A slightly annoying day. Woke early and listed the Gunstorm sheet music and lyrics on itch.io, I thought this would be a better place to put them than on my website, and they host documents/magazines, so this seemed logical, and it's already had a few downloads, so all good.
Then I wanted to work on Golden Water, a slow and dreamy track from The Anatomy Of Emotions. It's ironically extremely easy to play and simple to listen to, yet nightmarish to score accurately. It's essentially a stroke of the same four notes, a C#-Major chord, then occasional stabs of base notes in that key (or on the triad) and octave stabs of higher notes, again, usually in the triad, all to create an atmosphere of light glinting on the ripples of a dark lake at night. This description alone is probable enough to play it, and indeed better than the score. The music is about five minutes long, and I started by using my new transcribing device in Prometheus to convert it... but a few notes are totally off beat. Notes were being chopped off or merged unnaturally. Nothing repeats so the score is one long five minute stroll of pseudo-random notes.
I could see that the march of the C# chord was regular throughout the song, so it seemed to make sense to chose those and make them the 'click track'. I had a feature in Prometheus to separate out a specific range of notes, so looked to that, but alas, it only works on single tracks, not across a range, and if I imported the sequence as a single track, notes would be lost or confused as some were chords. So, I reprogrammed the feature to use a range and it seemed to work. I spent ages on a version of the sequence, but errors kept creeping in.
Then I noticed a bug in the converter. It was then time for Peter's piano lesson, so took to that, and prepared some notes on repeats and loops.
Then back to fixing the bug, which I did, but it barely helped. The score, in the end was remarkably accurate, but the odd note is missing, only abut 4 or 5 notes in the 5-minute score. It sounds good though, even with regular pacing and velocity, rather like the same mood, so it must be good enough. It is rather odd though. It almost looks and sounds like an A.I. composition, or something mechanical, when ironically, it's one of the most organic and live tracks I've scored - which is the whole problem.
Still, now, it is done, and so is the last of The Anatomy Of Emotions scores; so The Anatomy Of Emotions, Gunstorm, The End And The Beginning, and Salome (for piano) are now scored. I'll also work on Heart Of Snow. When they are done, I can move on. With each new music release, I'll aim to score a 3 or 4 older ones, this way, the whole back-catalogue will be scored.
I'm somewhat sad and worried that my old PC is becoming obsolete. I toyed with putting Gunstorm the game, or even Flatspace II on itch, but my computer is barely able to compile and play these old things, and I'm worried that the code in Visual Studio 2013 will have trouble working on newer systems - it must! My creative life depends largely on my unique array of software, much of which I've developed myself. Things works well for now, though, and I'm hesitant to 'upgrade' as this often kills old and wonderful software. I'll have to upgrade eventually, but I'll delay it for as long as possible.
