Recording Guitar Music on my Computer

My youngest son's daughters are used to me playing the guitar when I go visit them in Ohio. It is a nightly ritual for me to sit on the end of a bed and play while the girls fall asleep. If I am allowed to play long enough, they fall asleep before I am done. The girls love it and so they asked me to record the guitar so they can listen to me playing even though I am in Utah.

It is a lot of work to set up the recording equipment and so I put it off until my oldest granddaughter asked me two days in a row. The second day, my son forwarded a video of an impassioned plea to record the music. How could I turn her down? On Saturday evening I pulled out my wife's old Mac laptop and connected it to my audio converter. Then I plugged in my acoustic-electric guitar and got ready to record.

The Mac comes with GarageBand which is great for recording audio onto your computer. I have a high-end microphone that I use to record audio for my YouTube videos but my guitar also plugs right in. I thought I could just start playing. I clicked on the GarageBand application only to have it crash repeatedly. The simplest solution is to reinstall the application so I loaded up the App Store and downloaded the latest version. That worked and I could run it on the laptop.

My audio converter connects to the computer though a USB cable and the Mac isn't quite sure what to do with audio afterwards. It can pull input from the converter but also send output to it even though it doesn't have a speaker. I had to go in and tell the Mac to use the device for input but to route output through the computer's speakers. I actually had headphones plugged into the Mac and couldn't hear anything until I adjusted these settings. Then I clicked the "Monitor" checkbox in GarageBand so I could hear my own playing and what the computer recorded.

When I play for my granddaughters before bed, they don't care if I make a mistake. When I practice for myself, I just play through the song and don't worry if the music doesn't sound 100% correct. All that changes when you record music to play over and over. I want it to be perfect and so it took me about 20 attempts on the first song before I felt I did it justice. Knowing I wanted to record around 15 songs, I had to come up with a better way to finish the project. Or I had to stop being so picky.

The first thing I did was to change how I recorded my songs. Instead of stopping the recording after a mistake and starting over, I would keep the recording going and just stop long enough so I knew where to cut the mistake from the track. That sped things up somewhat. I also decided to play each song through once before even attempting to record it. That helped a lot and I cut the number of takes from 20 down to just 1 or 2. Being less picky also had something to do with that.

It normally takes me about 20 minutes to go through the 15 or so songs I have memorized. Recording them took over an hour with all the stops and starts. It also made for great guitar practice as I could really see my common mistakes and work to fix them. I highly recommend recording your music practice on a periodic basis to help you improve. It is something I will incorporate into my practice.

I sent the music off to my son on Saturday evening thanks to some help from Google Drive. He put it on my granddaughters' music player. When I called them yesterday, I could hear my music in the background. This morning my son sent me a video of my oldest granddaughter listening to some of my songs and being happy that she can now hear them whenever she wants. That makes me feel great as a musician but even better as a grandpa.

With Computers, Heat is Your Enemy

When it comes to computers, heat is an enemy. I recently visited my youngest son in Ohio and enjoyed an evening of watching him play Spider-Man 2. The way he has his PS5 set up is that it sits in a television stand below his TV. His stand has doors on it and so when he plays, he has to open the doors to make sure the console has enough airflow to remain cool. When he forgets to open the doors, it gets really hot and the PS5's fan sounds like a jet engine. Continuing to run the console could cause damage and render it useless.

When I worked in Research and Development at Sony Interactive Entertainment, the PlayStation 5 early development kits took many precautions to ensure they didn't overheat. I can't go into too many details because of my existing confidentiality agreement but we always worried. about heat. The consumer units have been designed to withstand a lot, but they are not designed to run in an enclosed space without proper cooling.

The PlayStation 5 is similar to high-end home computer systems. Both need to be appropriately cooled. This means ensuring there is good airflow around intake and exhaust vents. Dust needs to be cleaned from fans and airways. Basically you should constantly evaluate your computer setup and make sure nothing has changed that would create an overheating hazard.

Online Research for Fun

Today I got an e-mail from Alaska Airlines letting me know about a one-day sale where they have great deals on flights but you have to buy them today. I have a lot of credit on the airline and so I surfed over to their site and started entering destinations. The first question is where to go. I thought about it for a second and looked at what it would take to go see my son in Ohio. Unfortunately Alaska does not have an optimized route between Salt Lake and Columbus. I'm not a fan of connections and the trip would require several of them. Next I checked about going to Orlando. After all, doesn't that sound like a fun destination? While the flights only required a single connection, all of the layovers seemed way too long. My final destination to check was Hawaii. Who doesn't want to spend part of December in Hawaii? Alaska Airlines has some great flights between Salt Lake and Hawaii for about $450 round trip on the dates I selected.

While I am tempted to book the flights to Hawaii, I have other things I need to do and ended my research there. I am asking myself if there could have been a perfect situation that would have me booking flights tonight. What about $200 round trip? That seems tough to pass up but I still would not have done it.

The Internet is a great tool that constantly amazes me. Tonight I did a bunch of research that would have required me to waste someone's time on the phone before the Internet. Now I can play around with a number of parameters without inconveniencing anyone. I wondered if I wasted my time this evening but got some entertainment out of the exercise. I wasted my time no more than if I watched a YouTube video or an old movie. Yes, doing online research can be entertaining and fun even if you don't buy anything.

Glad to be Home

My wife and I have been traveling a lot over the past several months. We spent a week in Hawaii and then followed that up with five weeks on another island a month later. This past weekend we visited my youngest son in Ohio with his family. Last night we returned home and my wife let me know she is done traveling for awhile.

Even when travel goes perfectly, it can be rather arduous. Last night we experienced a number of small disruptions that all added up so that we didn't get home until 2 hours after our scheduled arrival. I'm sure that contributed to my wife's comment about not wanting to go anywhere. I admit it felt like a death by a thousand cuts. There wasn't any one issue that made for a big delay, just a lot of little ones.

We left Columbus, Ohio on time and arrived in Atlanta, Georgia early. Those that know the Atlanta airport know it is huge with 6 different terminals. Naturally we landed at terminal A and had to make our way to terminal F to catch our next flight. As I mentioned, we landed early and had plenty of time to take the train. It still required a lot of walking even with the train. We got to our new gate and found two seats where we patiently awaited for our next flight.

Our plane came in from Athens, Greece and required thorough cleaning. While we had a plane, we started boarding a little late. Then the flight only had 9 empty seats. An Airbus A-330 has a lot of seats and so it took a very long time to load all of those passengers. Our scheduled departure time came and went with people continuing to load the plane. Finally everyone boarded and we pushed back about fifteen minutes late. Soon the pilot came on and explained that the wind shifted and we had to reposition the plane to the opposite end of the runway with all of the other flights preparing to take off. Once in the air, the flight went relatively well but we landed 40 minutes late.

I am a firm believer in two types of luggage: carried on and lost. We carried on all our bags and made a straight line for long-term parking once we landed in Salt Lake City. A lot of flights were landing at the same time and the line to board the shuttle to get to our car was massive. It took about 15 minutes just to board the bus and another 10 minutes to get to our car. Fortunately SLC has an abundance of non-human cashiers at the parking exit and it did not require waiting in line to leave the airport.

By this point, we thought we had experienced all of the delays for the evening until we came across late-night road construction. We had five lanes of traffic merge down to one. That added another delay which compounded on the others as we tried to get home to go to sleep. Eventually we made it, albeit significantly later than we hoped.

Those that travel a lot have come to appreciate being at home. Those that don't travel much but then do a few trips in rapid succession discover how satisfying home can be. My wife falls into that later group. At least we can rest for a month or so before our next trip.

A Skype Christmas

I thought I would take a break from video game reviews this evening and write about my Christmas. I used to love getting gifts on Christmas. Now that I am older, there are other things that make for a good holiday season. One thing that has been nice this year is having my older brother living so close to me in Utah. I spent the day at his new house visiting with him and his family.

Yesterday I enjoyed opening my gifts, but the best gift of all was being able to talk to my two oldest kids. My daughter is living near Cleveland, Ohio and my son is in Romania. With the help of Skype, we were all together as a family for the first time in seven months. We talked for over two hours and it was free. For a parent, it was the best Christmas gift ever.