A full day of music today, recorded the vocals for Away From Her Manger, new vocals for Won't Be A Silent Night and the finale of Conan, plus two guitar solos.
The final chorus of Won't Be A Silent Night is now, thanks to my 2021 voice, a whole octave higher than the rest of the song, and although the vocals tend to sound better and more epic up there, the rest of the production and mix was designed for the moderate lower F's so most of the song is the same as the old/classic version. I did try the chorus layered in octaves but I don't really like vocal layering and try to keep it to a minimum. Once I became aware of it in songs like Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, it started so sound strange. Almost every song by The Carpenters has some sort of layering, and, conversely, Kate Bush is perhaps distinctive as a producer by hardly ever having any.
I discovered a bug in Prometheus, at last a crash I could reproduce. The live playback of an instrument when pressing keys in the sequencer uses the buffers of track zero, which isn't used in song playback (track zero, the 'song track', is used only for global effects, global volume, tempo etc.) Now, deleting an instrument should reset the buffers everywhere so that every track keeps a tally of the biggest buffer needed for the effect used by an instrument. It seems that, after deleting an instrument that's been played, the buffer on this zero track isn't valid... now, it doesn't have an instrument, true, so it shouldn't ever be used anyway, but it should still contain valid pointers to the new buffers for the new next-biggest effect. I'm not sure why it doesn't, but either way, trying to use these buffers causes a crash. Playing any new instrument will reset things, apparently, and so fix the problem. I'm still not sure why there IS a problem, but it's fairly easy to switch off the live playback until a new key is pressed, so I've just done that when you delete an instrument.
This also pointed me to the cause of another, long standing and rare crash when engines were shifted left or right. This is more obvious as the live buffer pointers aren't updated, only those used by the engines themselves.
A good day all in all, but I'll probably spend a few days updating the software rather than making music itself.
