adaptation

I rather unfortunately rashly declared that I wasn't planning on buying anything from any sort of music shop in the near future when I was spotted browsing USB sound-input breakout boxes on Sunday after empirically confirming my suspicions about the capabilities of the sound hardware in my laptop for the purposes of Uke Project recordings. Although my cobbled-together method works it's far from ideal and is too inconvenient to be able to be quickly set-up for a quick ten minutes' multitracking as I used to be able to do. I may have to pop out for a poke at things after all. In a couple of hours I managed to get a few test tracks recorded (to be reviewed during the day tomorrow for improvement tomorrow evening) but it's a bit of a faff. At least I rediscovered my main cache of adaptors and interconnecting wires in a box under the bed as it slightly reduced the number of steps required to connect thing A to thing B.

In the current setup the phone plays the backing tracks, one earsworth of which heads to the computer's line input (via two adaptors and two interconnecting leads). The uke's pickup's output goes into the sixteen-year-old effects box for a little signal boosting, compression and reverb. That then heads into a thirteen-year-old Fostex cassette four-track (now useless as a four-track as it never runs at the same speed twice) which is currently pretending to be a mixer to take a mix of the sound from the uke pickup with some external microphone noise into the other channel of the computer input to be recorded (via, luckily, a single interconnecting wire). The preserved backing track sound in the left ear is then used to align the recording with the backing track in the multi-tracking software (which is happy enough when playing multiple tracks, merely shite at recording whilst playing back); when aligned, the track is split and the re-recorded copy of the backing track disposed of. Vocal recording is similar except for the use of a few extra adaptors as someone stole my proper dynamic microphone in 1999. Fiddly, but hopefully shortly to be remedied by means of technological purchasing.