When I last wrote about transferring some audio from old ADAT tapes to Pro Tools, I had gone through an unexpected amount of hassle.  Instead of putting a tape into the ADAT machine and pressing play, I had to go through extensive, tape-destroying calibration along with disassembly and cleaning of the machine.

I spent the time to take care of all of that and get the ADAT working correctly again, only to find that the audio piped into Pro Tools was overwhelmed with digital noise.

So, picking up where I left off, I went out a few days after the initial extravaganza and got myself a couple new optical cables.  They’re not cheap, but hopefully these will be the last ones I have to buy for some time.  Since I invested in new cabling, the time is about right, of course, that I find my other good set which had gone missing at the time of the original calibration and cleaning.

I made the connection between my PT interface and the ADAT optical output, set up tracks in a PT session and found that my old skinny optical cables were indeed the problem.  It must have been like putting audio through a pipe full of broken glass.

So I managed to transfer a couple of the songs I wanted to work on, and in the process I found a few old ideas that were mostly forgotten.  It was fun, similar to looking through an old photo album and seeing pictures you hadn’t thought of in a long time.

One in particular was interesting.  It was a jam that I subsequently sampled, using the samples in ACID to create a piece of music. That’s pretty much the opposite of the “normal” methodology around here.  Generally I would build a demo in ACID or PT or whatever, and then we would record the real instruments.

In fact I had forgotten that the track, which wound up on the drunkdude69 album Funk Out With Your Junk Out as a hidden track, was actually a real jam to begin with.  Here it is in all its boogery glory: