Singing and Dust, Scores, Philosophical Notes

I distinctly remember recording the vocals for The Dusty Mirror, my first great attack at a vocal album - I can't count The Modern Game, that was an experiment in every sense - and still an incomplete one which I may return to, one day, for the 4th time. Warm Comfy Sofa took so many takes to record back then, all bad. Now I listened again and prepared a new backing track. The vocal guide melody was an octave too high; a common mistake of that ancient era, that era a mere 4 years ago.

I re-sang the vocals and in a first take it was simply right, about 10 times better than the best take from those days! At long last I can sing! Though I know that skill levels are always a gradient; I can sing better, I can sing worse, but now the results are on another league to those of 2020. Would that this be true in 2028!

These old songs were often pitched poorly, perhaps good for my untrained and weak voice, but too low now. I also, experimentally, sang Two Parents Of A Child, but find the song more natural an octave higher. In my mind and heart though, it is in the lower pitch.

It's been a slower day generally. I completed the scores to the new Fall in Green album, though I haven't scored the two tracks that need vocals (and need finishing - I don't want to score until it is complete). I also wrote a few philosophical words on the nature of life, life forms that is. Philosophy and inward thinking is something people with too much time and too much solitude do; but sometimes, wisdom or something interesting can appear from such endeavours.

I've made a plan, outline, for a new album of new songs, and will mull these over. Money is a constant worry but art is a constant goal. That itself is a good title for a song.

Onwards we charge!

Asylum Escape Dream, Square Spoon Scoring

A somewhat sleepless night. I dreamt of going to some sort of event with Chris, we sat next to each other. Later, the event moved, so we had to get into Chris' car and follow it. It seemed to stop in some low sand dunes with harsh grass, like a beach area of sorts. I walked with Chris into the dunes among the scattered attendees who had dispersed. I discovered Noel Edmonds there; he was secretly gazing into a crystal ball, a transparent orb, shortly before burying it in the sand. I wanted to tell him that a transparent orb is no use, that scrying depends on random occlusions in a real crystal.

The scene shifted and I found myself in a dormitory in an asylum. I think Sabine was in another bed there, and she wanted my help on some technical matter. I offered to help if she would help me escape this prison, and she agreed. After advising her, I fixed up some wooden object with bolts which I'd been working on as part of my escape; a part of my bed. I realised that it was 5am and that the time to escape was running out, so I opened up the window and jumped a great height from it. I landed on some triangle rooves of terracotta, then leapt to lower rooves and into the snowy garden, then ran away, to bushes, trees, and a beach beyond which was something like the earlier one. I found myself indoors, in some sort of conference area, a large business gathering. Annie was there, and I asked her to help me escape, I needed a disguise or other form of practical help. She said yes. I can't remember much else, apart from that I felt that help would be given, that my escape may succeed.

I woke late to a good day of working on the sheet music for the new Fall in Green album. I score the music in all new albums now, and aim to score one old for each new one. 14 of the 15 tracks are now scored. Some tunes have many parts, so not everything is scored as it can be, but I try to at least have a piano version which contains important musical bits of audible parts, and make more expansive options if possible.

Mixing, Cause and Effect, Scoring

A slower day, yet the day has flown. I woke at 9:30 and didn't want to get up due to a million sighs. Perhaps suicide is the answer I thought, as Tom Baker also once thought, to the pointlessness and poverty of my doomed existence - but no! We are to die anyway, so that is no answer. All existence is equally doomed, and yet equally valid. We must do our best to extend our life.

Borges writes about infinity a lot; of course there can be no infinity in the real world. I read that if each effect is the result of a cause, then that cause must also have a cause, and so on forever, which proves that the universe is impossible. My refutation of this argument is that causes and effects are human perceptions built from our evolutionary need to make predictions. There is no actual cause of anything in the real universe; it merely is. Our belief in a 'cause' is a probable, and personally validated, prediction based on our life experience, nothing more. If we move our eyes up a tree, a branch may appear, so we may predict a branch every so often, but that doesn't mean the trunk has caused the branch - it's merely there as part of the tree.

I eased my body up.

There are often times when things have been done, dangerous times of relaxation, when in actually a job is never done. I started by adding the vocals to the last track we've recorded, The River Where You Used To Swim. I'm still too deaf to mix anything, which is annoying, but life is never perfect. Each day is to precious to doom away.

I got to work on Mr Tambourine Man, the sequence for another Fall in Green track, but this one destined to be a single release not on any album. Then started work on transcribing the sheet music for the new album. This wasn't on my list of jobs, but it needs doing, so I began, and made good progress. A few tracks are already transcribed well, notably 'Sunchild' and 'Sky Robes Of Celeste', and a few have well scored versions for live performance, though these have changed now I've recorded them.

So, today I scored We Used To Store Sunlight, The (very beautiful) River Where You Used To Swim, and Kingfisher's Handcup. These are all rather time consuming, and involve importing the MIDI sequence to Prometheus, then exporting a neater version to Sekaiju, then neatening it all up yet more, then importing that into MuseScore.

More Square Spoons, Production Work

Three jobs today. first, updated indiesfx.co.uk with the new SFXEngine logo, Bluesky links, and a few other small things. Then making the spoon even more square!

Then, work on yesterday's vocal recordings. Adding these to the tracks involves noise gating, then compression, then editing into sections, and inserting at the right time. A few tracks needed special edits due to mistakes or retakes, just the odd word. All tracks generally have one full take and that's all; we don't record lots of takes (or even two!), but some little mistakes can happen like stutters or misspoken words. Given the tongue-twisting complexity of the words in these it's a testament to Deborah's brilliance as performer that there aren't more retakes. Generally, I say 'go' and everything is done perfectly first time in the right voice and perfect timing.

Adding the words can take time because of the timing, which is quite exact, yet it's not like a pop song where it is 'obvious' where the vocals need to be. The mixing is fairly easy for me now, but hampered at the moment due to my deafness in one ear. This means I simply can't mix at the moment, but I can do this workman-like job of inserting the words and work on the details later.

Today I added words to 'The Cabinet of Dr Eckelmann', 'Kingfisher's Handcup', 'Lilac 12 Fold Dodecahedron', 'We Used to Store Sunlight', 'I Slip Into French Like Tolstoy', and 'The Candle Burns'. Sunlight and Candle are typical Fall in Green fayre of piano, strings and beautiful melodic romance. I like all equally, and strive for that. Kingfisher and Tolstoy show the influence of Björk.

Square Spoons, Ty Pawb, and Vocal Recording

Two very full days, I'm feeling overwhelmed and need to pause. The tracks for the new Fall in Green album are now finalised, there will be 15, though 8 lack vocals as yet. I bought a spoon with the aim of making a square one. Here are the stages of sawing, sanding and carving:

It's not square enough, so I'll do more work on it. Then, a trip to the Ty Pawb Open 2024 opening event. The artwork was great, imaginative and skilled. There were one or two boring landscapes; a portrait, no matter how conventionally done, is always more interesting; but generally, the artwork had huge variety in styles and themes. There were no trending themes or media, it was a wide gamut of media and of theme, but all works skilled and professional looking.

There have been four such open exhibitions and I've featured in three (I didn't apply for the first!) and I feel doubly honoured at this statistic; the quality here is really high.

Today Deb arrived to record vocals for the new album, and we managed 7 tracks before darting out to a Christmas event, a purchase of some 'Alphabetti Spaghetti', and other essential duties. Social duties tonight with a gamer night, my second and perhaps last of the year. Perhaps tomorrow I can start clear the backlog of jobs. I've barely had a few minutes to myself to think, but I know I have messages to respond to. Sisyphus cannot linger. Onwards we much push our weary selves.

Rhymin' Simon, Slip Into French, Bluesky

A really nice evening last night at the Paul Simon event in Congleton. Mine was the only original song, though there were a few original poems inspired or connected to Paul's words and life. John handed me a creator's copy of the album, which looks really nice:

I remain hard of hearing, but it's gradually got better each day, my treatment and remedy is hope and trust in my evolutionary biology; that treatment from Beethoven's day. Today I've expanded a few of the Fall in Green tracks. There are 14 on the album now, including an instrumental about the solstice. Most tracks are under 3 minutes, the album 35 or so, and overall it compares with Revolver by The Beatles, so can't be that bad.

One of the possible inclusions was 'Soaked Monet', so I listened to Deb's performance of that from the Wonderland Knutsford concert in 2021. It was spoken only, over sounds of a swimming pool, no music. I set up a string sound and played something, which sounded rather nice, but too long for this poem, and perhaps too solemn. I may work for one last track here, perhaps We Slip Into French Like Tolstoy.

Deb's had a fraught and stressful few days. I hope that we can make it to the Ty Pawb opening tomorrow. I've been looking forward to this for months and now it might be that we can't go.

Oh, one other thing done yesterday was setting up accounts on Bluesky, a Twitter alternative. I will probably only post there from now on, and have updated many Twitter links to point towards Bluesky. I dislike Twitter and I feel that the world has been waiting for a credible alternative for some time.

SFXEngine Finalisation, Lilac 12 Fold, Back To The Zoo

Much of yesterday was working on SFXEngine again, though only a small program update. Most of the time was preparing new graphics and organising new DLC.

Today I worked on and completed 'Lilac 12 Fold Dodecahedron' for the next Fall in Green album, a poem about Rudolf Steiner's educational philosophy. The process was difficult as my left ear is blocked, so I'm working partly on instruments but mostly relying on my right ear.

In between I've written and practised a song for tonight's Paul Simon night, a sequel of sorts to 'At The Zoo'. It's musically very simple, using a beat that's a bit like 'Refuge' from Synaesthesia, with a bit of 'Pinball' by Brian Protheroe thrown in. The chords are largely A-minor, E-minor, E-Major, so easy to play on guitar, but I'll use the Microkorg.

Back To The Zoo

Someone said somewhere that it's still happening
at the zoo.
Must be true
Let's go back to the zoo

The jungle drums are clichés
like the plastic desert rocks
Let's buy a toy
A little mannequin of nature

The elephants are matriarchs
The tigers are the oligarchs
The penguins are the populace
The jackals laugh at them but hiss at you
When they see you in the queue
For the zoo

The bats all fly Deliveroo
The chimps have nothing much to do
The butterflies are dolly'd up
The vultures reminisce about the, old days
When they had desert skies of blue
Before the zoo

We should build a prison here
to show the animals that we cage
people too
If they only knew

If they had a choice of home
would the animals choose the zoo?
If you had a choice would you?

SFXEngine Filing, Prometheus v3.51

Well, I made a few changes to SFXEngine first thing, a few relatively small things, mostly concerning fallbacks if the core frequency can't be met upon initialisation, and a test for the success of buffer locking. When testing it in Steam, it seemed to work with no sign of either of yesterday's problems.

I feel that the problems were, like that Taskforce issue, something connected with security or some form of Windows validation because a lock-out is a rare thing. In code, it would be an infinite loop, but that's easy for me to spot and fix, and the only cause here was reactivating the main window after opening the manual. My code pretty much does nothing in that instance, so it seems to be a Windows system issue.

Well, I immediately filed v2.00 for the time being, and will revisit it next month for more testing and new graphics prior to the public release.

After that, I updated Prometheus with a few changes discovered while working on SFXEngine. One was the correct deinitialization of the floatutility and longutility variables on song exit. One was the correct deinitialization of the text file after various text-based imports. One fixed (and improved) the sample and modulator resampling. The only new features were a new cursor skip, which can jump by a fixed proportion of a beat (eg. 1/4) or based on the notes in track 1 (a guide track). This is now a toggle for both settings, so from now I'll use keyboard keys only for toggles or commands, never a cycle - a key should never be pressed many times. This became confusing.

The other feature skipped to the next valid parameter rather than moving though many blank ones, if prev/next were chosen.

Finally, I updated a few plugins for speed vs. size, repating the small code 16 times rather than use a for-next loop.

Today was a generally happy rest day compared to the extremely busy and stressful past 7 days. I now have a couple of days to work on a new song for the Paul Simon night, and some other art things which have been neglected.

My left ear remains annoyingly blocked with wax, though not painfully so as it had been, so perhaps progress is being made.

Onwards we move.