Yak Shaving in the Studio again

The above is a little sung background to accompany the reading. It's a bit of an experiment. Barely audible. Looks terrible. Who cares? We have been working on this music record. Want to overdub some accordion and only had one good microphone. Now we have two. Two good microphones (Neuman and Shure) and two good microphone preamps (Neve and Universal Audio). The sound booth is tiny. Like a closet. In the image on the right it might be apparent that fitting in it between two microphones is no small challenge. We also got four really good microphone cables to the tune of like $140.00. Really. The pile of old ones was creating too much crackling.

Yak Shaving?

Yak Shaving is a term some MIT students came up with in like the '50s or the '70s to refer to doing all of the things you need to do in order to do the thing you initially set out to do. For example, oh I'm gonna make a video of myself making fried eggs. Cool. A 3 minute video.

So you get the computer and... what? Actually you don't know how to record a video on your computer. So you "google" it. And you find, after a few false starts, a tutorial showing you how to do it on the computer you have. You're following along but realize the tutorial is actually using a newer operating system and you need to upgrade yours. So you google how to do that. Someone recommends that you back up your data first, which you realize you haven't done in a while. So you do that. Wait. You need to buy a drive to back it up to. Or should you use a cloud service? So you research that for a while and settle on Cloud. The tutorial for that recommends that you hardwire into the internet for a faster upload speed. What's a USB cable? You go to Walmart and buy a USB cable. But the cable is a foot too short to reach your computer. You finally, a few hours or maybe days later have the camera working and are ready to fry the egg. You do a pass or two, but the computer microphone isn't picking up the sound of the egg frying in the pan, which is key to your vision. So you research external microphones. You find one; buy it: used. You are about to get it on Ebay, but someone tells you about Reverb so you make an account there so you can buy it. But you lost your Gmail password and need it to make the account. This is called Yak Shaving. It's a word that, once you know it, you'll always find opportunity to use it. It is viral. Yak Shaving. Why yaks? Why shaving? Someone might know.

Patience

Going through all our old microphone cables to see which ones were crackly was some yak shaving. There's the key concept of simplifying in the troubleshooting process. At one point the accordion was opened up, because we're also recording the sound from the internal microhone system in the accordion. And one of those two channels was going, "hmmmmmm". A loose wire? Turned out to be simply because the instrument was sitting on the ground between the mics or resting on a cable (wire) or something. It took us about a week before we had finally gotten–a week–oh yea it was weeks ago that we realized we should really get another good microphone. So ya learn to enjoy the process. Recording the egg-frying might be a three minute endeavor at one point, but it might be a six month, or ten year endeavor all together. "Old students pursuing our chosen areas of ignorance", Duke Ellington's nephew Steve once told me on a Sunday evening in Montgomery, Alabama. It's what we all are.

It's like watching this funky old neighborhood recovering from blight and dilapidation slowly but surely. It's like learning how to sing, one note at a time, building your range, comfort, developing various techniques. We're all gonna get evicted eventually so you enjoy the sound of your voice, the beauty of the old, empty buildings, the peeling paint, overgrown yards.

Drink it in. Soak it in. Yak shaving in the studio again.

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