Cousin Silas – “Deserted Highways”/”The Lost and Fading Cosmonaught” – 120611

DESERTED HIGHWAYS

The plan today was to try and record some of the bass loops I was writing about yesterday.

This would involve me transferring the stereo audio file that Cousin Silas had sent me from my PC onto my Tascam 2488 digital recorder and then track the bass on the Tascam. Trouble is, you can’t load stereo files onto the Tascam, so I had to record two mono files, representing stereo left and stereo right, on CE5,  which I could then move across. While I was at that, I decided to record the metronome as well, for reference. This will not figure in the final mix.

That having been done, I needed to physically transfer the files. Normally what I do here is copy the audio from my PC onto a memory stick. power up my laptop which is connected by USB to the Tascam, slot in the memory stick and then use the laptop as a “bridge” to the Tascam. Trouble was, my laptop was in my sitting-room and I was just too lazy to get off my butt and bring it in to the studio, So I invoked Plan B, which involved transferring the audio via CD-RW from the PC to the Tascam. This is a very slow method, and as I subsequently discovered, no matter how many different CD-RW discs I used, the Tascam refused to read them. So there went Plan B…I shall have to resort to Plan A, but not today. Just too lazy…

…COSMONAUGHT

…so instead, I loaded the backing track for this piece onto CE5. Although I don’t intend recording anything that requires a lot of cutting and pasting, I still needed to work out the tempo/time signature. While this is a very abstract track, I discovered, about a minute in, a faint, but repeated percussive pattern. After a little trial and error, I discovered that the tempo/time signature is 120 bpm at 4/4. I moved the backing track so that the start of the percussive pattern commenced at the first beat of a particular bar. Ran the metronome and everything sync’d perfectly at 120 bpm. Sorted. I then proceeded to record two mono tracks as per …HIGHWAYS, but no metronome this time.

Phew, both mentally and physically knackered after ALL THAT EFFORT. Need time to recover…Nurse?? NURSE???!!!???

Regards,

djp