The Ohm Studio Sessions

On 26 April, Graham announced that he had created sufficient bars and a click-track for us all to follow.  But he had lost his Multimoog - lent to a friend after 2004 -  and so might have to resort to MIDI keyboard voices.

Mark Hammond:  joining from Germany:  "So I installed Ohm Studio.  I realised that resistance was useless."

Graham Gill:  " It is a little known fact that singing the chorus of Stand Up and Be Counted twice (if you dare) is the perfect way of timing your 20-second hand-washing experience.  You heard it here first."

Different members of the gang had some trouble getting started.  Either, they could not hear the results of what they had recorded - which was due to the DAW switching where it sent output (back to your plug-in interface) - or they had trouble with the latency of Ohm Studio.  That is, whenever you recorded something, the analogue-to-digital conversion put a 20ms delay on what you were monitoring on headphones, and this delayed feedback could put you quite off your stride.  We held another Zoom meeting on 11 May, at which the technical consultant gave out some more helpful how-to video tutorials.

Latency and the Echo

At this time, the song was still only half-finished.  Mark Hammond was recording in Germany.  Apart from the earlier tuning fix, he was finding that his bass line sounded "boomy" and was always lagging behind the beat.  The first problem could possibly be fixed by buying new strings, or re-balancing the height of the magnetic pole pieces on the bass guitar, or playing through an amp with compression, rather than recording a dry signal directly from the bass.

The second problem was to do with the latency in Ohm Studio's analogue-to-digital conversion.  Whenever you recorded in time with the click track, the new track always appeared behind the beat.  We had become used to editing samples after each take, to slide them to the left, back onto the beat.  This seemed to be a peculiar fault of Ohm Studio, since other DAWs were much better at synchronising new samples on the time-axis, based on a known A-to-D conversion delay.

However, if you were monitoring your own recording through headphones, the distracting echo made it impossible to keep in time.  Graham worked out that you could reduce the size of Ohm Studio's buffer from 4k to almost nothing, but this just meant that you heard a slap-back echo, rather than a 20ms delayed version of yourself.  Tony suggested reducing the fader volume of the new track, with respect to the playback level.

Mark Hammond:  "That's what I did and the result is better than I thought.  But I'm no Beethoven; I really like to hear myself.  I even tried resting my chin on Blondie's body, to feel the vibrations..."

Freezing and Overdubbing

The next issue we had was that certain MIDI tracks created by Graham were not always audible to the rest of the gang.  He had recorded the organ track on 23 May using a plugin for a Hammond B3, triggered by MIDI.  Tony reported not being able to play back MIDI.  On further investigation, this was found to be caused by a software incompatibility.  Ohm Studio relied on another package called UVI Workstation to play MIDI tracks, but the software versions did not match.  So Graham converted the MIDI track to a regular audio track by a process called "freezing", after which we could hear him.

Not satisfied with the original take, Simon decided to redo his drum tracks on 27 May, and Graham set up brand new left and right stereo tracks for this.  Simon still found he made the odd mistake, and wished to fix it.  Tony worked out by trial and error that you could take any existing sample, and snip it using CTRL-E on the keyboard.  With judicious cuts, you could isolate and then copy a portion of a decent sample, and then paste it over a duff section that you wanted to repair.  We had discovered overdubbing by copy-and-paste!  But you still had to be careful.  CTRL-Z was useful for undoing editing accidents.

Graham Gill:  "Yesterday I managed to delete a synth track by accidentally dragging "Drums R" over it.  And when I realised and put it back, it was a bar out of synch with "Drums L", which made for interesting listening."

Vocals and Mixing

On 5 July, Mark Allchorn started adding his first vocal line to the song.  This was welcomed by the gang.  He had same latency issues others had reported earlier, and tried to fix the delay.  Logging in later that day, Tony found that something had gone horribly wrong.  Certain tracks had been dragged to the right, starting at bar 21.  Other things had appeared or disappeared.  He spent some time realigning guitar and vocal tracks, reinstating the click track, and deleting empty tracks called "Rack 1" and "Rack 2".  Eventually, things looked in better shape.

Mark Allchorn:  "Oh dear, I'm the likely suspect, I fear.  Hopefully no lasting damage.  Ohm crashed out on me before lunch, after I tried to get around that echo problem."