A slow day but I'm gradually turning the ship of creation towards The Infinite Forest. I've started by converting all 12 exsiting tracks to new (better) instruments, then going note by note to tailor the mood.
I'm also adding more variety to the music. It's shameful how boring some of the backing parts are; up down up down all for all of the music. In many way the art of art is can be very simply summed up: Don't be boring. The more exciting and unboring the better. Each instrument's melody can either be independent, or it can dialogue with the other instruments a bit. This is the joy of orchestral music which is largely absent in pop: the bass hardly ever plays the lead melody; the chords and generally fixed and melodies or improvisations are based on those, not reflections of the melodies elsewhere. I imagine a poor soul having to play each instrument. I want him/her to be happy to play it and boast to other players that he/she has a good bit.
Still, I can't stray too far; this is a reworking of something that exists.
I need to keep doing this technical refinement for all of the tracks, but need a unifying idea, a story of images. For inspiration I'm thinking of Jean-Claude Vannier, the artist behind the Histoire de Melody Nelson strings, and his great Child Assassin album, this is very surrealistic and fun. Also, some of those Pola X tracks by Mr Engels.
I'm struggling to focus, and work is too slow for my liking. My Yamaha Reface DX arrived today so I spent an hour or two playing with it. The sounds are really nice, and I'm pleased I bought this Reface rather than any other; the others have no presets at all - I had hoped (ney, expected) to a program that allows me to create or save these; the fantastic THR30II amp (a product so good that its transformation of my musical abilities persuaded me to buy the Reface) has a really good program for editing - yet, NO, there isn't one for the Reface. Yamaha demand that you join a really slow and badly made social-media type website to 'share' your sounds. This won't work on gig night... I would rather save and load a present bank. Yamaha should stick to making instruments, not SoundCloud-clones.
Fortunately the DX is the only Reface that allows you to save some presets, even if a mere 32. It's an odd instrument, almost like a powerful toy because of the lack of these features, yet it has almost every other feature: good connections, battery or mains power, good touch sensitive keyboard, and very powerful programming to make great sounds easily. Will I use it? Who knows. I probably won't sample it for sequencing its sounds (...but I might). It would work well for live playing of solos; iI'm more inclined to record myself doing that now, the guitar has cured and liberated me from careful sequencer-based recording.
It would be most useful, I suspect, as a live instrument to supplement the Microkorg. I've often thought of getting a second Microkorg because it's one sound at a time can be limiting when playing live and its tiny size would make two easy to set up. I can really see the Microkorg playing a backing loop or sound effect (or using the vocoder) with a synth lead or digital piano on the Reface. I also like it because it's a DX (FM) synth, and I don't have one, so in timbral gamut, it is a good addition to my instruments.
I'm buying too much. No more instruments now. I have enough!
