Sunny Wednesday Soho

August Clouds, Richmond on Thames

 First one from the bridge, the rest from the Old Deer Park.

Solving the "Low Recording Volume in GarageBand From My Katana Using USB" Problem

It's time to think about recording. Because this is the +CurrentYear and just playing for your own ears is not enough. And listening to the playback makes it really clear that my fluency sucks.

BOSS swear the USB out can be used as an input to Garageband and other DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations).

There are YT videos on how to do it. Reddit is full of people saying "I can barely hear what it records", and, "it has horrible latency", and getting not very useful advice in return. The Interwebz is full of people giving advice. I will have a post about publicly-available advice coming shortly.

So here is how it's done - and my apologies for oversights. I assume you know the basics of Garageband (or whatever DAW you use), have installed the Katana driver on your computer, and set up a project file to record from it.

My First Law of Doing Stuff is: The task is not the problem.

The task is getting a decent recording in Garageband running on my M1 Air, using the Katana 50 Mk 2's USB connection, while also being able to get reasonable tones through the Katana at living-room volumes.

The problem is to work out why I get a useless waveform in the Garageband track display like this

and then fix it to get a useful waveform like this

After some directionless fiddling around with knobs and dials systematic experiment, it turns out that to get a decent waveform, there needs to be a fair amount of gain on the signal going into the USB connection. On the Clean Amp Type, I had to apply +15dB, but the Brown Amp Type was just fine.

After some more directionless fiddling around with knobs and dials systematic reviewing of the options, I wondered why Tone Studio has a LINE OUT option in the Global EQ, when there is no Line Out on the amp. (Line Out means, in my world, a fixed-voltage analogue output for use in recording). It isn't possible that BOSS really mean 'USB' do they? (Fiddle with settings, play random notes, look at waveform display in Garageband.) Oh, yes, they do. LINE OUT means USB. Because you know, of course we knew that.

So to get a half-decent signal into Garageband, and enough to produce a useable waveform, set the Global EQ to LINE OUT, use the Parametric EQ and give it +20dB of gain. Set that, choose the relevant colour on the Panel and never touch it again.

It won't affect the volume from the speaker.

If you want to apply gain or attenuation to a channel, my experiments suggest using the channel EQ and EQ2 controls. Those apply nice clean gain. The pre-amp gain is an attempt to emulate gain on a valve amp, so it dirties up the signal.

You're welcome.

Saturday Skies - It's About Clouds

 

The last few weeks have been all about the clouds. The Europeans may be melting in the heat (they chose to stay in the EU...) and we have been getting skies like these for at least an hour or so a day if not more. I can't remember seeing clouds like this for years. Anyway. This was taken on the last Saturday of July, and after you've finished thinking that it's a damn fine shot, let's consider that it was taken on an iPhone SE2. Somewhere in Cupertino, there's a team that really knows WTF it's doing with computational photography. Because a conventional camera wouldn't get this exposure.

Landing at London City Airport

 

Taken from the Sir Steve Redgrave Bridge. This is heavily cropped, and it's why 24MP cameras are as good as a zoom lens.

That Trans Thing

So here's my take...

The aim of the Trans movement is, one assumes, to help Trans people establish productive, stable, emotionally-satisfying lives in society, and to help them deal with, and get legal remedy for, the occasional ignorance and prejudice they may meet(1). Sounds like a nice part-time gig for a few lawyers, medical advisors and social workers. Not something an FTSE 100 company needs a policy on, and certainly nothing trillion-dollar hedge funds such as Black Rock and Vanguard need to be involved in.

The core demand of Trans activism is that people of one sex(2) should be able to claim the legal and institutional rights, privileges and protections accruing to people of the others. Since women already have all the legal and institutional rights of men, Trans activism reduces to the demand that men should have access have to the many rights, privileges and protections of women in Western societies that are not shared with men(3).

Unlike religious conversion, where considerable changes of behaviour are required of the convert, the Trans movement insists that no changes of phenotype or behaviour are required of the Trans person. Men should get the special rights and privileges of women simply by professing that they "identify as a woman". This has been a really terrible decision, opening the door to a parade of chancers, frauds, and grifters who have tarnished the Trans brand badly.

Another terrible decision was to copy the feminist tactic of "Invading male spaces": this was the idea that anywhere men gathered together should be subject to female supervision and policing. In Western societies this has been more or less completely successful. In the same way, Trans activists insist on the right to "invade female spaces": women must have nowhere they can feel safe from male intrusion, observation, and competition.

Another series of bad decisions has been to fail to distance itself from...

a) children who use it to irritate their parents and bully their teachers 

b) trillion-dollar hedge funds using it to advance their profitability and influence (cf "ESG / DIE") 

c) the social-work / teaching / NHS / local government / civil service / media nexus, who are using it to silence or remove their opponents 

d) governments who are using it as a distraction from the serious issues 

e) media who use it as click-bait and to put on a freak-show

How the Trans movement shakes off these mistakes, and becomes useful again... I have no idea.



(1) I know. But it's what they should be doing 

(2) There are men, women and hermaphrodites. "Man" means anyone with at least one Y in their chromosome, "hermaphrodite" means hermaphrodite, and everyone else is a woman. 

(3) Don't pretend there aren't any.

Ship on the Thames

 

It didn't look like this, but a) it should have done, and b) this is the way anyone would paint it. 

I've been reading Tom Ang's Photography: The Definitive Visual History from Dorling Kindersley. (Superbly printed in China.) Early photography was far more painterly, mainly because of the longer exposures. The film types and lenses also created a softer look closer to an 'accurate' painting, than today's ultra-sharp lenses and 20+ megapixel cameras. Somewhere in the middle were the Glory Days of 35mm Black and White - which is nowhere near as sharp as we think it is.

The adjustments I've made to this are deliberately painterly. I'm starting to think that maybe the default settings on my X-E4 need changing. The catch is this: some changes seem to trigger a bunch of processing in the camera to create the jpeg, as I found taking photos in Mile End Park using someone's Kodachrome-emulation settings.