Sometimes it’s hard to see the positive side in the thick of it all. You’re just pissed about the money you’re being coerced or forced into spending, or angry that the situation is happening out of your control. It’s at these times though we need to remember to always attempt to see the positive side.
It’s all over the place lately and by it I mean life. I thought finally living alone again would be awesome and it is. The freedom of living alone kicks arse, do what you want when you want because you want to; but it’s expensive and trying.
Mid last year I moved house to live on my own. The idea was that 3 bedrooms and a house all to myself would result in more time and room to do music. The reality of it all was learning a new untreated room to mix tracks in and getting used to a different sound again. I figured I’d get some reflection panels up, but landlords, life and banks don’t always agree because rent+alone = $$$$ (the lone factor).
It was pear shaped from the start but I remain(ed) optomistic; Most things are pear shaped in this world, it’s best to stay positive. On inspection of the house it smelt like cat piss, i was assured it’d be fixed. I moved in, it smelt like cat piss and the shower was blocked. I complained, put nil odor and baking soda (or was it bi-carb soda? I dunno!) around the place and they sent a plumber to unblock the drain.
Slowly it smelt less of cat piss and one end of the house smelt as i described it “like hydrochloric acid is burning carpet or something”. I’m not sure how long that hung around for but a few weeks after the cops arrested my then neighbour for making methamphetamine it went away, SURPRISE! I guess if you smell acid in one end of your house and you know its not yours, you should probably holler to someone.
After all that things settled down for a while, I started mixing some tracks and making some music and then just before Christmas things started falling apart. I was watching T.V. one night when *POP* the right channel of audio dropped out on my TV. Turned it off, Turned it on and hio it worked! Until the next time it did it, for a few weeks I pissed around turning the t.v. off and on every now and then because I don’t watch a lot of T.V. It got more frequent so I sent it in for repair and long story short, 4 weeks after sending it in they’re sending me a new T.V.
Not long after that the started happening the right channel in my Beyer DT-250′s crapped out. I sent them in for repair and waited weeks for them to get back just in time to record on Christmas break. Tracks were recorded, tunes were edited, things were mixed.
Then the computer crapped out. I was in the middle of a Goonbag Radio show when it just froze on me. After power cycling it was OK for a few days and I’d been mixing a new track of ours. I fired up another compressor and *BLERT* the computer froze, i rebooted and it never came back to life. Money was tight because I’d just purchased a Group DIY 51x Alliance rack kit and then the computer died, GREAT!
Anyway, I scraped together my butt and bought a new low spec motherboard, CPU and RAM and threw it all together with a spare HDD I got from my boss. It was faster and better than the old computer and after a week of bullshit I was back in session.
That’s when I notice my DT-250′s have a really dull left channel in comparison to the recently replaced right. So back for repair they went, 2 weeks have passed and I’m still without them today. Headphonics have been handling it well though there just seems to be a lot of wait for parts.
3-4 days after sending the headphones in, me and Luke notice somethings not right about the left speaker in my studio, panning L-R you can hear completely muffled tones out of the high side of the Left speaker, and the Right is perfect. Now i just think I’m going insane, i’m scrutineering everything I hear with anal retentiveness and thinking “is that channel out?”. I’m confident somethings just dead in the crossover for the speakers, so it should be a relatively easy fix.
There’s a positive side to all of this though, everything that was old and shit got upgraded and everything that was new or good is getting repaired at little or no cost. I’m happy it all happened, i felt pretty shit about all of it at the time but in retrospect it’s worked out.