Nightfood II Transcription, Creating Art

Two days working on Nightfood II. Recorded a few harmony vocals for 'Plastic Superman' yesterday but ended up discarding 80% of them. Balanced more tracks. 'Theme From Burnout' sounds better than ever.

Today, the start of the sheet music transcription. It's faster and more thorough than ever before, thanks to the tools in Prometheus. The 'Dream of Wasps' has 13 instrument parts, 'Nightfood' 12. This is full transcription of so much of these complex songs; not the drums though, except for accents like tam-tams, cymbals etc. I tend not to score regular drums, perhaps because I'm not a drummer and have never had the need to desire to drum live. It can depend though. In this case, these epic songs are more orchestral in scope. Anyway, it's trivial to export drum tracks from Prometheus to MIDI if ever needed.

I digress. Much of the work today was manually entering the notes for guitar solos, and fixing up the loose piano and harpsichord solos. Both done on these two tracks, which are the most long and complex on the album. I need to add the chord symbols, which I like to do on every score.

I'll aim for two more scores tomorrow, but if I manage those by 3pm I may be able to fit in the remaining three.

After this album... then what?

Most artists create work because they are commissioned, they are asked, or they find a job and obey the client. If there are no clients or patrons, they may create something based on what sells, or what is popular, or what is acclaimed. I rarely have commissions for paintings or music, I love it when it happens, but people very rarely ask me to create anything. I sometimes sell paintings, I've sold a third to a half of everything I've painted, but hardly ever music, the listening stats are still dominated by ancient music like the Flatspace soundtrack, only because the game was and is more popular than the other things I've done. That music is nothing like my music of today (excluding general brilliance). Nothing is really 'acclaimed', I've not had any music reviews since before streaming existed, so my choices or what to create artistically are governed by myself. Hobby artists, those inspired and enthused, do this all of the time but it's perhaps rare for someone who has been creating full-time for many decades.

Still, in many ways this is the way to create the best art. Feedback, good or bad, can be unreliable, and we can't create with the aim of pleasing; this never works. Whether we are popular or obscure, we must be doing new things, and better than before, forward looking and pushing harder, to the maximum of our ability. I'd love to create something popular and acclaimed, a hit, but obviously only a hit I'm pleased with and proud of, like I am of Nightfood for example. Most of hit making is marketing, not connected with the quality of the content, and marketing is a factor of the social which I inherently struggle with.

Chord Code

Completed the complex instrument explosion code for Prometheus, here's a not very informative screenshot!

The top row of purple notes is a flute which actually plays a chord with each stab. The red notes below (3 tracks worth) are those notes, calculated and extracted from the notes above. The note calculation is different for each sound generating engine, there were about 30 which needed attending to, but overall this complex code didn't take as long as I'd expected. This should help hugely with certain types of sheet music transcription.

After that, updated my social media profile images with new ones for the new season of music, then more work mixing and toying with Nightfood II. The mix of the Burnout theme is the most tricky, but it's already far better than the first version.

Smile To Fall Video, Prometheus v3.95 Chord Explosion

A steady day of working on the video for 'Smile to Fall'. The song has a Gothic sort of feeling, and my mind upon hearing it filled with imagery of chessboards and black and white tiles, so I've made the video black and white and little more, not even glows. Black squares and white ones mask the simple film. A chessboard appears for the solo. The video is only of my simplest, yet it matches the initial plan. The highlight is perhaps the sheer smoothness of the movements due to Argus.

The subtitles presented a bit of a problem in that they change very quickly, so I needed to insert a rapid change. I've also updated the Spotify canvases for these songs. Then I updated the artwork for the Flatspace and Flatspace II soundtracks on Steam; the art there was out of date, a lower resolution than Steam uses today. It was also (worse!) not filed correctly with the album. I created the art for the up-and-coming Radioactive Soundtrack too.

Then, started work on a new feature for Prometheus to help with sheet music transcription. Sometimes an instrument plays a chord, it has several engines which each play a different note. This can make composing more efficient; one track for a chord instead of three, and it allows an effect (like distortion) to be applied to all three notes after they combine. This, alas, makes transcription of the music a huge headache though, if an instrument has three saw waves set to pitches of 0, 3, 7, then the note of C4 in the sequencer would play C, E, G, so I have to work that out by hand, note-by-note; and this is a simple case. Some chords use monotone samples, where the note is set not by the note in the sequence, but by the unity note in the sample list (which can vary hugely)... and some chords have 4, 5, or 6 parts! This process took about an hour just to notate the organ chords for 'The Eternal Dogma' in Burn Of God, so I want to program a feature to help with future transcription.

The new feature will seek every note in a track and 'explode' each element of the instrument across several new tracks, so the C, E, G notes as sounded will now appear in three tracks, exactly as they should. This will require specific coding for each engine, as each has different tuning settings, and there are differences between samples, analogue waves, and monotone samples; but this will help hugely for the tracks which use this form of chord.

Women And Wives Video, Cliff Richard, Marie Louisa Wain

A long sleep, close to 12 hours and many vivid dreams. I was watching a film, a dark and grainy black and white film in a square spiral-stair tower of concrete, something like an M. C. Escher print with a spattering of Ingmar Bergman. A group were ascending but it got darker and scarier, until it became near pitch black. They seemed to sense that they were ascending to hell, a place behind a distant door at the 'top'. They retreated and things grew lighter, but oddly, descent started to make things darker again after a certain point.

In another part of the dream I was shown a painting by ancient Blue Peter presenter Peter Purves, telling a friend that I knew he was a painter, and rather good, that I met him at an art group hosted by John Craven which I'd attended once or twice.

I awoke feeling slow and still somewhat tired. My throat is a little sore and dry, the October disease, this rawness which hits my throat and ears, upper chest when the days turn cold. I'd be tempted to think it was due to the dryness of central heating if we had any heating here, but it seems to be endemic.

I started work on the 'Women and Wives' video. My plan was to create animated masks to reveal the filmed components, then add a top layer of additive glow effects. This went to plan, a square pulses with the drum beat, this done by saving out a list of all of the frame numbers with a drum hit (exporting this list is a feature of Prometheus) then importing this as a list of Set Modulator events in Argus, each triggering the attachment of a modulator to the square's size. The same shape was duplicated in the glow track with a glowing object. The square slides side to side in a sine-curve, once every 300 frames. This is almost all of the video. The rest was done in AviSynth, first adjusting the lighting of the masked (revealed) parts, then inverting the mask and showing a dark grey outline of the video. For some reason, this plan was instant in my head before filming even began and it looked largely as planned.

So, this is complete. I have 'Smile to Fall' to do tomorrow.

I've been watching a Cliff Richard concert on television. He hasn't been 'cool' since the early 1960s, yet he's the epitome of a star and a brilliant singer. What is 'cool'? He is perhaps too nice, too passive, too smiley and subordinate for cruel society. Cruel society looks down on nice people; perhaps the element of 'nice' is designed to be looked down on, we smile and surrender, but what is polite or kind is oddly usurped, others leap upon the kind as 'weak' - an easy step up the ladder of hierarchy. We can tread on kind people for free, so despite their niceness, kindness, they are not seen as ideal citizens; unworthy because they paint themselves as such. When we are treated badly we want kindness, but when we are not, we want a degree of cruelty... a challenge which we can rise up to. So, perhaps Cliff is too nice to be cool again, and was cool only when rebellious. It was all down hill after ground-breaking rock song 'Move It'. Yet, star to the core he is. He can't escape his personality, nor can any of us. I loved his humour when he was jokingly mocked by Kenny Everett. Like any true artist, I hope he can and will keep going forever.

Last night I started to write a short song about Marie Louisa Wain, the sister of Louis who died in an asylum. I wonder if I can finish such a thing. If I manage it, it may be the only thing poor Marie has ever been given.

Women And Wives Videos and More Nightfood

Sigh, a couple of long days of hard work, to match the lifetime of similar long and hard days in isolation, poverty, and obscurity. Yesterday Deb came to film me for 'Women and Wives' and 'Smile to Fall', the single is out on Friday so I'd like a video. In these days of AI, which I largely hate and distrust, I think it's more important than ever to be 'real', to reject anything too digital or fake looking, so I thought that a plain filmed video of myself should be the core of both films. Deborah is a natural camera operator and photographer, she has a good eye.

I'll use Argus to mask and add top layers this week. Nightfood II is broadly mixed and complete. It's not vastly different, but the vocals are. My main job this week is to complete the Women And Wives videos.

Today was spent painstakingly rasterising the lyrics for this and the Nightfood tracks, creating them as images then making them appear in the correct places in the video using Argus. To add some interest and creativity, I've made the 'Nightfood' words yellow and shaky, anxious, matching the look of the words in the (unused) CD artwork, and the words of the 'Neon Sonata' (which I named the second half of the album) as glowing neon letters full of bounce and joy.

A new head of BBC news appointed today. Her salary is more than 200 times my income; not twice, not twenty times, but more than 200 times. How pointless I feel my life is. On my break at 3pm I saved the life of a honey bee which had fallen into the plate of water we leave out for the animals. So, to that bee, I at least made a difference.

I've started to watch the Louis Wain film again, this time with Deborah. It made me triply blessed to know and love her, and doubly blessed to have known and loved Cat. Louis Wain, Freddie Mercury, Myself, Deborah; we are cat people, we four, we happy four, we band of brothers, and sisters...

Nightfood II Vocals

Recorded all of the new vocals for the new Nightfood, so different from the first version. Rest of the day spend incorporating and mixing. The vast majority of the need for any re-takes are due to not exactly knowing the correct notes or correct words.

Nightfood II Begins

A full day working on the Nightfood remaster. First, making dubs for all new vocals. Most of the vocal tracks were mixed fine (so it seems, hard to know exactly until the final vocals are in).

Most of the day was spent remixing 'Young Attractive And Physically Fit' and the Burnout Theme, both of which were far darker and muddier than I'd mix today.

Burnout was tricky at the time. The key to mixing is often high pass, high pass, high pass! In a flat mix of infinite tracks we would have pink noise which is far too bass heavy, we want white noise, so just about everything is bass-cut (or high-boosted) to some degree. Burnout is tricky because it has a filter-sweeping constant sound, such sounds need containing, some strings, which are often constant, sometimes solo, and a piano. Pianos always need bass cutting. They tend to be sparkly in all dance tunes, but even in rock (like in most Queen songs), they're kept sparkly or tinny, above the guitars. Here I've used my Engram Firegate, a sort of 'fast duck' which monitors the piano sound and attenuates the strings and filter-sweep in proportion to the piano (and its echoes, which we also want). With only a 20% fade it makes a huge difference to the clarity of the mix without any evidence of the quieter other parts.

Young Attractive uses a similar trick on the vocoded vocal, such vocals are hard to hear at the best of times. I don't like using this effect much, the ideal is a mix which naturally makes way for every part, but it can work wonders, and the effect is ubiquitous in recorded music. It's not something I used back in ye-olde days of 2021 when I first made Nightfood. I had programmed the ancestor effect (Waterfade) by that time, then Watergate on 3 Oct 2022, which used a better formula, then the modern Firegate on 6 Oct 2024 which used normal millisec time slopes that are frequency independent. The 'water' versions used exponential multiplying gates which worked well enough but only in limited value ranges and were not quite as elegant as Firegate.

Dubs are ready, I'll need to wait until I have the time and space to sing the new parts. Can't wait!

Hello Autumn

Happy Autumn! A power day, like many October 1sts! My quarterly backups started the day, then de-clamping and varnishing the frames in progress, cutting glass and the spacer. My Toyo glass cutter has started to wain so I've ordered a new head for it. Plus, a trip out for supplies, and the announcements and promotion of the Steam Autumn Sale - all of my Steam software is taking part.

A good day overall. For me, this marks the official start of 'winter' and the start of music, writing and non-painting arts, the end of the 'summer' dominated by painting. The music jobs are already large. I need to make a video for Women And Wives, remaster and partly re-record (and notate) Nightfood and Remembrance Service, possibly create a Radioactive Soundtrack and a new Fall in Green single.

On we charge!