Recording With The Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 and Helix Effects

Regular readers will remember the problems I, and everyone else with a Katana, had with recording and playback through the thing. I gave up in the end.

I’ve been trying recording on the iPhone / iPad, using the Lexis Audio Editor, which is intuitively easier to use than the iOS Garageband. For my simple mind, anyway. Record with the mic, playback via the Apple dongle and the Katana Aux In. It kinda worked, but not inspiringly.

Then I got the Helix HX Effects. I’ve been playing with it exploring its functionality for a while. I had registered that it treated the SEND and RECEIVE ports as blocks that could be put in the signal chain. I had got as far as using a RECEIVE port / block to receive music from the phone and pass it on to the Katana.

That works because the Helix software lets us create two logical paths (A and B) between the device inputs and outputs. It’s actually easier to see-and-do on the control software than it is to explain (which is how it should be). Put all the guitar-related effects on one path, and use the other path to take the play-along music. Join the paths together at the end, so the play-along music is unaffected by the guitar effects. Works nicely.

One afternoon, I started thinking about recording again. I don’t want to use headphones, and I want to hear the sound of the guitar from the amp. That was always a problem in the past, because I was getting the guitar effects from the amp. Ever since I got the HX Effects, the amp has been set to the Clean channel and all the effects turned off. EQ’s at mid-day. It’s almost tonally transparent.

The following question now makes sense. Can I use a SEND port on the HX Effects to send a copy of the signal to an interface? The interface connects to the laptop via USB and a recording program can use the USB as an input. Also, can I take the audio out from the laptop and plug that in to the Aux In of the Katana. The HX Effects is connected to the Katana via the L/Mono output socket as usual.

I have one signal path from the guitar to HX Effects to the amp; a separate path from the HX Effects to the laptop to the recording software; and another from the recording playback to the amp. So there’s no feedback loop.

And even better… there’s no way background noise can get into the signal chain because there are no microphones!

I’m using Audacity. It’s recording software with some extras, rather than a full-featured DAW, so it will do nicely for my simple mind. I made sure it could record one track while playing back another, which is kinda key to the whole thing. I can.

All I need to be able to do is send one copy of the signal to the L/Mono output, and another copy to a SEND socket. Which is kinda the reverse of bringing in a signal from the RECEIVE port.

I tested everything I could without actually getting the interface. Everything worked the way I needed it to.

Pull the trigger. The interface of choice for the amateur is the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, which has two inputs: either instrument jack plug or mic three-pin. (Mics need a lot more signal boost than guitars.) I need one short guitar cable (male-to-male jack plugs) to connect the HX Effects SEND to the Scarlett instrument in.

Arrives within 24 hours thanks to Amazon Prime. Took about fifteen minutes to set up, including an online firmware update. Another five minutes to set the recording volume for the guitar.

Now I have to deal with the well-known phenomenon of “recording klutz”, where hitherto fluent playing suddenly misses the beat, because someone turned the red light on. Also with the fact that my playing is, well, not quite metronomic.

Which is why we record ourselves. It’s one thing to know you’re a bit clunky while playing, but another to hear it in playback. It’s so much more embarrassing in playback.

The Geometrical Kit In The Playground Picture

This was taken around midday. In the school holidays. The park was empty. Sensible people were wandering round air-conditioned shopping malls. Or in air-conditioned cinemas.

The Path Leading Into the Distance Picture (Maryon Wilson Park)

It’s still hot. I went out to the Big Smoke yesterday and even though the temperatures were 10F lower than last week, I was still beat by about 15:00 and had to retreat to a shower at home.

The Empty Park Seat Picture (Maryon Wilson Park)

It’s been hot, and I can’t take the heat like I used to be able to. I’m not so sure that 80+F temperatures were even a thing when I was a young lad. I was in no fit state to move the day after this trip.

Empty park seats are one of those subjects that photographers are drawn to: Geoff Dyer has a chapter on it in his book on photography The Ongoing Moment. So that’s all right then.

Garden Clearence and Patio Cleaning Videos

Call me odd, but I find it fascinating to watch someone turn a jungle into a neat lawn, revealing paths and sharpening borders in the process, or jet-washing a grimy patch of hard standing in front of someone’s house to reveal an area of warm pink stone.

I have two thoughts at some point in these videos: a) Jeez, this guy is putting a s**t ton of work in here, and b) how could anyone let it get so bad. For most of the garden videos, the answer is that the owner is old, infirm, or absent. This can apply to the jet-washing videos but not so much.

(I too have been solvenly in these matters, so there’s no judgement here.)

This is the UK. It’s damp all the time (except for ten days a year when it’s too hot) and so moss grows all the time on any north-facing shaded surface, and weeds thrive everywhere .

Every year, once it’s stopped being winter, I clean the front path. This year I used chemicals and a stiff brush and it worked a treat - no need to water-jet. Next year I will need to water-jet my new paving in the back. The lawn needs to be cut, raked to get rid of the dead grass, and fed chemicals a couple of times a year to keep it green. I cut back my side of the neighbour’s hedges a couple of times a year as well. It doesn’t take much… after I got the gear: the lawn mower, the power trimmers for the hedges, a leaf blower to clear the leaves off the lawn in autumn, an extension lead. I pick the little green weeds that grow between the stones in my front garden every spring: it’s tedious but it takes an hour, if that. The resulting weed-freeness is something I look at quite a bit for a couple of days before I get used to it.

(Of course I subscribe to the Council’s garden waste disposal service. It saves car journeys to the tip all the time, which is good for Climate Change. *smug*)

It doesn’t take many activity-hours to do these things, but it does take the gear - which not everyone can afford, and spending £200-ish on kit that only gets used twice a year can seem wasteful, and what’s wrong with some sharp shears? (Answer: you have to take them to get sharpened, which in my case is quite a drive, because knife-sharpeners don’t come down the street like they used to.) And then there’s working out what chemicals to use. I’m not a gardener, so it took me way longer to work out what I needed, and then find it, than might seem a sensible use of time.

However, those bits of work contribute to a pleasant, or at least a clean and tidy, public space, and that’s one of those public goods no-one really thinks about. Keeping the house and garden clean and attractive should be about self-respect, but if you’re not in the mood on the one day it’s not raining that you have spare, then all the self-respect in the world won’t get the job done. Landlords, have no respect for the quality of life of their tenants, and say they can’t afford it.

In the same way the Council should clean out the weeds on the streets and put down some chemicals to discourage further growth. If they don’t, the place will look like the poorer parts of Brighton did a while back, where councillors muttered about environmental safety and let the weeds grow for three or four years, while the spent the money they saved on some indulgence or other. Councils don’t do details. Details cost money, and there are many calls on our Council Tax, and more arriving in dinghies every day.

Why do “we” live with grimy paths, over-grown grassy patches and borders, and long thick tendrils of bramble in our way?

One reason is that it’s normal: we live with it because it seems that everyone else does. We don’t have a picture in our minds of neat borders and weed-free gutters as the way life should be in the UK.

Another is that once the grime, moss and weeds have built up, it’s not an amateur’s job to clear them. It takes the right gear - which costs money - and some experience to do it well. It’s a day or two of someone’s time, so it’s going to run in the low £00’s. Plus VAT. Not everyone has that money lying around: don’t forget that one in four adults don’t have even £100 for emergencies. Homeowners can be up to their ears in debt.

Trees that grow past our ability to trim them, gardens that get overgrown, gutters and pavement-cracks with weeds, brambles waving in pedestrians’ faces, dirt building up on paths… left to itself, Nature will grow wild and dirty, much like our hair if we don’t wash and trim it regularly. Staying clean and keeping up pleasant public spaces (or publicly-visible private spaces) is work and expense that we don’t allow for, don’t have the spare money to pay for, and don’t have the tools and experience to do ourselves.

From which it follows that staying clean and neat is a flex: look at me, I have the money (or the spare time and the spare energy) to keep me and mine smart and clean. Showing off is okay when the neighbours can afford to keep up is okay, but not when they can’t.

Guitar Humility

For reasons to do with me mentioning it, my tutor looked up Joni Mitchell’s Coyote on YT. Within a verse, he detected the down-tuned low-E string (to C), and had picked up the chords. I still have fumble-fingers making a C6/9 and would never have picked up the detuned E-string.

It’s one thing to know about (say) perfect pitch and ear training, but it’s another to see it action and understand the ocean-sized gap between an amateur and a proper musician. An untrained ear condemns us to a lifetime of sight-reading or tab.

Learning the major scales, modes, and even harmonic minors, octotonic and other weird stuff, is actually fairly simple as long as you can handle doing repetitive exercises. After that, finding the key a song is in is a matter of quietly trying this or that note (starting with F♯ then B♭ to figure out which side of the circle of fifths the song is in, and going round that way) until it sounds right. Then jamming along with the track using pentatonics or a major scale is a fairly easy and pleasing experience.

An experience that requires almost no knowledge of chords or harmony, no ability to read tab or stave, and no idea what clever chords are being used. It’s like being able to make an omelet and bake a simple cake and thinking you’re a cook. Or being able to speak tourist Spanish.

Problem is, it gives you an entirely false idea of just how much you know.

I came away from the third lesson, during which we went through the chords of Autumn Leaves as an example of moving in fifths, usefully angry with myself. I thought I had been fumbling on the fretboard like some beginner, and it was inexcusable that I heard the phrase “E♭major 7th” and didn’t automatically make the required shape. I know the major 7th shape on those strings, but I couldn’t bring the knowledge to use. Not good enough.

Playing guitar is like speaking English. The basics are easy, and one can communicate well-enough in it and still speak it badly (unlike, say, French or Dutch), but advanced use takes a very long time, and most people never get that far.

Part of the hump is learning the fretboard. There is no equivalent for pianists: F♯ below middle C is in one and only one place, but on the guitar, it can be played on the third string fourth fret, fifth string ninth fret, and sixth string fourteenth fret. And yes, each one sounds slightly different, because physics (overtones). Same with the violin family. Learning the fretboard is nowhere near as easy as you think it is, and nobody knows why.

Chords are even worse, and it doesn’t help that a chord of N notes can have at least N different names depending on which one is treated as the root. (Classical harmony gets over this by defining the root as the note that would the lowest if the notes were re-arranged in ascending thirds (or nearest approximation). It also does not help that - aside from the sus chords (2 and 4) - there are no even-numbered notes in chords. Chord intervals go 1-9-3-11-5-13-7 (unless the 9 is a sus 2 or the 11 is a sus 4). Also 7’s are all minor unless announced as major, and a diminished 7th is a 6th, but not in a 5/6 chord or a 6-chord (which is not to be confused with a VI chord, of course).

So your tutor can say “Esus ♭ 6” and leave you wondering WTF? Whereas they mean A-minor, which is a reflex to shape at the first fret, because it’s a cowboy chord. Not that tutors would do that.

Oddly, realising just how low on the learning pole I am, has introduced a lump of realism to whatever the heck I think my goals are.

CrowdStrike and Other Security Nonsense

I don’t have CrowdStrike on my laptop.

So it never stopped working.

*smug*

Computer security software is generally a waste of processing cycles, RAM and storage space. In a corporate, all the security should be on the corporate wall and whitelist maintenance. Inside the corporate wall, no security except firewalls which are more or less unavoidable now. On a personal machine, let the OS take care of security.

If the NSA, GCHQ, the Chinese, Israelis, French, or very probably the Finnish security services want to get at your computer, they’re going to do so. Private or corporate. Does anyone not think the Russians and Chineses had Crowdstrike reverse-engineered (or were just sent a copy of the code) within about a couple of months?

The criminals are pretty obvious, though anyone can be caught off-guard, as I was a few months ago until the voice told me they could not cancel a transaction unless I was at my machine to do this and that. My guard came right back.

Personally, I think the companies who let CrowdStrike - or anyone - push an update out onto their live systems without testing it on an isolated guinea pig system first, deserve anything that happens to them.

And it is way past time that all these software companies, from Microsoft onwards, carried insurance to compensate the consumers who were affected. Not the freaking airlines, but the suffering passengers. The corporates can sue each other, but the consumers should be compensated.