I THOUGHT I WAS GOING CRAZY

Well, maybe I am, but that's a story for another day.
 
I've been tracking guitars recently and over the last couple of days, one of my guitaras flatly refused to stay in tune.
 
I'd tune it via the tuner built into my rackmount Pod, even checking & adjusting the octaves where necessary and sit down to record.
 
Every time I did this the guitar sounded flat. Or maybe the Dim Pro patch was out of tune (I've read a few threads about this) but the patches eeemd to line up ok with the Bass guitar I'd recorded earlier.
 
So out comes the tuner again - seems absolutely fine.
 
So I try anothe rguitar - this one I know stays in tune beautifully - seems a bit off (the room's been quite warm recently) so I tune it, checking the octaces, sounds great on it's own.
 
Sit down and play along to Sonar. WTF?????? Now THIS one is out, maybe by about 20/25 cents. Easily enough to be noticed.
 
I track it a bit & load up V-Vocal to have a look at the pitches. Plain as day. Every note flat by about 20/25 cents.
 
So is it my guitar(s), the tuner, I dunno.
 
 
Eventually, I had a look at the Pod.
 
Seems like our cat had jumped up onto the (horizontally mounted) rack, stepped on the global tuning switch and set my default to 435 Hz
 
So he's now banned from the studio unless under supervision.
 

Yup.... cats happen.

Glad you caught it early.

BTW: some samples and patches do sound out of tune, but for the most part they are 440 so when it sounds like somethings off, double check to see what's off. I do recall swapping to a different bass patch a time or two because the bass did sound OOT.

haha!  that's great!

Darn pets. One of our dogs decided to gnaw on some of my guitar effect stomp box knobs (unbeknown to me). Next day I go to practice and similar to you, things didn't sound quite right until I figured out what happended. I still like my dog.

Man...I'm lucky.  I picked up a dog from a no-kill-shelter a couple of years ago now. She's great!  I can leave chords and gear laying everywhere for days on end and she doesn't even act like she sees it.

(For those wondering.....no, it's not out of laziness that I leave stuff strewn about.  Sometimes, when tracking large projects, we end up at t stoppping point but don't want to tear down mics and cables because we'll be back at it in a day or two with the same setup.)

marcos69


I came back from a four day trip where the cat stayed in the house by herself.  She immediately showed me the new trick she learned while I was gone.  She shimmied up the burlap on the corner bass trap and climbed on top.  She then leaped 3 feet to the 2" burlap covered diffuser on the wall and balanced on top of it.  Then she looked at me with the "well, isn't that cool?" look on her face.

Haha, yeah my cat does a similar thing - she climbs up my absorption panels and tries to sit on top of them. Only problem is the panels are 1.5" thick, so if they are sitting flat against the wall, they will fall. So we get cat and absorption panels falling onto my head... Usually they start falling slow enough for me to catch them though. Now I need to have the base about a foot from the wall so she can't make them fall over. Don't get me started on what she does behind the desk where all my cables and my computer are... Very annoying!

Greg - he likes to walk up and down on my Yamaha AN1X which is usually hooked up to BFD2

(HE says it's to get a better view of the garden, but I know better )


Last night I retuned & reintonated 2 guitars, tracked with both of them and they sit perfectly in the mix (no out of tune Dim Pro patches).
 
All I have to do now is sort my playing out  

another reason to hate cats.

My two dogs are a afraid of my home studio room - they will come to the door but no further.  The tend to lay down just outside as I think they dislike the loud noises.