two new demos

there is a funny story attached to these songs.
I bought a new mixer, and as well as learning to use Reaper, i've been learning to get the best out of it.
I had problems with latency at first, because i'd created an awkward setup , and it's got two speaker outputs - monitor and control room, with importantly different mixes.

Recording through it, i've got both line out and microphone from my guitar amp. but on closer inspection, both the outputs recorded to disk from these inputs had been identical - and what's more, hugely hissy, with only a 12 dB signal to noise difference. i couldn't believe my equipment was this bad. having a fiddle around, i starter to notice something strange, and eventually confirmed this - even with all the levels zeroed, the gain set to zero, and finally, desperately, all inputs to the mixer unplugged - the computer still recorded this awful sounding input. i didn't for the life of me understand.

the culprit: a webcam with built in microphone, using identical USB audio codec drivers, therefore coming in on the mix. with the quality sound.

on 'yentl' below, you can hear the difference in sound quality with the piano sound, which was added after i fixed the problem.

anyway, here's a couple of lo-fi tracks based around picking patterns i wrote recently, having taken paternity leave more than a week before i should have done. but waiting was doing my head in at school. oh my god, a feeling. i haven't expressed one of those on here for a hugely long time. i'd better log off and let you listen to these tracks.