O.k, well…the latest thing that I’ve been up to is moving to London.

Yep, I have moved to London!!! (I say ‘moved’ but it’s more like for an ‘indefinite’ amount of time, so I could end up returning to Spain, depending on how things go here in London.)
I am here to meet people and to try and find a job within the music industry. Whether it be writing, performing, producing,e.t.c… Whatever comes, I am open to all!

I will be trying to do more blog posts about my progress, but I’m not promising anything!

Start to slide the optical drive out,
“He means the DVD drive”
Take out the hard drive and this plug,
“Just grip the tag and pull upwards”
Look how they hide the screws,
Under parts that we remove,
I think it’s pretty clear, that we’re not welcome..


Why’s it have to be complicated,
All I wanted to do was clean the fan,
“Clean the fan, as good as new,
But spic and span is hard to do”,
I just wanted a simple pannel,
So I can get to the fan without the fuss.


But I guess they made it like that so that you can’t clean it and then it runs out of warranty and you end up having to by another one because it’s broken… Great.

Disconnect the wifi cables,
“All of this just to clean a fan”
Undo these clips to free the RAM,
“RAM means; Random Access Memory”
Now we flip the whole thing over,
Take the top half off,
I’ll show you how,
To take it all apart,
But don’t go yanking on it because there’s still cables attached to it..

Turn the screws to free the keyboard off,
“unplug it before you go tugging it off”
Then start unplugging all the plugs,
“Plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug”
Now the battery case and speakers,
Bare in mind that speakers have a magnet,
So just keep them free,
From any piece of circuitry.


Why’s it have to be complicated,
All I wanted to do was clean the fan,
“Clean the fan, as good as new,
But spic and span is hard to do”,
I just wanted a simple pannel,
So I can get to the fan without the fuss.


Now we reach the sad part of this song,
“Sad part”
A choice to make before we can go on proceed,
“That doesn’t rhyme”
See, if you want the fan to part,
From processor and graphics card,
You’ll have no choice but to remove,
Some thermal gel, you can’t reuse,
But you’ve come so far, so why refuse,
To buy a tiny tube of thermal gel?

“Lift this up,
Don’t forget about the plug,
Then a couple more screws,
And we can finally begin to..”

“Clean the fan as good as new,
But spic and span is hard to do..”

“So much fluff,
Gets stuck inside the heatsink,
Why is there no easy way to clean this?”

Clean the fan, clean the fan,
Clean the faa, aa, aaaa, aan yeah,
And then improvise yeah,
And say lots of phrases that don’t make sense,
Do some twiddly bits,
And, and go really high,
Yyyyeee, eee, eeh, ehh, yeah,
Oooh baby,
Make sure you say baby,
Cos everyone says baby,
Yeah, baby yeah,
Bay, bay, bay, bay, baby.

Disclaimer:
This is NOT a definitive maintenance video. I disclaim any responsibility for damage caused to any computer that has been taken apart, using this video as a tutorial, manual, explanation or guide.
Do not attempt to open your computer if you are not a qualified computer engineer.
Opening your computer can invalidate the warranty.
You open your computer at your own risk!

…Also, over-tightening screws or using the wrong size screwdriver can damage the screw heads.

P.s; annoyingly, the video didn’t export in 16.9ths, like I told it to. Maybe it’s something to do with Sony Vegas 64bit, I don’t know why.. Joe! seems to be having the same problem.

So anyway, getting back to where I left off…
Now we’re in the theme park, with the big boot.
Originally I was going to have the music playing on a background fairground barrel organ, so I wrote a simple piece on the organ to simulate that.
It didn’t work as well as I thought because in order for the music to sound like it’s coming from a distant barrel organ I needed to turn it down to the right level and put a long delay on it, leaving the music very faint and well in the background. But, in order to be able to hear the melody well enough I would have to turn it up quite a lot, making it sound just horrible and confusing :s
So I scrapped that idea but kept the organ part, without the delay, then added some drums, bass, e.t.c,.. and just used it as background music.
I planned the music to end just when the shutter goes down.

Something that I am realizing now is that I have forgotten to talk about the sound fx.
It was another VERY involved job. And from now on I think that I’m going to start to point out a few.
For example; in this particular scene the footsteps on the gravel that occur when the boy crosses the screen are fake! I did them! The are also panned, starting off far left and then going over to the right, following the boys position.
I also added some background children’s voices and some fairground rides too.
The tramps footsteps on the gravel were also done by me.
Joe! played the part of that tramp. I think he sounds a bit like Bob Hoskins XD
At the end of the scene the shutter goes down and that sound was actually the plug re-wined mechanism on our vacuum cleaner. It was just the sound I was looking for, plus it meant that I didn’t have to leave the studio!

A while ago, me and my brother (Joe!) were filming a pilot episode, for a series that we want to do, called ‘The Jayme G Show’.
Seeing as we didn’t have any money to fund it, we couldn’t afford to buy the proper equipment for the job, so we had to be creative with what the equipment we already had. Luckily ‘Joe!’ recently got given a boom mic for his camera, as a birthday present. But we still needed something to record the audio on to, and plugging it into the camera’s mic input means that your boom-mic guy is tied to the camera man.
So, seeing as I already had a portable audio interface (the one that we did the video about) ‘The Session I/O‘, we decided to use my laptop.
Here is my setup:

As you can see I have two bags; One with the audio interface in and the other one with my laptop in.
I would set up a project in Cubase, using the ‘Session I/O‘ as the audio device, then press record, shut the laptop and put it in the bag.
The first time I tested this setup, I ran in to a little problem…
After doing a short test recording, I opened up the laptop to see how it went. I then saw an error message in Cubase; (I can’t remember exactly, but it was something like..) ‘Error-too many record tracks’.
What does that mean?
It means that too much information is trying to be recorded at one time for your hard drive to handle.
Now, when doing multi-track recordings it’s understandable for this to happen because if you have a lot of tracks, recording at a high bit rate and sample rate, it can be too much information for the hard drive to handle. (depending on the speed of the hard drive)
But this seemed crazy, I was only recording one 24 bit mono audio track @ 44,100 Hz! That’s nothing!!! How slow must my hard drive be!?
So I started looking for information on the hard drive that I have in my laptop, to see if it was actually this ridiculously slow or if it was something else…

It was something else.

Upon reading up on my hp hard drive I found out that it has a built in:
HP ProtectSmart Hard Drive Protection
This little thing does this:
“Built-in HP ProtectSmart detects if your laptop has been dropped, and during that split-second journey to the floor, it automatically locks your fragile hard drive. This safety mechanism helps prevent the loss of your files and media library from damage caused by the fall.”
Which is great if you’re a cluts with an expensive piece of equipment, but not so great if you’re trying to record audio with the laptop in a bag that keeps setting off the damn ‘HP ProtectSmart‘ because of the movement!
So that was it! Cubase must have thought that the hard drive wasn’t recording fast enough, because when the hp protection thing was triggered, the hard drive wasn’t spinning at all! So it must have assumed that it was because of too many tracks being recorded at once!

All I had to do then, was go to; start menu, control panel, Hp 3D Drive Guard and then disable it! (And also be extra careful not to bump or knock the laptop much, while it was disabled!)

Hope someone finds this useful..