Not much done today, awoke late having hardly slept. I began be editing a final draft of my story Erasure. All of the protagonists in my stories are names George. I liked the name initially, it had a feeling of ordinariness, and it adds a unity to the collection to have the hero of each tale names George.
The collection is now largely compiled, but I don't have a name for it... I would also like to ad more; more illustrations, a preface perhaps, or a foreword. Most urgently I need a title. I had thought about simply Strange Tales, but that might compete with the existing magazine (and lots of older ones, and might have some sort of legal precedence). There are lots of similarly generic titles that also tend to hark back to the pulp magazine era. I does sort of match the mood of the stories; slightly sci-if, or more like imaginative, slightly surrealistic tales, stories of magical reality... of course if I wrote more... what would that collection be called? Many compilations name the book after a notable story, so that is one option.
This arrangement didn't take long. Now I have set-lists for the four Fall in Green shows I can work on instrumentation, so I dragged out the SY-85. What fun it is to make instruments, but very time consuming. I can make a list of possible sounds, but most still use piano. My Behringer B207MP3 amp is very crackly in the volume control, almost unusably so, very bad considering it's a new unit. In fact, this is the most crackly and unusable control for any piece of music equipment I've ever bought! I should send it back, but that would be an annoying delay. I could simply set it high and use the channel controls for actual volume.
The sound quality is not bad, and it is loud enough for most small or medium venues, but I'm thinking that the big 800W amps would provide better sound quality, even in a small venue, and we'd have stereo. I would prefer, ideally, each instrument to have it's own amp, like the instruments in an orchestra. The different timbres of each amplifier (and spatial location) would make the performance more stochastic and interesting. Feeding all of the instruments, mics and all, through one mixer and sound system kills an element of interest and variety.
I need to list and start on the videos next, and work simultaneously on the book title and cover. The second proof for The Burning Circus has arrived and looks good. I've also finished production work on Clown Face, which (unusually) took make vocal takes, but was really worth it. This is a masterful poem/tune/track. I'm reminded how unique the work we are doing is. There's really nothing like this out there.
