Technical difficulties are common place but there’s a very special level at which the common technical difficulty turns into an intergalactic technical difficulty. An almost super natural technical difficulty if you will. This particular technical difficulty revolved around a motu midi interface.

Now a midi interface is a wonderful thing. It is much like a very diplomatic level headed person in a crowded collage dorm. It takes a whole mess of different incompatible “units” and convinces them to work in relative harmony. This is great if the f#cker actually does its job with out having a nervous brake down. Well after realizing I needed to up grade our studio set up in order to make the use of external synths and other less complicated instruments possible, I went down to the local music store with my teacher. It’s hard to remember the real name of the music store after all that was about to ensue. It was some thing with a guitar in it, “we sell guitars”, “guitar place” or “got beaned with a guitar” perhaps. My personal favorite is “I’ll take this guitar and shove it up your ASS if you don’t give me a f#cking motu that works!” but that’s a bit long for the name of a music store. Any way, we find a midi interface that I’m assured is the best on the market for the money and I nervously shell out an ungodly amount of cash for a little black box with lights. We take this new “thingie” home and hook it up. It works. Just as the diplomatic person in the collage dorm has triumphed keeping Walter from killing the new television, having convinced Jane to stop complaining about sleeping arrangements and having black mailed Roger into kindly removing the unmentionable idem from the bathroom, this new mo2 has convinced the computer that it, the microphones, guitars, drums, amps and the synth are all friends now, perfectly capable of working together on an album.

Well it’s not long before “problems” arise. Now I’ve dealt with technical problems before and done some trouble shooting but this was different. We’d be going along nice and fine, music’s coming out of the monitors, instruments are being played, when all of a sudden about THE most painfully awful noise blasts from the speakers. I couldn’t even start to describe how annoying this sound was. Some one playing a recording of a heavy metal singer being strangled on stage, backwards, while someone runs fingernails across a chalk board, is all that comes to mind thinking back on it. We kill the amp before we start convulsing and begin the process of trouble shooting. I think they call it trouble shooting because of how after about 5 rounds of logical reasoning failing to explain what the F#CK is going on, you just want to get a 45 and SHOOT the thing with the problem.

Now there are 2 very distinct kinds of technical difficulties. Those that are predictable to the extent that one can decipher or trouble shoot the problem down to its source and those that are NOT. This was NOT. We even went so far as to shut down the computer, just to see if it would still make the noise with the computer off. Even in this state this motu still had what my teacher had dubbed by then “digital ants”. The greatest part was when it would stop for maybe 15 minutes. Just long enough for me to calm down and for us to start working again. Before long though it would happen again. “BLASHHKKTKKHKHHKSSKHTKKHKSAAAAKKHKHEEEEKHKA ASSSSHHHSHSHSKKSKKTSTCKT!!!!!!!!!!!” would blast from the monitors and we’d voice our favorite swear words while covering our ears. After hours of this madness we declared what it was that was so horribly going wrong with this new midi interface. IT WAS F#CKED UP! >.> . So we marched back down to the music store the next day to swap it out for a new one. I don’t know why but it must be a law that not only will a store not have what you need when you need it but the guy you get to serve you that day will be a freaking moron who would be lucky if he could operate a vending machine, let alone understand what it is you need and find a replacement. The one “dude” we got that day must have been form the planet “uhhhhh” because that seemed to be his favorite word “we need a new one of these please” we’d say. “uhhhhhh, ok uhhhhh, letme check, uhhhhhhhh, what was that again? uhhh” he’d replay. As it turned out they didn’t have a new new one. They only had a display model. This being only the first time we were returning this “state of the art” device, I didn’t ask the obvious question of “why?”. So we regretfully took the display model back to the studio.

Now this new motu was a bit different in its behavior. It worked fine for weeks. It smelled a bit funny but it worked flawlessly for what had to have been over a month. Just when we thought it really might be working permanently, with no explanation it started having technical difficulties. These difficulties were completely different from the ones had by the last motu and once again we started trouble shooting. Again the problem wasn’t at all predictable or explainable. I reckon it’s much like an old issue that a wife or husband keeps bringing up even though it has supposedly been “resolved”. You’re just going along and poof! There it is! Why now? Why this? Why isn’t it quite the same as last time but equally annoying and why can you not for the f#ck of you seem to keep it “fixed” for more than a few weeks? Well once again we decided to take the motu back to the music store.

The 3^rd time was the charm. We opened the box and not only did it not work but it looked like it had been used by that same heavy metal singer who, having regained consciousness, had randomly grabbed a piece of stage equipment and beaten the guy who was strangling him over the head with it. This is when I come up with some new ideas about our trouble shooting methods. To perhaps convince this “state of the art” piece of electronics to work I gave it a good pounding with a large rubber mallet. The results on that method were inconclusive. Seeing that the only predictable pattern in this mess was, I kept getting stuck with a broken motu, I took a silver marker to the box and wrote “defective” as to make sure the people at the music store didn’t just put it back on the self. We then again brought it back to the music store which now had a new name, dubbed by my teacher, banjo mart. Again we get the dumbest, slowest “dude” in the store and after it had turned into rocket science figuring out IF they had a motu in stock he says “uhhhh, ok we have like 5, but like they’re all display models” Now at this time I still failed to ask why they only had display models or even better, why the f#ck they had 5! I mean how many display models do you need in the SAME rack, on the SAME shelf, in the SAME ROOM! >.< . I DID however tell them to order a new one. I even spoke it in their native tongue of idiotish, “ok I want you guys to order a new new one, not a new one that has been on display, a NEEEEEEEW new one that’s STILL in the box ok?”. After a few rounds of the banjo mart guy saying “but this is a new one” scratching his head, handing me a display model, and even saying “uhhh well I could go see if we have an empty box you could put the display model in” as if that would make it a new one and not a display model, we finally managed to get him to understand we wanted an actual new one, actually still in the box, and not only still in the box but a motherf#cking SEALED box. In the mean time while the order was shipping we agreed to take home one of the display models to perhaps get some work done in the 3 or so weeks it would apparently take for the new one, still in the box, to get to the store. >