There were eight tomato seeds placed in this container three weeks ago.
And yet, I am delighted with the results so far:

The South-facing garage window gets quite a bit of sun during the day. Hopefully it will be enough to see this little guy through to potting stage.

This is a test post. Upgrade appears to have gone smoothly.

Update: Here we go again. Comments aren't working for me, currently. Changing themes back to standard to see if it is related to my custom theme.

Every morning our back yard is besieged with a gang of American Robins. The male birds (I assume) have a black head and white eye-rings and they look like they are wearing balaclavas. The females have less-contrasting plumage but are still very colorful.

This is a bit of an experiment. Trying out the SoundCloud widget:

Listen (2010) by ProdigalSounds

I uploaded a 256kbs mp3, I have no idea if SoundCloud re-encodes it. It sounds OK.

I've spent about the last year re-working a track called "Listen" that I really and truly thought was finished and done with. It all started when two independent things happened: Firstly, I decided to purchase XLN's Addictive Drums software and improve the quality of my percussion tracks. This worked really well on my first experiment (a "new" track called ... well that's not important right now). As is the norm, before I finished the track to my satisfaction , I got heartily sick of hearing it . Thish appens on every musical project, I should plan for it. The only solution is to take a break; and work on something different for a while, and then come back to it, aurally refreshed.

I'd been getting a good bass tone on the new track, but I needed some practice, so I decided to give my fingers a workout and attempt to play along to the bass line of Listen. Now, the bass in Listen was originally recorded with a Chapman Stick, which requires quite different fingering, so this was not an insignificant challenge.

After about the second run-through, I was beginning to notice that it was sounding good. I mean, really good. It was kicking the track up a notch, to the point where I was considering that perhaps Listen actually should have the Bass on it instead of the Stick. Then I noticed some places where the drums were a little glitchy, could be tightened up a bit, given a more natural feel... and I could use XLN Addictive Drums on it, because after all, they sounded so much better than the sound module I used on Listen...

6 months later, with completely new drums, new bass (including a new bass melody in one section), some alternate synths, and some additional vocals, I was guiltily pleased with the results. And then...

This one time, I was in the car, and I put in one of my CD's and I heard the original mix, the one with the Stick, and I realized that it had something that the new version I'd been working on just wasn't delivering. The new version was great, don't misunderstand me, it was improved dramatically in many ways, but in the process something had been lost. Something I had to get back. What to do? It was apparent that - although the new bass line was great, and had triggered many other improvements - it really needed to be played on the Chapman Stick. Back to where the riff began, as it were. 

Time to go back to the Stick, and practice. A lot. I gained fluidity and clarity but the tone wasn't there. The Stick is a different instrument than a conventional bass guitar, even though they dominate the same frequency range (at least the way I use the Stick), and feeding it through the same signal chain that I used for a great bass sound didn't work. I have no idea what I used for the original Stick recording (yes, I keep notes, but they are not exhaustive), and this time I was getting nothing but rubbish sounds via external hardware amp simulators (my two stand-bys are the Line6 POD 2.0 and the Johnson J-Station), and getting really depressed about it, but in desperation I pulled out the Native Instruments Guitar Rig 3 LE plug-in that came bundled with SONAR 7. 

It was the first time I used it. I'm not a fan of CPU-hungry virtual amp emulators and the associated latency. But in GR3le I started getting interesting results very quickly. Things were looking up. So much so, that I took advantage of a time-limited deal for SONAR users, and upgraded.

All of which is a preamble to what I actually wanted to talk about: Getting the bass tone for Listen using Native Instruments Guitar Rig 4.

Because GR4 is a resource-hungry beast,and the Listen project is already pushing the limits of my studio computer, I created a new project and loaded up three pre-rendered stereo tracks for the drums, synths, and guitars. Then a new track for the Stick recording:

Here's the sound with just the drums accompanying - it's basically just the natural sound of the Stick through the K&K pre-amp along with a little compression from the FX bin:

Through the K&K Pre-amp:

Then I added Guitar Rig to the FX bin:

Guitar Rig is a lot of fun, because you can drag and drop icons around and construct a virtual equipment rack that represents how the audio signal will be processed. I created a rack with a tube compressor and phaser along with the typical bass amplifier and cabinet:

Here's what it sounded like now:

Pretty good... but it is missing some nice, clear, top-end frequencies. With Guitar Rig, you can set up a split to process the signal via two independent processing paths, so I set up a second "jazz amp" with all the bass and mids rolled off to add some shimmer in:

Here's what this second signal path sounds like, on its own:

What I then used for the track was a 65/35 mix of both:

The results:

I exported the resulting bass line out to a separate audio file and then imported it into the original Listen project in SONAR:

Yeah. I think that's just about perfect.

Google Sketchup is pretty amazing, for a free program. You can build up 3D models of things using primitive shapes, putting them together, zooming around and rotating, and even dimensioning. It's tricky to use, but there is some valuable tutorial videos that explain things one tool at a time.

Here's the workbench I'm planning on building:

I'm sure the free version has limitations (I must try printing, for example) but so far, it's awesome.

This post is dedicated to my Dad.

A couple of months ago, our Panasonic DMR-E85H digital video recorder died. It did this once before, several years ago, and we took it to an official Panasonic repair facility where they did something to it and charged us about 50% of the cost of the original purchase. We kind of agreed that next time it died, that would be it, and we'd have to find a replacement.

It turns out that "they" don't make them any more. You can't buy a new device that records TV shows to hard disk, without involving a subscription, either to the cable company (who want to give you a cable decoder+integrated hard disk recorder) or to Tivo / DirectTV / SatelliteTV company. Screw that. According to the manufacturers, "customers are not asking for such devices". That's bullshit. I simply don't believe it. It's my believe that there is a corporate conspiracy going on between the media networks and the hardware manufacturers... but that's a different rant blog post.

After some research, we found that second-hand Panasonic and similar units are commanding quite extraordinary prices. The nearest thing we found was a refurbished Philips DVDR 3576H, on overstock.com. At first glance, it has similar specs, although with some trade-offs:

Positive: The Philips has a built-in ATSC digital tuner. This means that, if we were located somewhere with line-of-sight to a HDTV transmitter, we could attach an aerial to the recorder and record free-to-air HDTV programs. (This is not currently feasible for us, living in a valley in the North Bay, not without some experimentation, for another time.)

Negative: It does not have a way to tell the cable television decoder box to switch channels. The Panasonic had an IR-Blaster, but the Philips does not. This means that, although we can set up a recording schedule on the recorder, we must manually set the channel to record on the cablebox. This is not "set it and forget it" by any means. If we want to record two shows on different channels on the same night, I basically have to set an alarm to remind me to go point the remote at the cablebox and change to the appropriate channel.

Also - the operating system on the Philips device is HORRIBLE in comparison to the Panasonic, which itself was no great thing of beauty.

But this post isn't about the Philips. It's about the Panasonic DMR-E85H. You see, I didn't want to break it down or recycle it. I wanted to fix it.

My first thought was, OK, it's completely dead, therefore the power supply has perhaps burned out (they have a known issue with overheating). I opened it up, and a visual inspection revealed no obvious component failure. So I got out the trusty multimeter, powered up the unit and tested the voltage rails. They had voltage! Drat. Without the technical manual, or an oscilloscope, or more sophisticated equipment, I wasn't going to get much further. I closed the unit up and packed it away and grumped for a week.

Then I found this thread on avforums.com. This is a long-running thread (from 2006) and, after reading it all the way through, I concluded that there were still some things I could try. The most obvious problem was a failing voltage regulator, but it could also be failing electrolytic capacitors. It was worth opening up the unit and removing the circuit board of the Power Supply Unit (PSU) and giving it a closer examination.

(I wish I could say that I would have done this regardless, but the truth is that the posts on the AVForum thread gave me the confidence and incentive to try it.)

I was half-way there already, because the PSU board is located underneath the hard drive - I had to mostly disassemble the unit just to check the voltage rails. Removing the board was an extra step: four additional screws and disconnect one ribbon cable.

Breaking out the magnifying glass and reviewing the board revealed an obvious problem: Swollen and leaking electrolytic capacitors, just behind the voltage regulator:

There were three of them that looked suspect. Now I had a plan: replace them! Using solder braid and my trusty soldering iron, I carefully removed the suspect devices.

I had some trouble obtaining replacements of similar size, but Electronics Plus in San Rafael had some that might fit. (Using over-spec'd voltage rating on caps is not a problem, providing they fit inside the chassis.)

After creatively arranging the larger capacitors on the circuit board and soldering them in place, I was ready to put it back together. Crossing my fingers and holding my breath, I powered it up:

It's a little hard to see, but yeah, it worked. (does happy dance)

The Panasonic is now back in our living room equipment shelf under the television, recording shows and changing channels on the cable box via its IR-Blaster. The Philips will be relegated to our bedroom.

I've got two or three posts buffered up in my head but I'm thinking, seeing as it's 2010 and all (blood rushing to head as I type) perhaps I should try upgrading to BlogEngine 1.5 for the new year. And maybe re-enable comments too.

 

Taken a couple of weeks ago: Frost melting on the, um, plants, alongside our driveway. 

I don't intend this blog to become a bird-watching log, but we do get some colourful visitors in our backyard. A couple of days ago, this interesting character showed up: