Eckelmann Bass

Sigh! A huge amount of work on the bass for The Cabinet Of Dr Eckelmann. The original (live) sound was a Reface DX sound, so I've made something similar on the MODX. I played an intro with some strnage bends live, and that sounded okay. Then I wanted to sequence the full song's bassline.

I imported the intro MIDI sequence into Prometheus, but noticed that it didn't import pitch bends - I'd not actually programmed in pitch bend imports or exports before... hmm. So I spent 90 minutes or so programming MIDI pitch bend support into Prometheus. Values can range from -1 to +1, as with any Prometheus parameter, and these are exported in the MIDI range of (an awkward) -8192 to +8191.

Then I programmed in the bassline; but it sounded buzzy and strange, not close enough to the Reface version. The expression of velocities, bends and wheels and the other aspects of playing make such a difference, so I'll play it live instead.

The structure of the song is finalised; it's F-min organ chords, which shift to an odd 0-3-6 chord (part E-minor, part G-minor) then E minor to major, before a leap to A-minor. Then everything repeats, with a synth solo over the intro, where the finale hits the A. I wanted very synthetic instruments because there was something futuristic and electronic about the 1920s.

The bass the last aspect of this.

Eckelmann, Kingfisher's Handcup

Working yesterday on two Fall in Green tunes; The Cabinet of Dr Eckelmann (which is all about The Kabinet of Dr Caligari), and a surprise diversion into a poem we've performed once before, Kingfisher's Handcup. For the latter, I played around with a flute sound and like the strange looping effect during when using the sustain pedal, so played a moody tune in one go. This good start led to lots of small tweaks to get the timing right. At one point I added a 'water' sound which triggered when the flute did. Essentially it is a very minimalist tune; gentle, full of the forest.

Eckelmann presents its own problems. The poem is highly narrative so the music must track the story, as in Lost At The Fair, for example. We've played it live many times but every time it was different, with little more than a throbbing bass and some distorted organ chords. The bass is tricky to replicate, I may have to play that externally throughout. So far, the mood is nightmarish and suitably evocative of a dark and grainy horror film.

Final Paintings, Prometheus v3.48, Threads

A couple of busy days. Finished framing 'Bird Cage In Terra Cotta' yesterday, and the Theresienstadt painting. For each framed painting, I measure and weigh it, photograph it flat, and at a more 'natural' angle on the wall, and now some some photos with myself too. This all increases the record keeping burden, but I think this is worth it. I'm really pleased with how they look.

Then, a couple of hours work on this blog. For years I've used a 'Sculptural Design' tag to cover frames (which often include sculptural elements, cabinets etc.) and posts about furniture design. It's often annoyed me however that framing wasn't a separate tag, so I've replaced 'Sculptural Design' with 'Framing' and 'Furniture Design'. Cabinets are frames of a sort, and may include sculpture, or engineering in projects like the Eden Iris. I had about 200 posts to update. Many have faulty image placement or formatting due to the different ways Blogger has formatted images over the 20-year lifetime of this blog. Updating those took longest.

After that, more work on Prometheus, slight work. I wanted to fix a bug where wav files with markers sometimes loaded incorrectly. I really need a faulty wav file to test this with, as mine all now seem to work(!) but the 'cue ' chunk is a candidate, as this includes a 'data' chunk (why on earth 'data' is used as a sub-chunk AND a primary chunk name I don't know!). I now skip over cue chunks, so this may help. Plus, I added more features to the import/export of sequences as CSV. This is a useful format because it's so simple. A list of notes and times between is all that's needed to create a tune. Now I've added all types of event (including Set Modulator, Set Parameter etc.) which may be useful at times. I've never needed any export but notes before, but wanted the feature when working on 'We Used To Store Sunlight' and it wasn't there. I realised that there's no way to save or copy the parameter changes and fades, meaning I had to resort to pencil and paper. I won't have to now.

Today, back the painting and finishing 'She Was Always Asleep At School', and 'Castle For The King Of Death':

Over the past two days we've re-watched Threads on television; my 3rd viewing and Deb's first. We were shown this in school, in Religious Education lessons. Always scary and disturbing, I could not help but muse on post-apocalyptic survival techniques and technologies. An anti-fallout centrifugal water purifier came to mind using plastic water bottles and a bicycle wheel. Spinning the bottles and extracting the top water should result in clean water.

Framing, Chlorophyll, The River Where You Used To Swim

Completed the 'Self Inspection At Theresienstadt' frame today, it looks wonderful, just as I imagined. One tricky part was the need to cut 3mm off the edge from a long piece of glass. This wasn't entirely successful, as the score line wasn't quite deep enough in one crucial point. I had to nip off a little and sand it.

After that, a full day of work on the 'Sunlight' tune. A few days ago I listened to the Revolutions album by Jean-Michel Jarre for the first time in years, perhaps over a decade. This reminded me of the flute, the Turkish ney, which is apparently omitted from the album now for copyright reasons (yay to owning a first edition copy). The MODX has a rather wonderful ney sound, so I used that in this, rather than the piano as planned, at the start. I added some bells, and a gentle solo piano part, then some piano at the end, playing along live over the backing, which is unusual for me. This worked well, an unusual mix of sequenced and human.

Then, work on a new tune for the poem 'The River Where You Used To Swim'. I wanted to evoke searching so played a few 4-note arpeggios that climb, ever seeking. It's somewhat like Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. I chose chords without thinking: A-minor, Bb-Major, G-minor, C-Major, then F for a happy breakaway. It's very simple, and sounded pretty in most instruments but seemed to suit an acoustic guitar, so played it in that sound. It sounds very like a real guitar, but I can't be sure it's even playable on one guitar. I will let future listeners become awestruck at my 'guitar' playing.

Another hard work day in isolation for no reward, but done as best I can for the glory of art. Onwards we roll the heavy rock of life.

Theresienstadt Frame, We Used To Store Sunlight

Some good news from Ty Pawb as, a despite record number of entries, I hear that one of my paintings has been selected for the Open there. This is as much a relief as a joy.

I don't know which painting was (or even paintings were) selected. Only one of the three is framed, and the Theresienstadt painting is brilliant anyway, so needs a frame, so today I cut this. I used my Frameculator software to measure the sizes, and made a slight improvement to the code to show the 'half way point' to cut. With a long (over 1M) length of wood, it's usually better to start by sawing it in half at the correct place. For decoration, I first roughened it with a wire brush; I wanted an aged and ancient look, then planed a bevel to give a smooth inner edge. Then stained in red-shade phthalo blue stain, then brown (a raw-umber hue). The result is a dark green-brown, just perfect.

I managed to cut my thumb on a huge splinter, then repaired the splinter by gluing it into place with a tiny amount of glue and tweezers, the stained that part with a cotton bud. The repair is now invisible.

In between frame work, I've started the music for the next Fall in Green track. All but 'The Silk Merchant's' song were recorded last year (apart from the vocals), which is why they've not taken long so far. 'We Used To Store Sunlight' is also known as 'Rest In Peace, Dear Chlorophyll', it changed name during composition, and I still get both names confused.

I wrote a tune for it for its premiere live performance at Tom's Tap years ago (Ah 11th October 2019, 5 years to this very moment). It has a simple melody with a regular 4-time beat. The mood is dreamy, like a tune called 'Waiting For The Rain To End' as used in a Flatspace Music Pack, and some of the tunes from Arcangel. The melody is a little magical, described as 'Hobbity' in the notes, and it does have something of Lord of the Rings about it.

I've decided to sequence it first rather than play live, then with a sequencer guide, play live afterwards. There's a lot more instrumentation than the piano here; it's mostly strings. I have so many ways of recording, and so many ways to record, and I don't use just one. One key difference between Prometheus and most Digital Audio Workstations, is that the latter are primarily triggers of audio clips, but Prometheus is primarily a synthesizer and triggers individual notes. Of course those 'instruments' can be audio clips, but it's core inspiration is Protracker on the Amiga, rather than a multi-track recorder.

Sine Curves

Today, another two small fixes to Prometheus. The batch converter used to lock-out if an empty folder was selected, this was a silly bug I should have noticed. Second, a smaller fix to the auto-increment of an instrument ending in a number.

Then work on translating a linear ramp, 0 to 1, to various curves. There aren't standard names for these curve types, but they are common. All segments of sine waves. I've named them:

Sinoid:

curve=sin(x*PI+ONEANDAHALFPI)/2+0.5f;

Oversine:

curve=sin(x*HALFPI);

Undersine:

curve=sin(x*HALFPI+ONEANDAHALFPI)+1;

Unsine:

if (x<0.5f)
curve=sin(x*PI)/2;
else
curve=sin((x-0.5f)*PI+ONEANDAHALFPI)/2+1;


Firegate uses Sinoid. The old Watergate used something like Oversine for attack and Undersine for release; good choices for audio, but they were not sines per-se, but similar shapes made by exponential multiplication.

Ponderous Tomes, Watergate Replacement

Production work on 'Ponderous Tomes' for the new Fall in Green album today. This took an hour or so, quite simple, although the loud 'Santur' instrument is quite a clang compared to the piano.

The main job of the day was visiting each of the 77 song files which included the old Watergate plugins, and manually replacing them with Firegate. Firegate sounds a little smoother because it has a more accurate and reliable gate, and it has more tangible settings; correct thresholds, gate times in millisecs. Watergate had more arbitrary settings, so it's good to replace it, but it meant hand tuning each use of it. Now it is 22:12, and the job is done. I can now remove Watergate and Engram Watergate from Prometheus.

The secret of becoming good at recording and producing music is years and years and years of work, which in my case is at least 50% programming the tools.

Onwards.

New Fall in Green Album Work

Yesterday began by cleaning my PC, a good thing to do annually anyway, and aiming to discover the cause of an intermittent fan rattle, which is minor but had been disturbing me. It appears to be the case fan which is good news, I'd feared it was the expensive and hard to replace PSU. I hoovered inside the case, first blowing the dust away with a camera lens blower. Hoovering of delicate surfaces is much easier by blowing the dust and sucking if from the air. Hoovers should all come with powerful air blowers near the nozzle!

Then, back to music, and the next Fall in Green album. I started four tracks last December, works which we've performed live often but not yet recorded: Effervescent, Ponderous Tomes, Sunchild, and Velvet Gelt. Resuming work revealed a new bug in Prometheus related to the recent upgrades, so I fixed that, then a disturbing crash when importing MIDI. That's never happened before, and I don't think it's connected with the new updates. I couldn't reproduce it.

Then I recorded the piano part for another track from the Rattenfanger era which we've performed a few times, the rather pretty Silk Merchant's Song. It is a poem about Somerset Maughm's quest for contentment and the Mona Lisa; the wife of a silk merchant. Musically it's a simple melody focused on the piano, similar to Time Falling or the more gentle Salome tracks, painting pictures with simple notes, part Debussey, part Satie, but very spartan.

In the evening Deb came to record the vocals for all five tracks, and today I've added the Sunchild vocals. While working on the Silk Merchant's Song I found the need to quantise notes to the notes in the MIDI guide track, so added the feature to skip note entry based on the notes in a guide track (Track 1). I could already quantise to Track 1 later, but having the ability to type directly has instantly been useful, so Prometheus is now upgraded to v3.56.

The five tracks, plus an improvised instrumental called Anthem for the Solstice are already enough for a complete EP, but we have lots to add, if only of works we've performed.