Taking a New Direction

Did not see this one coming...

I'm a patient with a local at-home hospice care company, which offers several no-cost perks. One of them was recommended by my nurse: Music Therapy. That intrigued me, so I signed up for it. My principal interest was what this looked like to a patient, which was the first question I posed when the young woman providing the service showed up. Ordinarily she would play her guitar and sing songs to comfort bedridden and gravely ill patients. However, when she realized I was not a typical patient, and especially when I played her some of my own music, she said that my case would be quite an exception, and that our sessions would be anything but typical, especially when we soon found that we shared an intense love of music.

Indeed, she went so far as to suggest we collaborate on some musical projects, which would be a substantial win for me since it would add her beautiful voice and musical sensibilities to my work. But, in order to accomplish this, I would have to build a sound booth for her. Fortunately, I had an idea for a simple little booth that would not require much effort to create. It consists of a pair of comforters, one hung on the wall, and the other on a corner shower curtain rod.

Inside the booth I installed a middle-tier professional microphone: according to the manufacturer, it's made for "podcasting,", but it received excellent reviews for singing. Also on hand, professional-grade studio headphones (OMG, these are sublime), a music stand, and a light.

This was all easy-peasy, but getting the gear to play nice together on an ancient HP workstation was a major challenge to make it all play nice together, involving new cables and hours of debugging. The booth took less than a day to assemble, whereas I spent nearly two days fiddle-farting around with wires and jacks and settings. Windows lived up to its reputation of having the least-intuitive audio tools possible, made worse by unexpected behavior, at times overriding my preferences with what it deemed appropriate (which often defied all logic). But I prevailed, and reward myself with a silly neon sign to hang on the booth.

Amazingly, the stupid thing actually works: the sound delivered by the microphone is dead flat, with no color or artifacts. The booth is not soundproof, and we need the room to be as quiet as possible (inside and out), but what the booth delivers is on par with a commercial studio.

We did a shakedown of the system and made a quick test track. Then I put a little polish on the track to get a glimpse of what the system could deliver "Slowly Then All At Once," composed by the both of us, with lyrics and vocals by Morgan Golinski, exceeded both of our expectations, which served to propel us into a more formal project. I've got to say, collaborating with someone as excited about music as I am (and far more technically capable) is a genuine thrill.

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