Some final production work on Nightfood today. I recorded the vocals and added these.
I discovered and fixed two bugs in Prometheus too. First, the darn milliseconds calculation which hasn't been right for years but I'd not noticed until today. I know what exact sample the song is at, eg. 44100 means the song is exactly one second in. So the seconds are sample/44100 - easy; rounded down, so if you have 66150, that's 1.0 rather than 1.5. Now, 66150 should be 500ms... 1.500 seconds. My faulty formula was millisecs=s/44.1. Admittedly 44.1 is 44100/1000 so seems like it might work, but that answer is 1500, so my faulty calculation said sample 66510 = 1.150 secs. The correct formula should be sample/44.1-seconds*1000 so millisecs would correctly be 500 here. Another bug concerned song parameters changing while and not being reset to the start positions if/when the song stops.
Musically I've done a lot of small tweaks. The piano solo is now pre-rendered for speed and memory reasons. It's a complex part, it has a drifty and gentle feeling and I made the music oh-so gently slide to the left as though we are drifting on a river of summer (there are river sounds too). The music also fades away, but then suddenly the trills appear, something is wrong and we are snapped back to alarming reality, to the music here must shift right back to the centre and full volume. In fact, here is the exact movement of the piano melody, over the course of 106 seconds:
Some birds follow it, and these are instantly shut-off when the piano bass slams down, hence the need for that exact timing.
The vocals are all quite high in register. The 'pit' verse and the last one have 6 layers: two high pitch, two sung an octave lower, and two in a more chanted, spoken voice.
Now, for the 18th century 'party' at the start I needed some spoken parts, so I searched for some public domain films, partly because I like the timbre of old films. Essentially, my only criteria was a public domain film; anything else about the film wasn't important, so I found one called The Wasp Woman. I extracted a few segments of speech and only then realised that the theme of wasps ties in with the first track on the album, The Dream of Wasps. A stroke of serendipity! So I found another section from the film for the 'hell' part of the song, a dialogue about wasps and immortality. For a final hurrah at the end I added some real bees (a recording I made myself).
So now the first four songs form a quartet. My plan was a three part 'sonata', a middle song, then another three, but instead I have a definite four and three.
Now, the final tweaks, changes, balancing, listens. Then assigning the ISRC codes, mastering, artwork, paperwork etc. then release, then the next album, and so on for all time. Amen.
I really need some promotion work on these. The Myth of Sisyphus is to be released in three days to only my own fanfare. Still, the quality of the work, and continual production and improvement, is the important thing.
