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reinventing-the-wheel.gmi

@@ -6,6 +6,8 @@ In college I played a lot of music. I was in the university orchestra a couple y
 
 My sophomore year at university I was working on a sound project. I had a homemade electroacoustic instrument that I wanted to record, playing over some 'tape' aka electronic music I made on my computer. For the homemade electronic instrument, think something like the PDQ Bach instrument called the Double-reed Slide Music Stand. I think I had my bassoon mouthpiece connected to my didgeridoo or maybe my actual music stand neck, with a DIY contact mic pickup. And I had some experimental backing textures I had made on my laptop, from downloaded and homemade audio samples. Aside from this, I had a tape machine and my stereo system I had purchased used at the thrift store, an old beautiful wood Marantz receiver. And I needed to record audio from both my electronic slide music stand bassoon and my computer output simultaneously. Playing both the computer audio via my external speakers, and the crumhorn-pipe-bassoon into a small speaker at once I could record them simultaneously from the mini microphone input on my tape machine but the audio quality would be horrible. In 2022 I would probably just do it and consider the added texture part of the intended ambience. But in 2001 that kind of lo-fidelity sound was not necessarily my intention. My roommate, bandmate and all-around fellow nerd Doug was in class. So I was on my own to figure this out. I thought for a little bit but then quickly had an idea and I gathered my needed supplies. Soon I was humming along. The DIY contact mic on my slide-stand-bassoon was plugged into the left side input of the Marantz stereo receiver. With my laptop I plugged a stereo cable, converted to a RCA, only connecting one side to the right side of stereo receiver input. With this crappy dual low-volume input I pumped up the gain significantly on the stereo, using its warm analog amplifier capabilities. The stereo output, with the two instruments mixed to separate left and right channels, was atrociously combined through connecting them to my mono input cassette recorder option. So while I didn't have a stereo recording, I did at least have two channels of audio with both instrumens in them and was able to record my musical masterpiece.
 
+=> images/music-stand.gif double slide reed music stand
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 When Doug came home several hours later I was elated to show him my creation, with its combination of a gang of cables and converters and using all of the electronic instruments and players I had at hand. He immediately looked at it, dubiously, started laughing and said "Congratulations, you've invented the mixer." The strange thing was: he was right. For the entire time I had worked with this setup (maybe an hour or two) I had forgotten that an audio "mixer" was indeed a thing, probably because I hadn't actually used one before. All I knew was that I needed to combine audio wet-on-wet on top of each other, and I figured out a solution with what I had on hand to make it so. It wasn't until the following years I took experimental electronic audio production classes taught by an oldksool electronic music composer (from the 70s! we had an old Buchla 100 in the music lab). While Doug thought what I had done was trivial and silly, I was proud of myself for my ingenuity, even if I wouldn't really use that system again.
 
 Since that time I've continued to make music, art, and other creative output, sometimes with my DIY make-it-work hat on, and other times using my university training.