Nowhere Band News

I sat down yesterday to goof around with Garage Band, and kept having trouble getting my mike input set up properly.  A bit more poking around, and actually reading what was on the screen in front of me, brought me to the realization that the mike I’d plugged in didn’t matter a whit, that Garage Band was just taking its input from my laptop’s built-in mike, and that it had been doing so for the past couple of months every time I’d sat down to record something and spent hours fussing with the goddamned mike.

I was pissed, but also sort of excited— I’d been fairly happy with that last round of recordings, and if that’d been done unwittingly using some cheesy built-in mike, just imagine what sort of magic I could make with a real mike plugged into the input!

So I spent a while changing settings, and this round of fussing with things led to a really annoying conclusion:  some fault, either in my setup or my technical skillz, prevents a line-in mike from having anywhere near the signal quality of the built-in mike.  If I want to record, I need to either buy some USB-interfaced preamp for the mike or just use the cheesy built-in mike.

This brought on an immediate pissy mood, and a conversation with my wife which ran approximately like this:

ME:  God DAMN it, I can’t record.

HER:  Why not?

ME:  I feel like that fucking machine lied to me.  All this time, I thought I was using a real mike, and it was just that corny built-in thing.  If I can’t use a real mike, I don’t want to bother.

HER:  But haven’t you already recorded, using what turned out to be the built-in one?

ME:  Yeah, but I didn’t know I was.

HER:  But you liked the way it sounded.

ME:  That built-in mike’s just for people to use for voice chatting or whatever.

HER:  You’re an idiot.

As of press time, no further recording has happened.