It seems like for quite a while there in the late winter I was feeling under the weather, but in the last few weeks as spring has arrived I’ve been feeling more myself again. The last few weekends we’ve been spending a lot of time outdoors, doing the spring cycle of work on the yard, house and cars. Last Saturday it was warm and sunny and we washed and waxed Jeannie’s car. This weekend it was too cold to do my car, so we took it to the car wash instead. The kids were thrilled. We’ve also done lots of weeding, trimming, lawn mowing, planting the garden, and putting down fertilizer and new mulch. Probably one more good session and the spring cycle is complete.
But the weather has been inconsistent, so we’ve been doing stuff indoors too. Last Sunday it was cold and rainy, and I was working in my studio with Michelle on her new song “Now”. She wanted to play the piano part on my new synth, so I had to do some re-patching. This led to all kinds of problems with wires, hum and noise, gear not working, and finally furniture breaking. Michelle was a great help dealing with that stuff, but we never got any recording done that day. That night I was working on laying down a bass part on Black Swan, but the groove was just not happening.
I decided I needed to tear down and rebuild my entire studio. The main motivation was the need to move my rack cabinet so I could access the back. This cabinet is basically an open shelf with some x-braces, one of which snapped. It used to hold our TV, until Jeannie got a new TV a few months back, and I swapped it for my old rack cabinet as the new TV stand. The thing is, there’s tons of wires, and I just lifted my rack onto the new cabinet, and ever since there’s been a hum and occasional noise in the system. In order to move the rack cabinet I needed to move my studio monitors too. One thing led to another, and it was pretty much a full day of moving furniture and plugging things back in. Michelle was very helpful again, and in the end I wound up with a freshly organized studio, free of hum. Plus the monitors are now centered on my computer where I do most of my actual mixing work, rather than mixer, which was the center when I fist set up the space years ago, In their new orientation the speakers sound better and fill up the room better too.
As for my bass, that needed some attention too. At one point I was thinking of giving up and shopping for a new bass, but then I figured if John Paul Jones and Joco Pastorious can get an amazing sound from a Fender, I should at least be able to get a decent sound. That’s the kind of sound I’ve been going for all along anyway. Plus my bass has always had good action, intonation and feel. I’d never taken apart a bass before, so I knew I was in for some fun. Among other problems, there was noise in the tone and volume controls, and the strings sounded really dead. Someone once told me you can boil bass strings to bring them back to life, so I thought I’d try it. Then I removed the pick guard to clean the volume and tone controls. I discovered that the nuts that held the potentiometers to the pick guard were made of plastic, and broken, and the knobs were just kinda floating in place. I cleaned the pots and used rubber bands to hold them in place temporarily. Today I went to the music store and got some replacement parts including metal nuts. Meanwhile last night I put everything back together and tried it out.
It was a world of difference. The strings were shiny and sounded amazing. Good bright attack and sustain. Also, cleaning the pots got rid of the noise problem. I was able to turn up the gain on my MBox and record a hotter signal too. So the result was excellent, and I now have the bass part down for Black Swan.
