A long and tiring day, yet the time has flown. I wanted to work on the guitars for God Infinity, and it's taken a lot of time. My fingers now hurt too much to play. Sometimes the timing varies ever-so-slightly in the song, making it difficult to accurately play and time things, especially for otherwise identical parts.
The original mix had simple digital guitars with their own timbre and sound range, the new ones need new balancing, and more guitar layers. I'm learning more about guitar production. Queen are a good band to study, as much of their early material involved almost exclusively guitars and vocals, so needed inventiveness in layering. Breaking down the layers in Def Leppard from the Hysteria era is more difficult, so very complex and multi-tracked. It's fun to pick out the parts, a game I've enjoyed playing with music for all of my life. As with sung voices, the more you layer the more it tends to mute expression because expression is, in some ways, variation in pitch and timing beyond that which is 'perfect'.
I have a main guitar layer for the melody which tracks most of the song, plus some stroked distorted chords which stab away in time to certain parts. I experimented with improvising over this and added some high-pitched single musical parts at certain points.
Then, the bass. This, back in the days of merely 2018, used to be a single instrument, but now I work at this too, so spent an hour or two running with it.
Three more sound effect sets have been released too.
Beethoven, in my beloved book, has died again. On March 24th 2029 at 17:45 I will be his exact age when he died. The 200 year anniversary of this is March 26th 2027, I feel this needs commemorating. I noted that my artistic friends, Bergman, Dali, Beethoven, all had very different relationships with women, but, generally, appeared to be somewhat isolated misanthropes. If one is social, friendly, comfortable, there is no time for an artist to make art, that is, new creations from the soul rather than the 'craft' work of fulfilling commissions and orders. All of these people, and myself, work all day every day. I have never taken a holiday and never intend to. I fear and dislike the idea of comfort or contentment; what a pointless and animal goal. My job, my passion, duty to humanity, is to make art. I can't do anything else. Death is the only alternative.
I read through the job and art opportunities in the Chainlinks art newsletter and wondered if I would ever feel that I could appropriately apply for any. Am I a 'professional' artist? Art is my life and takes everything, is this a profession? I am perhaps a hobbyist who happens to do his hobby full time to the exclusion of all else, as I have for 40 years and my first intense focus on game programming. Perhaps this itself is a definition of an artist.
