April 1, 2017

8.30 am: Studiology. Today, I faced my demons: the persistent problem with the ‘A’ and ‘B’ loops on the Lehle D.Loop, and my niggling sense of compromise regarding the system mixer’s inability to exclude the ‘dry’ signal from the processing path when using its own internal ‘send’ and ‘receive’ loop. The latter problem could only be overcome by feeding the mixer’s main outputs directly through the modifiers and splitting the signal at the end — one pair of stereo outputs proceeding to the amps, and an identical pair, to an analogue/digital interface and onto a computer, where the signal will be recorded. Deciding where in the system the stereo signal would begin was the first task:

In the background, I combined and mixed down the composite tracks for each of Mark’s and Luke’s gospels. This process occupied my laptop for an hour and a half. (It didn’t like it. These are huge files.) In the meantime, I dismantled the sound system cabling in order to prepare for re-routing its signal path:

Before lunch I extracted, from the analogue>digital recording of the records, the noise of the stylus as it trails off from the recorded groove towards the centre of the disc. The ‘needle’ gets stuck in the grove until the tone arm is lifted. (Analogue looping.) The graphical display of the sound looks like a very fine-tooth comb:

1.40 pm: I isolated a portion of the mechanical loops from each of the records and created a digital loop. These loops will then be overlaid to create polyrhythms. The static, click, and bumps produce the trace of the stylus is exquisitely subtle and delicate. The graphic rendering looks precisely like the recorded sound:

In tandem, I continued to re-route the cables of the revised sound system. The new configuration does away with the need of the Lehle D.Loop in the system. (Problem solved.)

I’ll need to place a mixer between the system and the amplifiers, and to run the levelling amplifier into the Moog units, rather than after it. (I could, then, record from the mixer USB, which would save me having to split the stereo signal.) The present set up is far too cumbersome for recording purposes. Due to the variation in the capacitance and mismatched resistance across so many modifiers, the overall sound quality at the final output is also compromised, albeit only moderately and, for the purpose of the coming 24-hour open studio – negligibly.

5.20 pm: Close of play. 6.30 pm: Practise session 1. 7.30 pm: An evening with my wife.

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April 3, 2017