A busy weekend. Working on the final parts to The Myth of Sisyphus yesterday. We Shall See is a challenge of a song to sing, the same sort of vocal (and hopefully expressive!) range as Nevermore by Queen/Freddie Mercury. This, ideally, requires upper voice strength and can easily take months (or years) of practice... but I like the idea of a challenge.
I recorded the guitar solo to Style Guru Fashion Queen yesterday too. I knew the chord changes and the key to a solo is to base it more on the feeling than anything exact: feeling thrives on timing and pitch irregularities, not perfection, it is the interplay between the harmonious and discordant. The first time I've played guitar in weeks, it felt as fun as ever.
I also added a few new features to Prometheus, shortcuts and icons to do things in a click. I want to avoid adding too many features, yet just seem to add and add.
I started to relisten to the other tracks and refine the album. I noticed a tiny 'click' at the start of some vocals, the tiniest hiccup, and had encountered this before, so I decided to investigate today. Annoyingly it seemed to happen sometimes and not at other times. I switched different effects on and off and found that the reverbs and, even more-so, the filters seemed to cause it, or be active when the click happened:
So I had a peek at the 15-year old filter code, and noticed for the first time that some variables were being assigned without being initialised:
floatutility[0] (etc.) might be fine after first loop but on the very first iteration it could be anything, and its datum feeds into the signal path. Basically, I should have set it to zero before starting and I hadn't. Most of the time it seems that this is fine, but it seems that sometimes, it isn't. So many effects have filters! I have Low Pass, High Pass, Band Pass, Band Exclude, Peaking, Low Shelf, High Shelf as basic ones, plus a Moog VCF (a different tone of low pass filter), an EQ (which combines Peaking, Low Shelf, High Shelf) as well as many other effects that use them, from my beloved Band Distortion to every reverb.
So today I had to go through each one and initialise the correct variables to zero, not all, this might slow things down a bit, but the ones that are needed, so that has taken all day, a full, tiring and eye-strainy day of bleakness and coldness. Early tests suggest that this has stopped the blips, but even if not this needed doing. Here's the wave after my changes...
Back to music. I need to record the Style Guru vocals at some point, and We Shall See. I'm also keen to work on some visual art, though my headaches and eyestrain are almost constant to some degree.
I wondered about painting something Grayson Perry's Art Club, a TV programme with themes and deadlines (a format I love!). The next theme is Food and I thought about the emotions of food. Of course, we all have many feelings associated with food, but I wondered about the feelings and characters of foods: Liquid Camembert is a fat depressed woman, green apples jovial rotund fellows, gherkins perky, quinoa is a beautiful dark-haired woman in a bath, Cheshire cheese a small boy wandering lost outside, etc. I wondered about encouraging a tomato to paint a self-portrait... surely a world first for art.
Onwards we push.
