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, 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, involving some 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.

And it has begun to pay off. We did a shakedown of the system, made a test track, and I put a little polish on the test track to offer a glimpse of what's to come. Please enjoy "Slowly Then All At Once," composed by the both of us, with lyrics and vocals by Morgan Golinski.

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