Recording My Frustration

I came up with a riff tonight that I liked and wanted to get it recorded before I forgot it. Typical. It I don't tab it or record it, I lose it. Windows 2000 was already booted up so I fired up Audacity and got the riff "to tape". I thought I might put down a couple more tracks with harmonized parts with Kristal but the latency is too much to work with multiple tracks in Windows. So I rebooted into DeMuDi.

My DeMuDi installation is messed up but I can still work with it. I fired up Ardour and imported my riff to track one. I layed down four more guitar parts but I dumped one of the tracks. The fifth track was going to be a little bit of lead over the top of the rest. After several attempts (and I mean several), I got close to what I wanted. Cool.

Track 2 needed something though, the part was right but the sound was not. I needed it to be radically different in tone from the rest of the parts. With Ardour you can add pre or post fader plugin effects (I'm not sure if they are part of the Ardour package or if they are bundled with DeMuDi. At any rate, there are many options to choose from.) so I decided to go nuts with it. I added autophaser, chorus, delay, and one other I can't even remember. Sure enough, I got what I needed. Life was good.

Once completed, I mixed it all down to a wav file and went to do some tweaking on it with Audacity. Uh oh, something was really wrong with it. The signal was clipping all the way through. Back to Ardour, where I figured out I had selected a couple options in the export to wav that were mistakes so I exported again, this time with the correct options selected. This time it was right on. I started tweaking in Audacity and the dang thing froze up on me! Reboot...

After a couple more times of lock-ups in DeMuDi, I decided enough was enough. So I copied the wav to one of the Windows partitions. I would work with it in Audacity in Windows. It's definitely time to reinstall DeMuDi or one of the other Audio Distros. Maybe Musix this time? We'll see...

Well, I went into Windows/Audacity and everything sounded nice, but something was still wrong. What was it?

MY LEAD, what happened to my lead track? Somehow, I must have exported the Ardour session to wav with the wrong lead track take. ARRrrrrgggh!!!

[sigh]

I've had enough of this for one evening. Right now I am in my SuSE partition tarring up my DeMuDi home folder so I can keep my Ardour sessions for another day...

This is just my kind of luck, but hey, at least the original goal was accomplished I have added yet another riff to my vast collection. It's the getting them into actual songs part of composing that is the real trick for me. :-)