Aches, Shelf Bits, Go Sprout Launch

Full of muscle aches today after so much activity yesterday. I processed the vocals for the other two Christmas songs, and added those for the somewhat moving 'Heaven's Day'. I will keep musing on the first draft of Candy Cane.

Then, I made a mistake on the alcove cabinet. I marked the exact height of the side pieces late last night, and today cut to the mark, but only then realised that I needed to cut off the bottom, not the top. When marking, I should have (counter-intuitively) flipped the pieces upside down to mark them. So, a crisis moment. The wood was the correct length but the shelf slots all wrong! My instant thought was that I'd ruined everything and would need to buy new wood and start afresh, but not all was lost.

The top shelf space was larger than the 133mm I needed, so to fix the length I could cut the right amount from the top and glue it onto the bottom. This would lead to a visible cut line near the bottom, but like many pine lengths today, the wood itself is a composite, so the grain and hue is uneven anyway, and it is all destined to be stained. The cut line would be near the floor, not obvious, and mostly covered by the door, but even that aside, I could cover the line with veneer or some other decoration with ease (I will probably do this, I have lots of veneer in stock).

There are no dowels here, so after gluing, I aim to add screws along the length for strength (it hardly needs it, the weight compresses the joint). The screws, I realised, could be loosened or tightened to adjust the exact length far more accurately than trying to shave slices from the wood. The bottom 5mm or so is hidden by the moat of carpet, so everything is ripe for a height adjustment system. All in all, the mistake is not so serious, and the length adjustment is a design benefit I'd not have thought of otherwise. Next step, to check the sizes, sand and tidy the look, perhaps add that veneer, then fix the arch, and stain.

In the afternoon, Deb and I went to Congleton Library for the launch of Go Sprout The Grain!. A lovely reading with many friends present, and two new attendees from Newcastle. We were amazed and delighted to see Alan; enthusiastic poet and comedy performer, blacksmith and volunteer from Morecambe Poetry Festival. He travelled from Preston for this event. Everything we do in Congleton is a delight.

My throat was and is too tired from yesterday's singing, perhaps too rushed, or not technically correct enough, or just too much. My body aches. Time to rest.

Candy Cane Vocals, Alcove Shelves Part 1

Vocal recording today, for 'You're My Candy Cane', and the two other Christmas songs, 'Will You Be My Snowflake', and 'Heaven's Day'. A key part is to have good backing tracks, and to know what layers or different vocal parts are needed. For Candy Cane, the chorus is layered, and there is a 3-part harmony on the 'Honey in the summer' part, so this meant preparations for that.

Snowflake also had a few layering options, these were somewhat rushed though, I had to snatch an available quiet 90 minutes to record everything, so dashed around to assemble dub tracks on the fly. Later, some vocoder parts for Candy Cane were recorded from the beautiful Microkorg, and then the full assembly and production. The main vocals are all in one track, with a separate track for the Honey harmonies (these are layered as an instrument, so the three parts don't need three tracks). There are three more vocal tracks because the word 'call' at the end splits into growing 5ths... I think Bohemian Rhapsody does this ('Let me go-oh-oh-oh'), so that must be where I got the idea.

The song is just about complete.

At 4pm I had time to attack Step 1 of Stage 1 of the fireplace shelves, and my first use of a router. Essentially, for this project, I must make a square arch with slots inside for the shelves.

You can see the slots, and that they don't go all the way to the back, thus they will be invisible when the shelves are in place. Stage 1 is making this arch, but it must exactly match in size the existing inner frame of the fireplace. I think the way to do this is make it all a few millimetres too big, then power-sand it level. The top (I could say lintel, though this doesn't take any weight) should be just about the right size. I made a paper template, which is more accurate than a ruler because the space is recessed. The two verticals are about 20mm too long, ready to be cut down during final measurement.

Once the pieces are the right size I can fit them together, with dowels to avoid visible screws, though I plan on two being visible at the moment. Stage 2 will be cutting and fitting the shelves, that's easy, then making and fitting the doors, also not difficult once the rest is done. The shelf depth and door width will be cut by the circular saw of B & Q, so I trust will all be accurate!

More music work tomorrow.

Spray Paints, CDs, Mailing Migrations

After a power day of music creation, today is a bit of a fragmentory day.

Started by spraying some plastic compartment trays gold, with the aim of transforming them into wall-mounted trinket racks. This went to plan, though I was reminded that spraying plastic is extremely difficult because each single particle of dust, each hair, even each fingerprint, can become magically revealed by the ultra-thin gold.

After that, ordering the new CDs for Another Violet Night. I kept thinking or saying that I planned to, I hoped to release it on CD. If this ever happens, it's time to forget about plans and hopes and actually do it there and then, so the new albums will be ready for launch day on Halloween.

To prepare for the release, I set up a half-price sale of four of my existing CD albums on Bandcamp, which all are now £5 until the end of October. Each is from a different era of my music, each a different style. These are: my first electronic concept album, The Spiral Staircase; my first vocal rock concept album (very much progressive in the Pink Floyd style, not at all like the heavy metal one may assume from the artwork), Burn Of God; my proto-piano-concerto Cycles & Shadows; and the contemporary electronic ride of songs dark and light that is We Robot.

Updates about the Christmas Tails project were made; and new, slightly adjusted lyrics for my Christmas songs printed. I may record 'Will You Be My Snowflake?' anyway, even though Candy Cane is fine, and will almost certainly be my choice for this project. I may have enough music for a Christmas EP or similar, but it would have to be something artistically special, extraordinary. Until now, learning new skills, the excitement of learning was a key motivator. New music must be something beyond this, though, of course, we're always learning. An artist should be getting better over time, no excuses, no restful laurels.

One last act was to migrate my artworks email list to Substack. I by no means email out each post, but may this post serve as an update and glimpse to it to dear friends and followers.

Priority this week, to finalise these Christmas songs. Main event of the week is Deborah's poetry book launch and open mic in Congleton Library on Tuesday at 3pm. Brigid the Corn Dolly will be there, and by amazing coincidence there is a harvest moon on the night.

Onwards!

You're My Candy Cane Production

A full day of production work on my Christmas song for the Christmas Tails album, 'You're My Candy Cane'. A song I dreamt on Oct 20th 2023 (dream music composing happens to most song writers, it's fairly rare for me), there's an old post here about it and the original song lyrics. I've made a few small lyric changes. The chorus was simply 'You're my candy cane, my candy' repeated 4 times. Now it's:

You're my candy cane, my candy
You're my candy cane, my candy
You're my candy cane, my candy cane

You're my candy cane, my candy
You're my candy cane, my candy
You're my candy cane, my candy cane

So, two iterations. The song starts with this catchy melody without vocals. In some ways, the song is similar to my first ever song (well, of the 'new', post-school-days era), 'I Love You For Your Money', which also featured repeats of the line, and was also dreamt.

I could make you smile If only You would stay a while

Has been changed to:

You could make me smile If only You would stay a while

To match the song's perspective, and the 'When you call' line is repeated only once.

In production terms, I began with the drums and aimed for an electro pop song. Despite my dance orientated plan, the song doesn't feature regular bass drums, few of my songs do. I seem to favour shuffle beats. I added saw-chord stab fairly early on, to match the rhythm of the melody, then added a pulse-wave lead, as imagined. In my head, it was close to the track 'Zoot' from the Flatspace soundtrack.

I added a few more experimental layers, and a second lead. Arpeggios there seemed to work well in the chorus. I expanded this lead, and made it converse with the pulse lead, one finishing the other. The basic tracks are pulse 1, pulse 2, pulse 2 quieter for the chorus, bass, bass drums, snare, hi-hats, toms. I added a Casio VL1 click as a sort of metronome pre-emptive click, evoking the beeps on the starting grid of a racing game, and added a white noise filter sweep, a classic 80s sound.

This is mostly it. The structure is as penned, but opens with a melodic chorus, and has an additional chorus for a guitar solo after the refrain; the refrain is the climax, the essential sweet-spot, and the solo is the coast down from that peak.

The next step is working on the vocals and arrangement. Songs like this benefit from layers and backing vocals. I already know I want a vocoder for 'my candy', but layered vocals may work there too. I'll certainly need layers for that climax.

I'm constantly amazed how many tracks pop songs seem to require, mine are positively frugal by comparison. Here's a shot of Prometheus with the intro, so far.

Make Her Sky Makeover, October Priorities

The migration to Substack is now complete. Blogger and Substack have different pros and cons, so for now Make Her Sky will be on both platforms for dear readers to choose their preference.

Many other jobs are pending, perhaps the most urgent is completing my Christmas song for the second Electric Sprout album. 12 artists are now confirmed and two songs, 'One Star' by Paul Parish, and 'Solstice Carol' by John Miller, complete and ready for mastering! Mike Drew of The Forrest Dick Band have also sent a few possible tracks, though more may come. My big hope is that Andy Stubbs will manage to complete his song, which sounds brilliant even in the fragment I've heard.

As it has a deadline, this must be my first priority. Perhaps, concurrently, I can work on the two shelving projects. I'm tempted to start that woodwork today, but it is too damp due to rainy Amy, today's named storm.

Two painting competitions report this month, and I've been informed of a new Nantwich Museum Open Art Competition, which is now open for entries on their website. There is a theme of 'heritage', one of those hugely boring words like 'community'. Such a theme is perfect as it will inspire something exciting and daring, and we're blessed to have a few months to develop and pain something new, even if the judging is by a 1500-pixel jpg (sigh, what would Vermeer, what would Leonardo da Vinci do when faced with the degradation of something visceral and ultra-delicate like an oil painting being judged by a coarse digital photograph?). I can but hope for the sympathy of the judges.

Backup Duties, Substack Migration Continues, Computers and Cells

Backup Duties, Substack Migration Continues, Computers and Cells

Woke early, after a worrysome and sleepless night, worried about my darling Deborah and her insomnia and work stress. How I wish I could help.

Today was a full day. October the 1st, so a quarterly back-up day. Another task was disabling Bytten, the game review website I founded with Andrew Williams. We found fellow gamers and reviewed a game a week for 10 years, from 2003 to 2013, and today the site was switched off pending the lapse of the domain. I must, at some point, publish the reviews as a book, partly because nobody does. So many websites and web-magazines form a transient culture. I am critically aware of this point.

Backups took the first few hours, then a call from Galleria Balmain; I needed to write some new information about myself and about the paintings on sale there. This took the next few hours.

Then, the long job of the Substack migration of this blog. Yesterday I managed 60 pages, each page 25 posts, so hand-tagged 1500 posts, each opened, clicked edit, saw which tags were needed from the Blogger blog, then added them. I really needed to be a web-machine to do this, with 25 tabs open at once, and the Ctrl-Tab shortcut to dart the next tab after memorising the tags for each post.

Today, at 7pm, I approached the end, the last of the 3,032 posts; but then I noticed another anomaly. I had already discovered that any blog post with the same title was overwritten, forcing me to hand copy-and-paste about 149 posts, but today discovered that posts with multiple images were auto-deleting images. Not only when editing and submitting changes, but the very act of clicking 'Edit' and viewing the post makes the images vanish before your eyes!

I suspect this is due to formatting differences between the HTML of Blogger and Substack, and I hope that it only applies to a limited number of posts, perhaps ones where images appear after another in a row, without text between. This should be a minority of posts. But, sigh, this will mean again traversing the 3,032 posts one by one, comparing them with the original on Blogger and perhaps re-uploading the images.

There is much to do this month, so much. Of key priority is promotion of the Christmas album, as well as work on my song. Lots of other music work too. Well, I can do but one job at a time.

I must focus more upon making good art, seeing and presenting connections; this is the essence of art, and science. Already I can see that there is a connection between the Substack migration and cellular activity. Both are about replication and error correction. If I do this digital task well, my cells will act in a similar fashion and extend my youth. It seems clear to me that this is the case, that exacting computer work and filing trains many subsets of the body to behave in similar, exacting ways.

Copying Labels from Blogger to Substack

A long process is in progress as I migrate my 19 year, 3000+ post blog to Substack. Alas, this is not easy.

As first, it seemed that I managed to import all of the posts, but the labels were not there. So the first step was hand editing each post to add the labels.

This can be done relatively quickly with a few cheats, I say relatively meaning that it will still take many days, work, but not many months.

In Blogger, I searched using the 'index:xxx' feature to find a subset of posts to work on. I used 'sort:-published index:0' at first, to start with the oldest post. I need to use the index feature because I can't simply scroll on. It seems that 3000 posts makes Blogger (or Chrome) break eventually.

In another tab, I made Substack to display posts, sorted from older. Then ctrl-clicked each of the 25-per-page posts to open each post in a new tab and edit. The list always defaults to search from newest to oldest, so you need to preserve these first two tabs: one from Blogger, one from Substack.

This, however would be relatively easy, taking a mere 2 or 3 days, except that I discovered that about 150 posts were not imported - agh! This seemed to occur at random, yet there were clues, such as posts with the same title/name were excluded (foolish me for making more than one post entitled 'Dream' or 'Monday', for example).

This complicates things. When finding a lost post, I had to make a list of the missing ones, then add them as new posts in Substack, one at a time. Then, open the post, edit, and set the new correct (old!) date. This was not easy either because the date entry field is broken and takes (no joke) 5 or 6 times of typing the same number -every time- to set the actual date and time. It would have helped enormously to be able to set the publication date when first posting.

Yet, it is possible. The process will probably take me 5 machine-like days of constant action, and all because of a buggy Substack importer. So much work stems from badly programmed systems by other people! What can we do but sigh and do our best to correct, and stoically continue in our task.

It was, it is, a delight re-read my older posts. I must remember to delight and inspire with each new post.

At time of writing, about 750 of the 3000 posts have been edited. Onwards we roll the heavy rock of art.

Another Violet Night Videos Complete, Dowel Joints

A tedious day of computer chugging. Converted all of the new music videos to 8000kpbs and checked them. Some finished early or late, it's amazing how many small errors can creep in to any project, amazing how much proofing matters. I've noted to add a new feature to Argus to warn about events beyond the final render frame. For every error, some preventative action must be taken. Here's a shot from 'Smashing My House of Cards', which uses a card-like vertical flip for the video. I know that a true card flip is a 180 degree rotation, which I experimented with, but that looked ugly at the joint point.

I've also looked up gizmos to guide drill bits. There are one or two metal blocks with holes in made to ensure a perpendicular drill. I'd have liked one that fitted for 2.5mm bits, as I use this for screw pilot holes often. In the end I've ordered one for drilling for dowels, which is what I need this for, for the joint in the mantelpiece shelves. A screw is easier but the aesthetics matter. I considered another option of fitting a dowel haphazardly, then drilling a bigger socket, then to be filled with hot-melt glue. This may hold better than a conventional dowel joint and be simpler too. A plug which was cone shaped, zigzagged, perforated biscuit, or other holes may make a better joint still.

Most of the hours of the day were spent waiting for FFMpeg to build my 13 new videos, then proofing them all, uploading them to YouTube with the appropriate text, rebuilding in archive (lower) quality, and other such tedious tasks. I recall that in the 1990s, computers would often take hours to render and calculate things. The waiting gradually reduced so that rendering time was not at all a problem. Now, long waits for computers are back in vogue.

Thus, the videos are done. Only a few more jobs on this album left. How much work each release is, and I barely do any promotion or performances. Soon I can move on. Tree of Keys is perhaps next. I also need to fully update the sheet music distribution on itch, separating free and basic sheets with full and paid sheets, plus adding tags to this blog on Substack. 3000 posts mean 300 a day is still 10 days of solid work.

Onwards we hack at the rock face of culture, crawling forwards towards a better future.