12/10 First I refreshed my basic editing skills by figuring out again how Loopback works on the Scarlett, used that to get the Maiden Voyage backing track into Ableton. Edited out the guy’s goofy intro voice from the track, which wasn’t entirely trivial, since the voice stretches into the first quarter note of the music, so I found a quarter note further down in the piece with which I could replace that quarter note and spliced it in so you can’t hear it.

Then I brought the big piece I made when I was 18 into Ableton in order to correct the pitch which was off due to the copying between cassette tapes. At first I tried playing along with it to find out how much out of tune it was, but my hearing wasn’t quite up to the task, I only got the ballpark right. So then I used Ableton’s tuner to figure out the exact offset. Turns out it was about 53 cents high (more than a quarter tone). Also turns out that individual notes are often off by as much as +/- 10 cents, so finding the right tuning for the piece is quite a lot of guesswork.

After I’d done that, I synchronized Ableton’s tempo to the piece, which was also fun because of several tempo changes and the fact that it’s still off by teeny-tiny amounts due to the cassette tape copying.

And then I just liked it and played along with it for maybe another hour, trying to figure out what 18-year-old me had actually composed.