Captain's log #24

The gods favored my endeavors yesterday with an early success. Half the problem at least seems to be gone, and I'm confident about the other half. Sound is being made, although deep down you always have this rage that "things should not be this way, grrr..."

I recorded Guitarix via Audacity and the recorded track sounds as it should. So the obscure problem is an Ardour related thing, apparently. When I say that 50% of the problem is solved, I mean that I still haven't passed yesterday's guitar tracks back to Ardour; will they keep the quality, or is it Ardour what makes them somehow sound like crap?

I would like to get to the end of this affair and squash that motherfucking root cause, but I have to move on, so maybe I'll settle with a provisional solution. Yesterday's takes were not as good as the previous; to record in Audacity I printed the Ardour session in one track and exported it, which reduces the flexibility when you want to adjust playback levels, so I didn't get a comfortable mix to play to. Plus, I changed location and my posture was not so comfortable. I also think I had a case of butter fingers...

Now I can either comp yesterday's takes, which are full of "bruises", or struggle to find a better mix and then retrack again and go for impeccable like the previous batch. It's a matter of where you decide to put the boring stuff. As a starting plan, I'll check what does Ardour do to the guitar tracks, and if I can get a better mix I'll probably retrack again (standardizing the hell out of the whole process, so I don't have to go through this again).

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