A busy music day. I recorded a new guitar part for Take This Rose, I can play far better now than when I first recorded that song, but also I have my fancy new amp which makes recording so much easier, and meatier in tone, so a new solo for that and some new power chords at the end (which, in version one were simulated).
Prometheus crashed when testing the solo - bah, a disappointing setback, so I checked through some of my plug-in code, almost an automatic response. I found a few anomalies (not bugs, but inefficiencies). For some reason my Chorus and Flange effect had a buffer twice as big as it needed to be, and the 1 second Pause effect had a 4 second buffer (very wasteful of precious memory). The Chorus and Flange also had a few other opportunities for optimisation so I made use of those. Both effects as standard apply the inverse of the left signal to the right (the inverse of the delay) but the code to calculate this was over complex; all I really needed to do was max+1-leftdelay... but some some reason I used an over-complex calculation that converted samples to seconds then back to samples. So, all in all, I recompiled four effects, but these were really about efficiency rather than anything problematical.
Then I noticed that Take This Rose uses a Randy Saw Wave (that is, a saw wave spiced with randomness) and it used an older version, which I didn't think I'd ever used... that was probably the problem. The old version had 5 parameters, the new and current one 6, so most of the parameters were in the wrong slots and wrong units. I fixed it and things seem stable now.
Then vocal work on We Shall See. It's a gentle and high pitched song which I love, and it is deliciously difficult, and thus enjoyable, to sing. I rehearsed it about 4 or 5 times, each time a tiny bit better but several sections in falsetto. This sounds nice enough, but obviously weak, and thin in tone... I will keep working at this song, it's like a knot of chromium bars to exercise over.
I also refined the cover art and added more to the Nick Drake drawing. Most of the art is complete. Overall this feels like my first real vocal album, at least since Cycles & Shadows. The Modern Game, Burn of God, The Dusty Mirror were developed to learn and grow in different technical areas. I didn't appreciate the life-long mountain to climb that is singing; piano and guitar are so easy to achieve a moderate standard by comparison. Those albums were tutorials in the complex medium of vocal work and song production, but The Myth of Sisyphus is more like a finished work.
But it's not finished quite yet. We Shall See remains. Then there is the E.P. which will consist of two sets of three songs (these trilogies or sonatas). Part one will end with Take This Rose and have a dark and gothic feeling, something like Nick Cave or Bauhaus. The second half will be Plastic Superman (the new Electroharmony Remix), Style Guru Fashion Queen, and the old Burnout theme, so brightly-coloured plastic electro pop. I need a title for the E.P. and my idea so far is 'In Plastic Darkly'.
