January 23, 2017

On the weekend, I integrated Pedalboards II, IV & V and the other effectors.  A problem arose with Pedalboard IV. Mmmm! Quite literally a ‘mmmm’ of 50Hz, where there ought to have been relative silence.

8.30 am: Off to School for the penultimate-day of fine art assessments. This period in the year is something of a marathon for staff. And, no sooner than the assessments are completed, we will need to discover fresh reserves of energy in order to crank up the next semester. And so it goes on:

12.00 pm: I had time to write-up several of the morning’s assessments before a MA inquirer’s consultation at 12.30 pm and a pastoral tutorial at 1.15 pm:

1.30 pm: Back at homebase, I had a swift, late lunch of egg fried rice, before completing the writing up that I’d begun at the School. 3.15 pm: An Abstraction module, essay resubmission beckoned to be marked. 4.40 pm: Studiology. Over the weekend, I’d battled with a hiss n’ hum produced by Pedalboard II (above) when it was installed in the send and receive loop of my amplifier. Having replaced various effectors and examined the integrity of the patch cables, to nil effect, I could only conclude that the cause of the noise was the mono to stereo transition (TRS to TS connections) from the amplifier to the board. This was indeed the case, as I discovered this afternoon. I’d been caught out by this mismatch before. Perhaps, now, I’ve learned my lesson.

6.30 pm: Domestic sock matching from the laundry basket. 7.30 pm: Studiology, again. I’ll not settle to anything else unless I first convince myself that Pedalboard II’s noise emission had been remedied. And, so I rebuilt the board from scratch. 9.00 pm: Done! Optimised. One can never completely remove noise from a sound system comprising so many individual effectors. Their collective gain will always generate a small amount of hiss. The trick is to keep it to a minimum. I’m now confident that I’ve done my best in this respect.

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January 24, 2017