So, last Saturday I finally stopped procrastinating and bought a new internal hard-drive with the intention of installing Linux on it and, unfortunately, such was my unwonted optimism, when trying to install the hardware I neglected to take any precautionary notes or pictures of how it was all wired up. The installation proved more of an arseache than I anticipated with it being necessary to not only remove the GPU, but also partly dismantle and remove the cooling system and completely unplug everything before being able to take the motherboard out and add the new M.2 drive to the back. After some hours faffing about, I thought I had it sorted, only to find on switching it on, my PC no longer starts up. Yeah, I was tired and basically didn't know what I was doing so possibly I've just reconnected something wrong, or maybe I've knackered the motherboard somehow. I haven't been able to summon the will to take another look at it since then, but it's looking like I'm going to be paying for either an embarrassingly simple mistake or else laying out hundreds for replacement parts. <:-(
There is a bright side to all this though. With my desktop out of order I've had to revert to my cranky old backup laptop, which is so old it's barely functional. It actually struggles to handle YouTube. I do have an old version of Renoise installed though, with a small selection of old and basic VSTi's and I've found myself making music again. Now I did sort of have a new project in mind: a few months back I bought myself an Arturia Microfreak and I was planning on making an EP using just that. This isn't that. Instead, I've found myself just writing without any particular idea in mind. So far, it's turned out breakbeat type stuff, in a similar vein to the Ashbrooke Hermit EP. I've pretty much finished two tracks so far and got another well underway. I think my plan then is to spend maybe a week brainstorming track ideas and maybe a second week completing them before banging it out as a quick and dirty little EP. I'm kinda relishing it, this stripped down, back to basics approach. Hopefully it'll turn out ok.