12/18 I got a year-in-review from my ring and it clearly shows a deterioration in all sorts of parameters in December, not sure what this is about.

12/17 It is about time that we replace “to google” with a catchier version of “to chat with AI”. Then again, we have not been able to do anything even close with “phone”, either.

12/16 AIs and languages: If you’ve seen one of them, you’ve seen them all.

12/15 First workshop of the Electric Violin Labs. Forty-five participants. Very seasoned, very experienced musicians among them. Many over sixty.

12/14 I need a teacher not in order to learn things. The learning I must do myself. I need a teacher to tell me what to learn next.

12/13 Current history of Claude chats, on the left of my screen:

Guitar synth pitch detection
Chaining Focusrite Scarlett audio
Capitalizing German sentences
German car market share worldwide
Dm6 chord notes
Centene insurance company membership size
Understanding RAG technology
Aligning note attacks to the grid
Swedish language progression assessment
Electric violin preamp necessity
MongoDB clusterTime timestamp
Electric violins symmetric output
Preamp quality and price variations
Casio CT-S1 bag included
Georgia traffic light rules

12/12 My musical Gear Acquisition Syndrome is buying the same things over and over again, for example the same audio interface and the same set of monitors, now for the third time. Once for Manhattan, once for Newburgh (upstairs), now my studio, and once for Newburgh (downstairs), now J’s Electric Violin Labs.

12/11 I talk English without noticing it, it is no effort to me, it is in fact an effort to remember how I would say something in German. I probably wouldn’t. I do switch into German sometimes, also without noticing it, for example when I count the reps in the gym.

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.

12/9 Fell into an Ableton rabbit hole.