A full day. Started by adding some of yesterday's vocal recordings to Boring Ceefax Lift Music, these sounded good from the start. How I wish I had more freedom and space to sing! Then preparing the vocals for Passive Aggressive - this will be a tricky track. I also did some essential music admin work.
Then, Always in the Morning, this epic track. I realised that my plan of adding live piano is doomed because I want to control the pacing very exactly; the mood arcs and flows, and this would mean finalising this timing and everything first. This is possible, and for some applications like vocals or a lead solo, also essential, but for this song-length backing track it would really complicate things because any future editing is just about impossible. So, I decided to work on sequenced pianos. This has some positive points; like my strings, my pianos sound pretty sophisticated now. Prometheus good enough that it sounds more like instructing a player than sequencing something. Usefully, this permits more complex composition work which can match melodies in other tracks. I feel more Beethovian this way, working on the notation, the composition rather than the sound as such.
Music is about the dialogue between the parts. This music is the most sophisticated I've ever done, and it shows; the bass lines in particular are strong here, and on my recent work like the Nightfood album, partly because of this new Wire Compression algorithm, which unlike a compressor applied to a real bass in a studio, can be applied before the volume envelope, giving great stability across the pitch range.
The piano work today has taken six or more hours of note-by-note editing. This also involved the song timing, the ebb and flow between sections; there are many points of drama here. The vocals will be difficult, the climax in high F. I may need to change the melody or key, but I'd prefer not to. I still forget to consider the vocal range early enough. The high D# in Ceefax really makes it work.
I'm off to London tomorrow for the first day at the Galleria Balmain shop. Quite a nerve-racking trip, my first train trip and major public event since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic 18-months ago. Now about 1% of people have Covid-19, the highest in Europe by far - all thanks to our lazy (primarily) and incompetent (secondly) government. I want this and the second trip on the 26th to be over. Blessed be Deborah for coming with me, what a joy this is, what a joy she is.
On we march!
