01/24/2025
It was the perfect day to find this pic of me. I had done a lot of troubleshooting on my own, sought help from chatgpt and Sweetwater (great online source for musicians) and finally figured out how to make the ADAM Audio monitors (studio speakers) work with the rest of my home recording setup. But what do studio speakers have to do with a picture of me as a baby sitting at a toy piano?
Here's what happened. I was frustrated as hell. Could not for the life of me get a sound to come out of the new speakers. I had pulled up a YouTube video on my laptop and could hear the sound coming through my MacBook Air laptop speakers. I could also hear it through my headphones plugged into the Focusrite Scarlett interface. I tried unplugging and replugging. I tried rebooting. I tried everything I could throw at it. Nada, nothing from the Adam Audio fancy-pants speakers.
I thought about calling and imploring my friend and colleague Kevin Kelly to help me out of my misery. But I knew his m.o. He knows that if he tells me how to do it, I will be less likely to remember how to do it the next time.
So I decided to have a little online convo with chatgpt. I listed all of the problem solving steps I had already tried, employing what Kevin taught me to do (think sequentially). Brick wall.
In desperation (because I wasn’t ready to admit defeat to Kevin!), I called Sweetwater. After being transferred to the right person, I was told (ego boost) that in fact I'd done everything right except for one little tiny step I’d overlooked. There was an input switch on the back of both speakers. All I had to do was flip both switches up. Voila! I’m in business. Not to mention being on top of the world for sticking to it and mostly figuring out the problem.
Now I just have to decide which song to record. I'm thinking the Spin Your Groggers song I wrote last year with Kevin's wife, the inimitable Stacy Lowenheim Kelly (we formed a band called the Marvelous Matzo Balls). Yeah, yeah, that's the ticket. And drum roll, to revisit the pic of me as a baby sitting at a toy piano, the recording will feature me on keys, playing my fabulous digital Yamaha keyboard, as well as a few other hip musicians. 😎
