Wars, Remembrance, MODX

A couple of steady days. The news, everyone's thoughts filled with the war in Ukraine. Upsetting to see the scenes of the elderly trying to buy basic foods in supermarkets overrun with the desperate. Perhaps now, after Covid, we have a better idea of what such crises mean. Instant media can now shell-shock the world, not just the soldiers.

Here, I've been working on music programming and learning more about the MODX. I've bought a new foot controller and yesterday jigsawed my piano stand/desk to make the hole underneath larger for this. It has already transformed the live expression available, and I played a nice string piece with a gentle and sad mood. I was reminded of a poster "Remembrance Service For Those Who Died Homeless", which was, touchingly, postponed due to Covid, and thought at the time that this would make for a good project, so I'll do some work on that with this string piece as a theme.

I aspire to work on the Salomé project too. I need some words for that first. There seem to be too few hours in the day.

Crusher Effect, MODX Controllers, New Ideas

A slower day yesterday. I programmed a new audio effect I've named a Crusher, whish was supposed to be a sort of resolution destroyer, quantising the amplitude into sinusoidal bands, but I erred in the formula and made something that sounds rather amazing. It's technically a 'wave shaper', but that can mean anything. With certain settings it produces the same results as a 'wave folder'. Generally it distorts many samples. At extreme settings it turns a sine wave into white noise, and can turn a saw wave into a sine wave and a million things between.

In MODX programming I've been studying the controllers, the knobs, which are confusingly assigned to Parts, then those assignments are assigned to Performances, even though we only ever play Performances. More over-engineering and inefficiency. There is nothing this system can do that one, Performance-based, rank of controllers would, except things which aren't possible to use in practice (we could assign all 8 knobs to different aspects of a Part, but have none of those do anything on a Performance level). My critique of the frustratingly inefficient design apart, this synthesizer sounds amazing, a paragon of electronic instruments that exceeds anything from the past century I've yet heard.

Today I'm programming a new effect called Proteus which can, simply, play a sample forwards or backwards at any speed while setting any start/end loop points. Any of those parameters can be modulated to create some wild effects. The problem is, the anti-aliased backwards play is proving difficult to code correctly, the calculation of fractional samples and reverse loops. All pointers are fractional, which creates some programming challenges. In an array of, say, 100 samples the data is accessed as a number [0] to [99], but with a fractional pointer, a pointer of 99.9 is valid, so must be allowed for, and, in fact, calculated exactly or the music will simply not play correctly.

I've also fitted the steel brackets for B's garden fence.

In art, I'm mulling ideas. I have two ideas for concept albums/sonatas sketched out. One a revisitation of the Dark Hyperborea project, and the other a tale of lost love which needs some found love to warm it.

IndieSFX Music, MODX 7 Programming

An awful night of stomach twitches and pains, awoke late and battled eyestrain to list all 75 IndieSFX Music tracks, ready for gradual release over the coming days. I'm almost certain not to sell a single one (I say sell, I have made them free with an optional $5 donation), even if the music by Oldfield 1 is interesting from a historical perspective, but it's worth a few days work to, at least, put them out there.

I've been experimenting with Yamaha MODX programming. It's overly complex, but I have worked most of it out. The basic layering of Performances, Voices (ahem, sorry Parts), and Effects is quite a simple first step. Today I worked on the controls and the 'super knob'. This was baffling at first.

I realised, fighting the confusing and barely written manual, that this isn't a modulator/knob/slider like the others but simply controls the other existing modulators; it's a cross-fade between any number of those other controllers. So to set it up you need to set up the way the other controllers work first.

I also struggled with this:

Where it says "Assigned". Sometimes those are blank. Sometimes they have text. Oddly, it bares no relation to whether those 8 dials actually do anything. It turns out that this is the typed-in label, and those are confusingly filled in for the initialiser (ie. empty) voice, but empty for other presets.

I suspect that almost nobody knows how to program this because I've found a few bugs already. First is that the voices that are off can be edited, okay, maybe not a bug, they have to be something, but it's odd that a voice that isn't there can be edited. It's equally disturbing to delete your current Performance and still be able to play it, sometimes in a corrupted way.

The main bug is with these controllers. It seems possible to have a controller work for a Part, but not work during a Performance. I'm pretty sure this is a bug because setting a change to affect a Part (eg. its volume) appears in the Performance and Part pages but, the control doesn't work unless you choose the Part. This can be fixed by editing those things only in the Common view, then it works, but editing an effect in the Part view seems to only permit toying with those knobs when that Part is selected. I suspect this is a legacy from when Parts were actually Voices, things which could be played alone. Now they can't, we can only play them all as a Performance, so the control settings should really always be duplicated in the global settings.

My synth is serial number 1009, so perhaps they've not sold many, but there might be a few people who need to know how to program this (I'm not even sure if Yamaha believe this as they included 2200 presets and only room for 200 user programs, which is relatively rubbish, though, to be fair, 200 is probably enough).

The trick with programming these controllers is knowing what you want to control. Designing the sound first, then just using the Common Control (ie. Performance) settings to set a controller/knob/slider with a parameter of your choice. These can be linked to (and edited in) Parts but that's the part that is buggy so needs to be done in this common area.

Once those are set up, the super knob can be configured to dance between any two on this screen:

What's left for me to learn is the motion sequencer. I don't particularly want to. It can make interesting sounds, but rarely ones that are musically useful. Anything which uses automated sequencing, whether arpeggiators or other sequencers, make things sound as dead as a drum machine. For me, the arpeggiator is only really useful to play itself when your hands are needed to play other things, perhaps to make a pretty drone-like sound, and that's not really necessary here as that can be programmed into a voice. Still, this complex bit should be learned if the instrument is to be mastered.

In the news Russia has invaded Ukraine. I thought I'd mention this to mark the date in a Samuel Pepys/John Evelyn way, but this was no surprise to me or most of the western world other than the Grima Wormtongue of Nigel Farage.

IndieSFX Music, Fence Brackets, Farewell SY-85

Well, a super powered day today. I thought about listing the IndieSFX music to a new itch page, but the workload seemed daunting. I started by renaming the 78 or so files for upload, but even then I lacked images for them, and mp3 previews. Then I realised that I'd made some mp3 previews years ago for the pre-2020 website, and found these in my ancient backups, so it looked like I nearly had a full library of music at my virtual fingertips.

I made up some graphics, like this...

...for the 10 different genres, and started to format everything, then created a basic itch page.

Then, a trip to B's to switch roles into a fence repairer. Her fence had shattered in the wind because it was held to a metal gate by plastic tags. The original metal gate had some angle brackets, a [ shape, but one had broken and the remaining one was too weak to hold a whole fence in a storm. I measured up and sawed three new custom sized brackets from sheet steel, added some rounded corners, filed and sanded everything. All of that took a busy but satisfying 60 minutes.

Then back to music, and a test upload, 1 of 78. Then creating new graphics for the main IndieSFX site and creating links to the new music page, then finally creating 78 images for each song.

This evening, my beloved and much used Yamaha SY-85 synthesizer was handed over to a new buyer, a lovely chap and musician named Steve who will be using it for gigging. A perfect new owner. My new one will do the same job and more, but I feel sad for the old one.

Here I am playing it at the Congleton Spiral Staircase performance:

And an overhead shot, perhaps taken by Anastasia, which gives a better idea of what the lighting was like:

Song Tidying Admin

A long and tiring day of admin and tidying, how often this takes up my time. My 1000+ song sequences have various plugins, and over time these can be replaced or upgraded, usually with more features added, but this invalidates old sequences, so I've developed a tool in Prometheus to auto-swap old for new, and copy over the parameters, so that even songs from 2004 or so can be loaded and will still play correctly.

At the start of the year, about 14 plugins were obsolete. I've tended to update them one file at a time only when I needed to re-load an old song for whatever reason, but this started to bother me. I'd rather that all of the song files were up to date, so I've spent today finishing a mass conversion process, which involved making a big list of all of the files (hundreds) with older plugins, and typing up lots of command scripts to move/copy, then load, save, convert each one.

One or two plugins need slight changes to work with their modern versions; the Random Pitch II plugin for example now has an upper and lower bound for randomness (you might want one wave to pitch up a bit, a second one to pitch down) but the old version just had one setting, so those had to be set manually. With 1000 songs, loading and checking even 10 or 20 is very time consuming and headache making. I'm getting persistent headaches due to eyestrain and need glasses. I also need a dentist but can't find one of those either.

Well, it's now done. I'm still progressing with MODX programming and designing some test sounds for playing Fall in Green songs, as an exercise as much as anything else.

I want to create something artistic, but may do more admin, this time listing some IndieSFX Music online for sale/donation, as this is presently doing nothing and not available anywhere. This may take a week or more, there are 70-80 tracks, but the way these music sales are, a year or two's worth of sales might not pay for one or two days of work, but perhaps it's better to have some available than not. Again, my sense of neatness and completeness wants them all neat and in good order.

Keyboard Stand, MODX Thoughts and Synthesizer Design Concepts

Spent yesterday buying the wood and making a stand for my new MODX7 synth, and getting to grips with learning it. It sounds amazing, has many plug points but the over-engineering of it and sheer inefficiency of the user interface is really annoying me. How I would love to design a new synthesizer. It seems that Yamaha have always had a problem with poor user interface design and unnecessary complexity to how things are displayed and work. Just because something is capable of a million things, it doesn't help to have all million things visible at once.

Firstly, some pictures of my the furniture I made yesterday:

The MODX (and I guess their current flagship Montage) divides sounds into Performances, Parts (which used to be called Voices on my SY-85) and Elements, which are bits of parts. This works quite well, the Elements can be layered, but are often mutually exclusive, they might stretch for a certain key range or velocity, so that gentle piano samples play when playing gentle, with different timbres of sound when playing loudly.

This system is an evolution from my 25 year-old keyboard. I stress this because having these three tiers to make one sounds isn't something that makes sense if designing from the start because it's over complicated. By comparison, Prometheus uses a box that makes or changes a sound and these form a simply chain of ones design. It's very powerful and instantly visible what's going on.

Each Part is a voice in itself, but these are commonly layered again to provide more power - it's not clear why they haven't merged Elements and Parts. Parts can have separate audio effects applied, and there are 8 Elements and 16 Parts, so, if E is an element, P a part and X and audio effect, a performance works like this:

(EEEEEEEE)=P+X+(EEEEEEEE)=P+X+(EEEEEEEE)=P+X+(EEEEEEEE)=P+X+(EEEEEEEE)=P+X+(EEEEEEEE)=P+X+(EEEEEEEE)=P+X+(EEEEEEEE)=P+X+(EEEEEEEE)=P+X+(EEEEEEEE)=P+X+(EEEEEEEE)=P+X+(EEEEEEEE)=P+X+(EEEEEEEE)=P+X+(EEEEEEEE)=P+X+(EEEEEEEE)=P+X+(EEEEEEEE)=P+X+X = Final Performance Sound

All of the Es and Ps are optional, so the above example shows the maximum. Note though that every Element has a separate Amplitude Envelope (and amplitude response), and a separate Filter Envelope/response, so you can imagine the sheer amount of typing to make just one sound...

Those Part effects are useful sometimes, mainly when warping or shaping a sound. Things like reverb tend to only be useful at the end, but it wouldn't be a disaster to have just one per Performance. Sometimes simple is better. The FM effects, for all of the 'operators', sound the same as on my Reface DX while being a lot more time consuming to program. I'd prefer 4 operators.

There is 128 note polyphony, but that's only 128 Elements. If all of my example sound was played (and was layered) that's just two notes. Often though, Elements are mutually exclusive, and sounds don't have many Parts, very rarely over 8.

The whole thing feels like it evolved like a bizarre animal rather than having an intelligent force designing it. It has a pitch bend wheel, a wheel which rolls vertically with resistance and automatically centres. A modulation wheel, which is floppy and can rest in any orientation. These have been around for 50 years and haven't changed. There is a 'super knob' which can rotate forever rather than reaching an end (physically that is, it does reach a data-end, the advantage here is that sounds can start at a particular setting). There is a bank of four other knobs which can also be used to modulate things, and four vertical sliders which are also optional modulators. Are so many different options for real-time modulation useful? How many arms does a Yamaha keyboard designer have?

Each controller has some pros and cons. I would like a some joysticks for horizontal and vertical motion in one go, some auto-centering for pitch bends would be useful. An ever-rolling trackball can replace the super knob and have an extra dimension. No matter what, for each sound only two modulators are likely to be used because we only have two hands.

Secondly, most synths have evolved to have the wheels on the far left. Piano players are two handed so I think all synths should be symmetrical, and have duplicate controllers on the right.

My first test bed for a synth design would have two joysticks on the left; one with auto-centering, one floppy, and a trackball, and these duplicated on the right, so six controllers, plus a third ribbon controller over the keys, like a Trautonium wire. I can imagine a motion sensor, perhaps camera based or using Nintendo Wii technology, so that hand movements in the air would change things, but this might be too haphazard compared to a joystick. Of course, the keys themselves are the ultimate controls and need to feel right and have many untried options for more expression.

How I wish I could design a synthesizer!

I'm spending this week learning more about the MODX, but I could spend a lifetime. I must try to, remember to, be constructive in other areas.

Keyboard Tier, Synth

Spent most of yesterday making these brackets which were designed to slot into exactly-fitting slots behind my piano stand, which is a block of wood I made a few year ago (I'm so pleased I did that, it's a much better idea to have a fixed, solid thing for the piano). The brackets need to bend backwards, I I made a few hacksaw cuts:

And reinforced the joint with MDF, 12mm and 6mm bits glued to make an 18mm deep part:

Here it is slotted in. The pair had to match:

This worked to some extent, the distance etc. and they could hold the weight easily but they are too springy when the synth is played. Any spring at all isn't really useful, so I'll scrap them today and make new ones from wood. It was useful to make these, I could adjust the height to get it just right. An expensive exercise in time and materials (these shelving bits aren't cheap) but still worth it. The best way to make a good thing is make many things, each of which gets better.

I also printed as 250-page A4 stack of data on the MODX7. I will spend a few weeks leaning everything about it. It can do just about everything, is somewhat over-engineered for my taste (as such it has no distinctive sound and nobody could possibly use it to its potential, it's too massive). Most modern synths, especially Yamaha ones, seem to demand a programmer specialising in audio processing, as well as a musician. I'm fortunate to be both.

Birthday, Burn of God CDs, New Synth, Secret Electric Sorcery Release, and Harmonic Resynthesis

Yesterday was Deb's birthday, a lovely relaxing day, my first day off this year. A nice home-cooked meal of prawns, ginger, spring onions, shiitake mushrooms. I now avoid take-away food and prefer home-cooked. The food is healthier, cheaper, and nicer in every way. The same is true of almost all restaurant food, though Deb, as a former head chef, and myself as a rare cook, but one who takes time over food and treats the art of cooking as any other I practice, are perhaps better at this skill than many professionals. I value healthiness of food over any other attribute.

I suggested we watch a Nobuhiko Obayashi film, an idea thwarted by the fact that none of his films are available to stream apart from Hausu. I felt so sleepy, perhaps, this first taste of rest, that rare tonic.

I dreamt of a trip to the seaside. I emerged into sun from a railway station and asked some kids the way to the beach, the way south. They pointed down a road. I found myself on a coach going that way, sneaking aboard for free. People piled on and passengers were accreted. At some point someone started shooting. I think the passengers were gangsters or all assassins of different sorts. One person had a machinegun of sorts, perhaps like an umbrella. There was no blood, but much noise and chaos, fear, and broken things.

Today, after a headache-filled few days of relative slowness, everything explodes into extreme busyness.

Burn of God has been submitted to the steaming services and needs listing everywhere. The batch of CDs has arrived, an excellent job done, they look fantastic. I will pack these today. Pre-orders are accepted now, and these will be shipped on release day.

I've also ordered a new full-size synth, a Yamaha MODX7, my first since my beloved SY-85 in 1997. This will be a practical instrument for both recording, and more than the SY-85, for live playing, particularly with Fall in Green. The light weight was a definite factor in my choice of instrument. I love Yamaha instruments, they do so much very well, even if Korg often have cooler sounds. As a more technically-minded sound engineer programming person, I like the technical aspects of the manuals and way they work. I prefer power of use to ease of use.

My album Secret Electric Sorcery is released today too, this needs promoting and mentioning, and ideally new videos creating and uploading.

I've also thought of a new idea for audio synthesis which I call Harmonic Resynthesis. It has aspects of a vocoder and a Hammond Organ. Sounds are broken down into a range of harmonics, sine waves, in a restricted number of bands and these can be swapped and modified. This should be easy to program, I will try this at some point.

I am also very artistically inspired and ache to create but for now, there is so much to do. Onwards we march.

Burn of God 2022 Finalised

Finalising Burn of God yesterday and preparing for a release on Good Friday, April 15th 2022. I also created some previews for the 50 or so sound effect packs, I programmed a feature into Prometheus to create these.

I'm feeling isolated and battered by life, perhaps this is usual between projects. Thinking about my music, Burn of God follows a pattern set back with my first work, Synaesthesia. There is narrative, a story in images, and an eclectic range of styles and moods which reflect an idea from different perspectives. There are catchy melodic works, and longer or slower more complex pieces. All of this comes from the Jean-Michel Jarre influence, of albums like Rendez-vous. Other albums of mine, like The Spiral Staircase and The Love Symphony were similar in structure, but more unified in tone and instrumentation, and with some closer structural form which lent more unity.

The Myth of Sisyphus followed Burn of God, originally, and follows the same patterns. The Dusty Mirror, which, like my album of electronic tunes Bites of Greatness, was a collection of songs or tunes made over a long period and assembled; so those albums are not conceptual of 'symphonic'. Nightfood, still my current favourite album, pointed to something new because the tracks of the first half were more unified. A longer album, a traditional 12 tracks, doesn't lend itself to symphonic unity, so it was (and is) my aim to create works of 3 or 4 tracks to emulate or point towards more classical structures. In the age of streaming, any timing or structure of musical work goes, which is liberating.

Burn of God 2022 is a step up again in my production and performance skills, but already feels old. This is good. All artworks should generate this feeling for the artist. Those who are satisfied with their work are self-delusional; art will have pros and cons, but all art should be moving forwards to something better.

Apart from a change to the date and a slight addition of equipment to the credits, the artwork is identical for this release. For the first 40 copies or so - I will use the 2020 artwork. I'm unlikely to sell those (well, I have already sold one), or any albums, but I still prefer a physical format to the cheap, dead, ephemeral music of streaming. When I can afford to, I'll make CD versions of my more recent works, and keep them in mock-storage here; but they will remain on sale via Bandcamp. Perhaps the generation who now use vinyl will, tiring of the rubbish quality, short length and tedium of flipping the disc, will evolve back towards CD players.

Burn Of God 2022 Finalising

More work on the new Burn of God yesterday, a last listen and two slight changes to two tracks. I've tweaked the canvas animations a little and completed the full video to The Eternal Dogma. It should be fairly easy to make full screen videos for all tracks, though I'd want to do a better job that simple loops; everything is a balance.

Have also been updating the plugins to Prometheus, sorting out older ones, removing those, tidying files. Burn of God sounds and feels like a step up from older work, so I so want to revisit and tidy that up - but no. I must remain focused on the future. My initial goals for January and February are done, so I now need more artistic projects. I need to listen and proof the album, then I'll order a new batch of CDs, and prepare the digital release.

Burn Of God Spotify Canvases

I feel tired, cold, weak, exhausted, unrewarded and ignored by the cruel facelessness of humanity, yet, I am still working well, and today, woke early and charged into work on the Spotify Canvases for Burn of God. Secret Electric Sorcery is due out soon, and though I like many of the songs, I feel that in production and performance terms, I've already moved on a step since that album, and it's not even released yet. Everything I create in future will be better than anything I have made before, but this can cause me as much sadness as joy. How I'd love to fix-up and perfect the older work, make it as good and perfect as the new work. Perhaps my eternal optimism is showing a downside.

I spent yesterday updating my video for 'The Eternal Dogma' - a video made using Argus v1.00 which worked in a slightly different way (actors were tied to, and synonymous with, tracks) so this meant remaking it all. It's not finished.

So very tired today, but have completed a first draft of the 16 Spotify Canvas animations. It shouldn't be too difficult for me to make these full-screen for every song... is this worth it? Perhaps, but part of me would like to do a better job than make an 8-second loop as a music video.

My visual themes for these 'canvases' came from the music and the album art: thunder and lightning, Abrahamic-God fury, the angst of the Sacrifice of Isaac (the sculpture, and the act!), but also gentleness, glows, hopes and the ethereal clouds of peace and nature. Here's a clip from The Eternal Dogma:

Confession shows some of the clouds which pepper these animations. Most swirl gently or ominously; this one charges and whirls like a demonic dance:

More unusual ones include the spinning skulls of The Palace of Skeletons:

And the zooming zig-zags of Riding Pi has three layers and bends and sways. This was one of the most complex to get right, there are so many options. You can discern from the perspective how 3D this one looks:

So, I've managed 16 animations today.

Burn of God Mastering

A slow start this morning, but a fast afternoon. Managed, with the help of the new and increasingly fantastic Prometheus, to remaster the new Burn of God tracks. I'm reminded how much work I put into the album. My design notes began thus:

-All experiences are transient a change of flow, like passing through a pane of fog, a drape of emotion.
-Life is as transient as music. We may think we can capture it and record it, but the recording is a dead facsimile, a shop dummy.
-No authentic priest can be an aritst too, to be an artist is to scream at the void.
-The inevitable gravitation towards perfection and infinity.
-Entering the hallway of Oz, the powerful being on infinity, purity, to which we aspire.
-You must face the chasm and accept it - there is no infinity. What of destiny, determinism? Is free will to be hoped for? Is god freewill?
-"interested in the human drama surrounding another human being who really was in the process of slipping away".
-The duplicitous doubt of the priest.

The first draft had four sections but went through many iterations. The album is now largely complete. I will have some new CDs made, but use the existing, first edition, artwork for the first batch at least. As with all of my music, I tend to tweak the album artwork with each issue of 50, making each edition a collector's item, which is why some of my CDs regularly sell for over £30 on eBay. There is more to do. I must develop Spotify Canvases for these, and I might start to make full-screen Argus videos for my music. Many of these tracks are very good, as are the Heart of Snow tracks. I really need a film unit to make videos for them. I need videos for everything.

Regarding the previous post, I will not be demonstrating in the park. If I were to invite an artist to demonstrate their craft, read, or perform, I would, at very least, treat them as special, honoured, and with respect, and would not dream of asking them to come to a park for a day, stand outside for 10 hours without any protection from the elements, not even a chair, expect them to pay for insurance, perform a health a safety check, and leave without payment or compensation.

I will, however, aim to do something on that royal day. God Save the Queen!

Book Posting, Argus, Jubilee

Posted off the replacement Neorenaissance books yesterday, finalised the archiving for Heart of Snow and looked into potential release dates; should I make a plan for this? How? What should it include? I then updated my animation software Argus with 5 or 6 little changes and bug fixes. I've thought that it should be fairly quick and easy to make an animated music video using it for every new song of mine, with a similar look to the Spotify Canvases. Is this worth doing? I seem to be faced with lots of cost vs. reward balance questions.

I received an email from the Friends of Queen's Park about a the Queen's Platinum Jubilee in June, whether I would like to demonstrate art. I had fun painting there at a previous event, Picnic in the Park in 2015:

This time these is no gazebo, tent or covering, so we are subject to the weather's whims. I'll need to buy public liability insurance, £50 or so, and be there from 10:00 to 18:30, setting up from 8am. Fun though painting is, this is a lot of work for nothing except that thing artists often work for, 'promotion', 'publicity', rather than money or anything tangible. I have little to no chance of selling a painting, even if I brought a stock of paintings to display - which I can't, because there are no display facilities other than the grassy floor or floor-standing easels which I must bring myself (and don't have).

Still, Picnic in the Park was enjoyable, and I sold the painting I painted there on that day - though that large canvas (I use the term canvas loosely, the cloth was closer to a bed-sheet) was given to me by Carol Wilkinson of The Cubby Hole. It is part of an artist's job to show their art; and what alternative activities might I do on that day?

Visual Studio Registration, CD Art, Macc Art Collection

Started the day gloriously fixing a problem with Visual Studio which wouldn't let me register to use it - despite it being the free 'Community' edition. One of those annoyingly Microsoft-only problems, like Windows Update bugs, that had the danger of incapacitating the system for no reason, but a few Windows Registry keys later and I had, magically and amazingly, fixed this.

I then added a feature to Prometheus to auto-equate the two volume levels of two spectra, such that the spectrum shows the differences between the waves' EQ, rather than volume. Then I finalised the Heart of Snow artwork. Here is the cover:

I completed the rear and CD-surface art, and deleted the recorded audio. The final audio is present in my sequences, it's useful to have a copy elsewhere when working, but at the end of a project, not efficient to keep it all.

Then a trip to the Macc Art Lounge to collect work from the Winter Exhibition. I've been offered the opportunity to exhibit regularly there for at least a year.

I am reminded that things and choices which seem important and worrysome are often trivial. I hear the drums of destiny and feel that my art is still improving, charging forwards like a team of white horses.

Community Art, Heart Of Snow Canvases

I've never made community art. Isn't the phrase an oxymoron? The only exception is art which involves participation; a performance or an event. For actual artworks, even the best 'art by committee' is good only in transience because that which is new is necessarily unpopular.

I say this in response to a comment that no artists today work in isolation, to enhance their craft, self and world through art, though I do, and many of the best artists I know do. Of course, like me, these remain generally obscure, rarely sell work, though it is usually the very best of art by the very best of artists. I receive and fulfil commissions, from people who like my style and want something similar. I can, of course, paint any portrait or pet, but I never get asked to paint a 'normal' painting. I could compose a tune, symphony, poem or novel, or restore an old master or repair just about anything, but people don't ask me for such things, though perhaps one day they will.

A very good day today, and a sleepful night. I dreamt of a world where the portals from my novel The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death were trapping people in strange places, perhaps myself. I think the woman from Stargate SG-1 was in the dream. I may have been trapped, or trying to rescue someone. The dream made me think about love, death, heaven, and other things.

The day has been productive. I've completed the Spotify Canvases for Heart of Snow. I used some images from the album art, and generally a smoky or somehow delicately animated background.

Otesanek here quakes alarmingly:

Bleak Forest has some wonderful drifty snowflakes, the magic of Argus. I made them appear at random places, random sizes, and they wobble left to right in a sine wave, and down as they fade. It all looks rather magical.

I've also finally balanced Heart of Snow, yet again. This album has take two weeks just to balance and master, far longer than any album before... partly because I refused to balance the audio of an album, but now I can see the artistic unity that this can impart to an album. It's amazing how whole albums differ in feeling of EQ. Kimono My House has such a bass-heavy feel to all of it, very 70s rock, yet in comparison to the glassy and glitzy Kick Inside.

I've made the final changes to v2.77 of Prometheus, so now I can save and load EQ profiles. There are few other changes. I may update Argus too, after today's canvas work. Bless my programming genius! Like J.F. Sebastian I am awash with A.I. friends to populate my steel and orange fortress of solitude.

But art is my life, commitment, solemn calling. Heart of Snow won't be released for months, until the appropriate winter, but Burn of God should be ready fairy soon; this is my next job. Secret Electric Sorcery is due out soon, but that was very much a learning album for me, a stepping stone to the greater things to come this year.

Stanley Spencer's Ghost, Phasers

Another sleepless night, full of energy and loose electricity. Stanley Spencer's electrical aura fills the room, the ghost of an artist struggling in life, to realise great success after death, like most artists. People like dead heroes, they've beaten them, so are free to praise them without fear of competition for worldly resources, and their increasingly rare work is now increasingly valuable. The British way, as Elizabeth Garrett Anderson knows, is to obfuscate, criticise, block, and shout down anyone good at anything, then after 30 years of their toil, swap, and make their former victim a 'national treasure', piling on praise and acclaim for every act no matter how trivial. Nobody can win by aiming to please, we must please ourselves, and artists doubly so. Stanley Spencer electrically fizzes into a dark corner, a self-made shrine of static electrical design.

I dragged myself up and started work with glee on Prometheus, finishing the spectrum analysis coding, refining it and making the settings saveable and loadable. I then programmed two audio effects, a stereo version of my now-famous band distortion effect, and a phaser. I've wanted to make a phaser for some years but thought this was simply a different chorus effect; in a way it is, but only recently has Wikipedia revealed that its a chorus which uses an all-pass filter.

The algorithm for an all-pass filter is:

output[i] = old + power * input[i];
old = input[i] - power * output[i];


And old is put into a buffer with a variable delay, typically a triangle or sine wave to make it sweep. The effect sound brilliant. My algorithm is:

1. old = buffer[delayedbyafewmillisecs];
2. output = (old + power * input) * -feedback;
3. buffer[now] = input - power * output;


Vary the delay, and loop forever. The feedback parameter should be between 0 and 1 (don't make it 1 or it will feedback infinitely and howl; zero will turn the effect off).

I've rebalanced Heart of Snow. The EQ tool isn't perfect but it does help.

I've also had an apologetic email from Amazon who, after a week of ne response, have informed me that they will send 7 replacement books for the defective ones - hurray! So, although later, I will have all of the books.

Now, I must try to relax. I am concerned that my copy of Visual Studio will not register - probably a fault of Microsoft. Jobs for the week include making the Spotify Canvases for Heart of Snow and Burn of God, and mastering Burn of God.

Foxtrot Dream, EQ Cloning, Nantwich Museum

A very restless night. I dream of playing a complex Nintendo Wii game of the Genesis album Foxtrot, which involved characters climbing a clock with mice and other such wonders. Phil Collins was present.

My mind was occupied with the spectrum analyser. I thought that trying to balance the values to be equal was a silly idea, that it would be better to have two scans, A and B, because most of the time I work by comparing what I have with a target sound. The dB calculations took longer than expected. I realised that these aren't based on the difference between two values, but one divided by the other. 3db (well, 3.01029) is double or half, for example; the absolute values are not relevant.

I fed in some waves. In an experiment I used The Game by Queen, a song with similar production to Otesanek. I fed both tracks into the analyser and the differences were displayed:

I used this to adjust the balancing, and to my genuine amazement and megalomanic glee, it worked; the balancing of one song became magically mapped onto another. Of course, this is not a perfect science. Balancing one song 'sort of' like another will, for example, never result in a match and all zeros, but it worked better than expected.

This made me think of when and why to apply EQ, something I rarely, if ever, do. I prefer to balance by production and writing, choosing instruments that naturally gel, and setting volumes. I realised, that I rarely ever boost anything when mixing, only cut. For vocals, I cut bass, for example. Anything which toys with frequencies (filter fades etc.) is often part of the instrument design rather than something used for the mix. The mix works easily due to this efficiency of the spectrum. Perhaps I can use this philosophy; that once this is done as best I can, any final boosts are done once at this mastering stage.

Or I may just use this new tool for learning. With any new tool I never really know if it will be useful, useless, or indispensable; so it's worth trying everything.

In the afternoon Deb and I went to Nantwich to see the exhibition as visitors. This was to be the poetry reading day. It was nice to be there and take a few photos for posterity.

After that I programmed more features, tidied up today's code. There is more to do. I want a way to save and reload frequency profiles. I also coded a new effect; Dual Band Distortion which is like two parallel band pass filters with some bonus growly power. It may come in handy.

Spectrum Analysis

Rather a slow and lost couple of days, perhaps tiredness due to a busy January, but also a change in direction from working on music production to the more tedious work of graphic arts. I finished the album artwork yesterday for Heart of Snow, and recorded new vocals for the last of the new Burn of God tracks, the rather lovely Garden of Spring.

Late at night, I started to re-listen to Heart of Snow and found myself in the mental spaghetti of wanting to remix the whole album! I really want and have always wanted and have always aimed to never apply equalisation, and certainly no compression, to an album at the mastering stage, but yesterday night I found myself doing this and finding that the results were much improved. So, I wondered if I should be fixing these problems in the mixing stage instead. If the mix sounds better brighter, then perhaps, perhaps ideally, the brighter instruments need to be louder, perhaps. But I'm unsure.

The main Heart of Snow track, for example, has vocals with pretty much the same balancing as on every track, I tend to use the same filtering and the same sort of reverb, in spectra space, so why does the whole track sound more like the others, more in keeping, when this is given more higher space? Perhaps there is some science to an overall mix which defies this simple logic. Perhaps bass sounds make higher ones harder to perceive, even when they are, on a technical level, the same.

Perhaps I need to consider mastering a separate skill and entity to studio mixing, again, something I've resisted. But not entirely, I do, for example, enjoy playing with relative volumes and the segueing of tracks. Perhaps I should see balancing the equalisation in those terms, a last polish.

One difference is that EQ is a lot more complex, there are a lot more variables. I like the 10-band EQ in CD Architect, but at times I wish for simpler presets... of course I can make some, but they, annoyingly, don't seem tom work as well as tweaking the dials for each song! I don't like this organic factor.

Today, in something of a slump, I decided to program a spectrum analyser and see if this would help. It's relatively simple and uses 10 bands, filtering the signal and measuring each result. Here is an example of the output:

This isn't finished. I had hoped that the Boost values would identify in an instant where to push the song to make it sound ideal; this may still help, but it is very much in development at the moment. The relative RMS values (relative, all numbers are scaled between 0 and 1) help identify the dominant frequencies. I'm unsure what use this tool is, but it many help and was relatively easy to code.

I really need to complete the Spotify Canvases for Heart of Snow next. I feel this week has a been a bit wasted. I've been busy, but not busy enough to be satisfied with it.

Tomorrow I'll visit the museum.

Heart Of Snow Artwork

Dropped off books to Nantwich Museum yesterday. Still annoyed that 18 of the 34 books delivered by Amazon were printed badly and need replacements, but 6 have been posted away so I can't return them. I have returned 11 to Amazon, but haven't been refunded enough money to order 11 correct replacements, and after many emails I'm not getting any response from their customer support. I've been using Amazon for publishing successfully for many years, and have never had a problem with their support system, or a serious problem with print quality. Now, at this first problem, the customer support is exceptionally bad.

In between I've been working on the Heart of Snow artwork. This has taken a lot of time and work. As I've got faster at some jobs, I not do more and more, create more and more options to choose the best. I read that one of Beethoven's last quartets had over 60 different sketches before he settled on the final one. This is exactly how things are. I've taken lots of photos of Hail Mary, the name for Deb's Christmas tree, and used some of those. I've taken photos of myself in with my 'snow' look, and, yesterday, wrote out the lyrics in pen and ink and drew some drawings. I've also created a new snowflake brush in Photoshop, so a lot of source material.

Here is one lyric sheet:

And my final draft (so far) of Page 2:

I started with the simple penguin object photo (actually a felt penguin, I added the beard myself with my felting needles). I added some white frosty snowflakes around its periphery. On its own it looked a little plain. This would be fine for one page, but I had the idea of one page for each song, and many like that were rather empty looking. I experimented with the plain lyrics, but, again, all plain text looked a little too messy, the text is legible, but only just, and many pages of it looked a little simplistic, spidery, and a bit of a waste of colour printing.

I tried combining the two in many ways, and tried adding type-written text, but the typed letters looked far too rigid and 'digital', like a cheap greetings card. So, I layered the text in many ways, colourful, plain, inverted, complex. Some obscuring or interacting with the image inside, some not.

I made up images for each song, taken from the tree photos:

Then added the faint grey text, as seen here, which seemed to balance the look, though not as utilitarian, as the words are sometimes impossible to read, so designed more as a feeling with hints of truth, or things to discover. I created the red heart to add something to the white edge and added these.

So this is the stage so far, but there are many options. I like the ink drawn writing. In aesthetics, its often about feeling, the balance of order and chaos; is there too much order? Too much chaos? Just as I like the production style of Bowie's favoured producer, Tony Visconti, I like the visual style of his latter-era album artist, Jonathan Barnbrook.

Productivity aside I'm generally in a slow and tired mood, but I must remind myself that steadily doing things for hours is what work is, so if this is being done, then this is a measure of productivity rather than quantities of outcomes. Most of the actual music is complete. I burned a test CD of Heart of Snow today for a final audio-proof. There is always a lot to do on each album now; this art, Spotify Canvases, lyric reading videos, the essential filing and music administration, and none of that is publicity or any of that which I have always disliked and shun.