basically reinforcing it by sounding at exactly the same time, I was able to use the time shifting tool to slide the snare forward in time so that it was, outside of a few anomalies sounding within a few milliseconds of the guitar.

Still, though, it's frustrating to know that, in the digital world, everything you do is going to be rounded to within some tiny fraction of what it actually was. The computer can't divide the beat into an infinite number of fragments, so that, if the snare sounds at 4 and .00022 seconds of the track, it might be rendered at .00020 seconds, due to the number of bits used, etc. One can rest assured that it won't be perfect. But, we're talking about the amount of time that it takes sound to travel an eighth of an inch.



I haven't made even an eighth of an inch of progress towards getting into the abandoned rectory, something that caused me more frustration as I listened back to the half whispered vocals done at 3 in the morning, when a broomstick is at the ready to be sounded on my ceiling should I exceed, say 70 decibels.

"Oilify" is a nice effect that comes pre-loaded in the GIMP editor. It oilifies any drawing, such as this one (right)

I have gotten to the point where I can play the guitar as loudly as possible without someone calling my house phone, and then hanging up after I answer. You almost have to get neighbors accustomed to such things, so that they begin to block it out, the way they might the hissing of high pressure water coursing through a heating and air unit, constantly.

I have to record just the guitar, and maybe a good snare, fake bass etc. for a few of the songs that are slated to go on my CD, so that they will be ready to be sung over in the rectory, whenever I get in there.

Finding an auger is going to require me getting an all day bus pass and going into the "Bywater" area of New Orleans, which is kind of a pawn shop district, having at least a couple of those that are in large buildings that have enough floor space that they come closer to having "everything" than smaller stores. One of them, one could get about 10 Cash Americas into.

An auger would not be a far fetched item to hope to find in that particular store. It would probably be on a table next to a butter churn in one of the back corners of the place.

It is still going to require me drilling the holes and then I'll have to obtain a hacksaw type blade, so that I can cut from hole to hole, opening a rectangular hole that will be just big enough so that I can fit through. Once inside, it will be easy to make it so I can come and go, perhaps just by replacing the rectangle of wood, duck taping it in place and then spray painting over the tape to match the rest of the door, and then just leaving the door unlocked. I can use just a couple screws to keep the piece of plywood over the outside of the door. Nobody should get the idea to test the door from the inside to see if it is locked, since they might reason: "Why would somebody unlock a door that they can't walk through because it is sealed with plywood on the outside?"

I got up at 1 PM, and put on some Prince music and listened for about 15 minutes and then switched to the recording I made the night before, and was happy to notice that I had about the same amount of effects applied to my own stuff that the artist who was formerly Prince had on his.

Harold the cat meowed when I was practicing and recording it, so I created a loop around the chord change and the meow, then used the "Paulstretch" effect to stretch the meow out to about 12 seconds, then I changed the pitch of some of the meows, then copied and pasted and moved things around, until I wound up with a choral piece for a dozen cats in G major. I'll work that into the CD somewhere.

It's Wednesday night, and I might not go out to busk, if I think I can accomplish something substantial at home...something better than a drawing of me eating a mango...
o, procrastination is the word of the day, I suppose.


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