I wanted to rest my voice today so avoided singing and had rather a quiet day. I watched Point Break, perhaps Keanu Reeves' best film, though he remains awful in it (perhaps Bill and Ted suited him better). The rest of the cast inc. Patrick Swayze, Lori Petty were excellent.
Then, a nice and cold walk in the park with Deb. How long will it be before we can meet indoors? The W.H.O. recommended today that countries vaccinate the 'vulnerable' and ignore the under 50s which is somewhat alarming. A bad time to be nearly 50. I don't relish the idea of staying isolated indoors for two more years. The many years of breathing in secondary cigarette smoke from my chain-smoking parents have given me poor lungs. If, when I'm vaccinated it will be my first contact with any medical personnel in 10 years.
I had an idea to improve my Zeitraum effects. These allow the pitch and speed of a sample to be changed independently and the operate like the old 'hard-sync' oscillator synchronisation effect. A sample will 'reset' every so often so the pointer marches along the sample in small windows rather than smoothly, this is how the effect works. Until today I used two overlapping pointers, one attenuated with half a sine wave (a 'dome') and the second with a full sine wave, a 'peak'. This was efficient but I wondered if lots of overlapping waves would give better results, so today I modified the effect to overlap 4 'peak' waves, each offset by 25% of phase so they should sound relatively smooth. When playing at normal pitch everything is smooth anyway, but playing an octave or more away will result in strange effects. Most pitch or time shifters really sound bad beyond an octave (or double or half speed). Zeitraum excels at these ranges.
I experimented with 10 overlapping waves but this didn't sound any different from four.
I use three Zeitraum effects; one tuned (actually, this changes the speed by the note, not the pitch, depending on the note being played. This sounds counter-intuitive but it allows the hard-sync effect on instruments), one untuned, and one untuned stereo. Each has normal and anti-aliased wave players. The stereo anti-aliased version then needs 16 wave players alone (4 waves left, 4 waves right, and both again anti-aliased). Each of these similar and big chunks of code uses a large array of variables so the possibility of typos and mistakes is huge. Well, it's taken all day to code these. The results do sound better, for what it's worth. I've only ever used the effect once, in the forthcoming Nick Drake song to add some weird 'clowny' echoes to the main vocals.
Now it's past 9pm and the day is gone.
I was notified today that Apocalypse of Clowns is now scheduled, so this will be released on March 21st.
