As you become better at an art or craft, perfectionism becomes not a tool for improvement, and at the same time a paralysing disability.
I've spent almost all of today crafting tiny details on The Laughing Cavalier. I started with each part of the multi-part drums during a fun harpsichord 'solo' which I played and recorded late last night on the synthesizer. I converted that to MIDI and imported it into Prometheus. I have a few options now... I could have re-exported it to the synth and used that to play it back, but the simple (and bright) harpsichord sound I've used seemed to work better, so I've used my imported sequence and retained the velocities as played.
This had 'key up' elements, Note-Off, 'Kill' events. On the MODX these can be used to trigger sounds too, and it does add something to the sound, to made a sort of 'scrape' noise at the end of each key. I thought it would be fun to add this possiblity to my software, so programmed a new feature to replace Kill events with a new note (of any desired instrument). This was easy to add and pretty quick. Then I felt to need to change the speed of my stroked chords, to make the spacing divide up nicely by divisions of 3rds... this was very time consuming. The strokes sounded fine before. Everything sounds a little over-clean and artificial, but not too bad. I will jiggle things up later - 'noise' (temporal, velocital, any other) is easy to later, and this is the way it should be in any art. We start with the Platonic perfect, then add noise at our command, not make things messy to start with.
The actual melody and majority of the sequence is the same as it was yesterday, despite 20 hours of this work.
Now I'm finalising the end verse of the Franz Hals song. If sounds good so far but my vocals need something more.
