Dusty Mirror Remaster v100

More work on 'Except For The Hatred' today. I've spent weeks and months on this track over the years! Today, I've re-recorded one small vocal part to make it fit better, and tweaked the reverb a bit. In recnet days, most of the work and attention has been on 'Fingers Of Evil' and 'Cherries', although the changes have generally been slight balancing issues rather than anything substantial.

I started work on Nov 20th and today I think the first draft is complete. It's probably taken 2 weeks longer than it should due to my ear problems, and other disruptions.

Everything is difficult at the moment, with little feeling of progress of success on any front. I'm making better things than ever, can sing and play, and paint, better than ever, but there is always more progress to be made and I'm keen to practice performance skills yet more. Software updates have reached something of a peak in that almost everything I've made with commercial potential is on sale (although older games like Bool and Firefly, or even Arcangel, are not on sale). I must balance long term legacy projects with what is new and exciting. I have so much to do, so much fire to do, and must do as much as I can while I can, and while my skills are hot.

Eleven days of the year remain.

Onwards we must charge, pushing our rock harder, faster, with more joy.

Back To Dusty

More work today on The Dusty Mirror. I'm keen to get it finished, but the project seems to go on forever, partly due to so many other jobs interfering, and Christmas, and my birthday (and SFXEngine, and framing up the painting for the Grosvenor Open) taking up vital days.

Today I recorded some new guitars for 'Cherries'. It had fake synth guitars before, which were okay, but not a patch on the real thing. The climax here demands an epic feeling. This was (trumpets!) my first guitar part which used more than one string! This appears to be a song about perversions and fetishes, but it was always about food, and about how when young we like sweet things, and grow to like bitter and complex tastes such as olives and rocket and dark green vegetables, which are considered horrible by a child's palette.

After that, a dash around some shops for important Christmas shopping, then more work on SFXEngine, and spending about an hour contributing to a government consultation about AI and copyright. Tonight, another draft of the album and small production changes; really tiny things. I've made the harpsichord louder at the start of the 'Norman Bates' solo, removed the distortion on the vocals for the second chorus of 'Except For The Hatred', and a few other very small tweaks.

I'm aware that all time spent on this steals time from a future project. I must strive to optimise every minute of my life. Onwards we charge.

SFXEngine v2.00 Launch

The launch day for SFXEngine v2.00. This was a lot more work than expected, as all of the new graphics needed to be created, at least 4 images for each product (the program, demo, 12 items of DLC, and 16 future items). The new graphics do look much better though:

I also had time to re-record some vocals for 'Except For The Hatred'. I don't like the idea of a copy-and-paste song, where vocal recordings are the same for two choruses for example, because the context is different for each repetition; and because it is easy. The best solution is the most difficult. Brilliance results from doing what is difficult, showing toughness, doing and showing hard work... but the old version of the song used the same line each time, and to change too much would change the original essence of the song. There are no fixed rules. Some songs may benefit from being copy-and-paste. A few of Sparks' Beethoven songs were copy-and-paste; and who can criticise their lifetime of mastery?

My general rule is that if two options are similar, so similar that you can't decide which to use, then the choice doesn't matter and either will suffice.

Kitchen Light, Framing, Nokia 105 4G Customisation

A better day today. Charged into the day fitting a new LED light to the kitchen, to replace an ancient under-shelf fluorescent tube. This took an hour or so.

Then, worked on the 'Asleep' frame.

There were a few imperfections. The saddest part was how carefully I treated the soft wood, only to drop one piece onto another accidentally, causing a visible (and unrepairable) dent in the smooth surface of one side. The frame was also made too small. This a consequence of using the still new 45-degree sliding tool to measure the edges. The tolerance for these hand-cut frames is just 1mm. 1mm per edge, makes 2mm for both, but this can grow to 4mm with ease, how these tiny amounts grow. In this case the frame was 4mm too short. It was also annoying in that the moulding was particularly complex and beautiful and special, so I cut down the painting by 4mm to fit.

I also, unusually, framed it all while the frame was gluing; to save time. This thick wood barely needs long for the glue to hold. I know from experience of pulling these apart just how strong the glue is on these grain-edge joints, and these are stapled too.

Finally, I decided to customise my new phone, a Nokia 105 4G (2023), to replace my old beloved friend of the Nokia 106 type RM-962. Almost every change the new phone is worse, from the hard-to-press buttons, the slow everything, the many stupid menus that aren't needed, and system bugs (like the 'Abc' capitalisation not working, like renaming profiles not renaming them in the shortcut options), to the slowness of texting, long pauses to press each letter. Bah!

However, I can customise it. In memory of my long-term 106, I've sampled the Nokia 106 sounds in 24-bit and added high quality versions to the new phone (in 16-bit, mono, 44100hz, wav format). The new one didn't have a 'quiet' single-tone for texts, so I've added that. All of the old sounds sounded better, the new ones are brash and distorted, and are too loud even on the lowest setting.

I've also customised the wallpaper, which (after some experiments) is 124x160 pixels, and png format works fine. It's a pity that I can't use my old Nokia 106 background (I guess a hardware rip would be needed), but perhaps it would be silly to use that anyway.

The Slowness of the Modern World

I've been forced to update my mobile phone as the '2G' and '3G' mobile phone networks are being phased out. Last time I upgraded my phone it took an hour or two to set it up and copy over the contacts. Contacts were a simple matter of name and number, to be copied to the SIM Card, then to the new phone.

Now it will take me several days to do the same job. Each contact now has lots of details (even custom ringtones and profiles) and the size of the data means that most of this must be entered manually. The phone itself is hugely slow compared to the 10-year old one. Not slow in processing power, but in poor interface. Every click demands another menu or confirmation, and text entry is slower. Doing anything now takes 50% longer. Something like this, two or three 8-hour days of full time admin, happens with every 'upgrade' for no benefit other than slower and less efficient communication. Utterly frustrating.

Well, today I've start work on 'upgrading' my 320-or-so contacts. I can, now, copy these to my computer and edit them in Google Contacts, but this too is precarious. It's slow itself (long pauses just to edit each record), but also threatens to 'sync' with my main Google contacts, when I must keep these separate.

I'll do the best I can.

Slowly onwards I must move.

Admin, Trips, Boxes of Delights

How quickly the days are flying, so little seems to be done, but such are social and performance days.

On the 13th, recorded some new harmony vocals for The Arm, recorded at lower pitch to a slowed-down backing track, these give a nicer, and stranger, sound. This was the first recording with the new Rode NT1 (for other re-recordings, I'll use the NT3 as I have with the other vocals, but backing vocals should actually benefit from the slight timbre differences of a different mic). A new phone arrived, but I didn't have time to set it up. I found time top update my art catalogue spreadsheet to include all 1415 artworks.

In the afternoon, a delightful visit to Linda from the old Nantwich art group.

Yesterday dominated by birthday events; a trip to many Sandbach shops, and ending with the first half of Sideways, a quirky 'road movie' I've seen before. The title is poor, it should be called something like 'Love in 50 Vineyards'. We're watching The Box of Delights too, a 1984 series which is being repeated by the BBC. I strongly remember this, and its music in particular, from my childhood and haven't seen it since. Several aspects seem related to things I've made since (the music certainly inspired the music box at the end of The Spiral Staircase), but I expect that most of the narrative elements are a coincidence as The Box of Delights has just about everything fantastical in it, from animal people, to growing/shrinking, time travel, portals, magic and more.

More art filing today! Onwards!

Exhaustion and Repairs

I feel tired out after a non-stop week, a non-stop year, yet I feel like I'm hardly doing anything or getting anywhere. This month has largely been one of consolidation and organisation; filing.

Today I've posted two Christmas presents away, and wrapped the ones I've prepared. I've fixed a photo frame which had a broken 'tail' stand, and completed a job for mum: adding postcodes to the house address book; a book of distant family and friends (many of which we've met once-per-lifetime, or never at all) mostly used for festive cards - my father excels at this annual ritual.

Then I enhanced the new air fryer. It had dark-grey on black numbers, so I had to make them all lighter. I used vinyl stickers and sliced them into tiny (about 1x5mm) strips, sticking them on with tweezers (after wiping it all with alcohol). I painted numbers, and filled in the knob's 'dot', with white acrylic paint:

I could have bought some white Letraset-style numbers if I wanted a neater job, but this does the job without the £10 fee. The whole machine only cost £17, so £10 for white letters may be extreme!

I've updated Argus and Frameculator, so some fixes there too, and neatened up 'Two Parents Of A Child'. The sine waves 'fizz' a little. This appears to be a consequence of all sine waves which fade rapidly, even my MODX does this (though some older analogue synths didn't; not even sure if the SY-85 did, and pretty sure the Ensoniq ESQ-1 didn't). Well, the solution is to add a low-pass-filter, but that (as you expect) makes the low notes louder than the high ones, so a scalar amplitude modulator is needed too. It's done now, and this song sounds smoother than ever before.

So little seems to have been finished since my manic Sunday. I have my frame to saw and make, and still the Fall in Green vocals to add. I checked my bank account with horror; 2025, as the phrase goes, can only get better.

I must keep battling, pushing to complete the projects in plan. I need 12 music videos for The Dusty Mirror; to complete the mastering; to complete the Fall in Green album, and single of My Tambourine Man; to complete the frame for 'She Was Always Asleep As School'. Plus several Christmas duties. Time off is for me a relatively recent phenomenon. Before I met Deb, Christmas was another day, yet with annoying national closures (not that I ever cried 'humbug'). Now I must stop for a few days each December, which affects productivity, and yet doesn't exactly refresh.

Well, the battle goes on. Let us charge again with new vigour and joy.

Asleep Frame, Congleton Events

A good, though exhausting, day yesterday. Started the day by preparing a length of wood for the 'Asleep' frame. This involved sanding, staining red, then repeated coats of black such that some red still shone through; then masking and spraying gold. Today I've updated my framing software, Frameculator, to v1.05 to accommodate some slight changes to the way I cut the frame.

At 2pm, it was time for John's album launch, apparently the last ever community event at The Saw Mill:

It was brilliant. The evening was exhausting, preparing for today's performance in Congleton Library. I wish I had the time and means to do more live events. A few more hours in each day would be useful.

I had a clearly spam/fraud message about my art. Whenever I post a painting online, I get 1 or 2 messages offering to buy it, all of these are fraudsters, 100%, perhaps 1000 or 2000 over the last decade or so. The social media companies do nothing, to such an extent that I'm considered remiss if I fail to reply.

So much still to do. I must cut the frame, and work on The Dusty Mirror remaster, Much of October and November were intense with production work on the Fall in Green album, and Dusty. This month (which includes Christmas, more social occasions, and end of year filing) will mostly be admin, trying to catch up and consolidate. Finding time to do anything seems to be nigh on impossible. I've not slept a full night all month and barely have time to even pause for a break. As is the case today. Onwards.