Captain's log #27

Today I've tried a lot of stuff, under the bracket of "fail fast", and I think I've finally found something I can work with.

I've been doing experiments regarding the guitar tone. It's difficult for me to summarize here the chaos of tests in a linear manner; the result, or at least the most plausible hypothesis as of now, is: my audio interface, a Samson G-Track, works better with buffer size=3, but according something I read somewhere, Guitarix acts funny under buffer sizes that are not a multiple of 2 (perhaps this is true for Rakarrack too?). So that's why historically all my tests with buffer size=3 did weird stuff. Today I have tried recording the guitar within Ardour, no Guitarix, just adding a distortion plugin to the track and monitoring via software, and the sound has finally become something I feel confident, not that sensation that someone or something is taking a dump on you whenever you try to play and the latency is "slimey".

So I'm very happy, as I have the sensation that I've finally gathered everything I need to start cranking out stuff seriously. To be honest I get this sensation periodically, but this time what's undeniable is that I've taken a giant step forward, with Drum mutherfucking Gizmo and this song that is starting to sound really kick ass...

The distortion in Ardour  is primary and raw, so maybe it will need some more audio polishing, but I'm not going to obsess about it because in the end I'm a musician, a punk musician for worse, I just want to put it out there, especially in this age when so many hide that they have nothing to say under 300 plugins...

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