The kids are sleeping at their friend’s house. Your spouse is visiting the in-laws. Tonight is the night! You finally have two or three uninterrupted hours to work on music. Finally, you can put together the bedroom EP that Rick Rubin will find on Bandcamp and offer to produce an album. Your musical dreams are about to come true. The only thing that can stop you is getting too tired and falling asleep on the couch. Here’s how to maximize those precious hours.
Connect your audio interface
Consider which amp plugin you want to use out of the twelve you bought on sale last Black Friday. Connect your guitar and start comparing Fender Twin simulations to Marshalls. Wait, shit, there’s no sound coming out. Plus, the light on the front of the audio interface is blinking. That can’t be good.
Scour the internet for troubleshooting advice
How has no other human being on the internet in 2023 had the issue where the Focusrite 2i2 light blinks three short times followed by three long blinks? There is one Reddit thread where someone appears to have a similar issue but moderators locked the discussion for being off-topic since it was on the Celine Dion subreddit. The search for help continues.
Reinstall your audio interface’s drivers
Let’s just start from scratch by reinstalling the drivers. The interface itself is pretty old, so are you supposed to install the x86 version or 64-bit? There aren’t any Windows 11 drivers listed but Windows 10 should probably work, right? We hope. Fuck.
Update Windows
Yeah, maybe that’s the problem. Even if it doesn’t fix the interface, at least that little notification in the corner will disappear. Hope that this isn’t one of those updates where your computer is stuck restarting for twenty-five minutes. Oh, it is? Well, time to pour a finger of whiskey since there’s nothing else to do.
Accept defeat
No sound is coming out after reinstalling everything, submitting a support ticket to Focusrite and Microsoft, and changing every conceivable setting for your audio interface. I guess it’s just not meant to be. You’re never going to open for Dokken. But that doesn’t mean you need to spend any less time or money on guitar fantasies! In fact, maybe it’s time to transition from guitar player to guitar collector. These are all things to think about as you drift to sleep, drunk on the couch. It is almost 9pm after all.