Welcome Vocals, Album Artwork

A good and productive day. Started by recording the vocals to Welcome to my Gallery. These worked remarkably well in the first take without even a rehearsal, which was something of a surprise. This is happening more and more often, mainly due to knowing what I want and what might sound best.

David Bowie is famed for recording most of his vocals in one take, though I suspect that the number of takes increased in later years and on later albums simply because expense and time was an issue in early recordings, and (I don't know much about Bowie, but perhaps) studio experimentation took place. In the days of tape and cost, artists needed to prepare well beforehand, and songs had often been performed many times, making a first recording as good as any other. It would be well rehearsed and the sound well known. Today, first takes are probably more rare simply because recordings are as good as free and it might be artistically useful to record everything including rehearsals, warm-ups, and experiments, so there's no reason not to.

Anyway, in this case things sounded fine and the song doesn't seem to need any harmonies or fancy vocals. It sounded remarkably good from the outset. Perhaps I am, at last, learning something. This is one of the most electronic-led tracks on the album, and its mood matches the cover. I also finalised the artwork today. Here is the cover and a few pages, which are all simple and will use the motif of darkness (blue) and light (golden):

I'll also include The Girl with the Pearl Earring painting, and one of Cotán's. One odd thing is that the new 3000x3000 pixel size doesn't scale well to 300dpi; the pure diagonal looks wobbly. I expected some impurity as the old format was exactly a 2:1 ratio (which is why I used it) but this was worse than expected. Sigh. Here's the CD Surface:

And the rear:

Back To Work, Program vs Romantic Music

Back to work after my break, which included a trip to Glastonbury Tor, the town, the Arnolfini and the rocks near Clifton Suspension Bridge.

Have been busy today working on music. It's amazing how many changes can be needed to songs which were, a few days ago, thought of as finished. I've added some chords and quite a lot of balancing work to The Girl with the Pearl Earring, and added some chorus to the vocals in an homage to Pet Shop Boys which made me smile.

I changed the harpsichord in Girl Reading a Letter for a better one, like the one used in Autumn's Shadow, and added some more to Rembrandt, and tried to add more drama there with guitars, but more layers didn't seem to help things. Then, more work on Welcome to My Gallery, which is something of an epic in 3-minutes.

While away, I thought about Program Music vs. Romantic Music, and the applications to pop/rock. So-called program music is structured, as with Beethoven and earlier, and Romantic music less structured to evoke a mood. To some extent, feeling comes from breaking tempo and form, so this makes sense. Prog Rock is perhaps closer to Program music, in that it aims for large structures (well, my music does, with albums like Nightfood, and generally progressive albums have an overall feeling or unity, if only because the same instruments are used on very long tracks which evoke classical movements). Pop songs are somewhat Romantic though... because they're short pieces that are not related to others on an album, but there are many crossovers, as songs are typically very structured with verses/choruses, and lots of rhyme and simplistic poetic structures. There are very few completely open songs (our Fall in Green music is closer than most). And, of course, even in Beethoven's day, he wouldn't have recognised a distinction between Program and Romantic, as his music was generally structured, and the emotions came from breaking or defining those structures.

I can see that The Beatles started with short and highly structured songs, and gradually broke these up, but whole albums weren't particularly structured. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is often cited as an early 'concept album', yet it's broadly a collection of any-old song bracketed with a start and end, rather than structured in any musically meaningful way.

Album Progress, Holiday

More work on Welcome to my Gallery yesterday. The album is nearly complete, and is a little different than my music before. As will much of my music of the last 4 years, I waver between broadly liking all of it and broadly disliking all of it, but, objectively, I've certainly made some new technical improvements on this album in guitar playing, singing, and production and engineering, as well as the new audio effects I've programmed. Improvement in art, for me at least, is a long and slow process of accretion of small improvements in techniques and skills. It's odd that many commercial albums of the 70s and 80s featured bands that tended to peak early. As a Queen fan their earliest albums, Queen II, Sheer Heart Attack, A Night At The Opera, are perhaps their best, and I still rate Kate Bush's The Kick Inside among her best (but Hounds Of Love and The Dreaming are certainly better). The Beatles gradually got better with each release.

Today I'm leaving for a few days 'holiday' in Bristol. I hate holidays. Holidays cause me great anxiety, sleeplessness and illness, a depressive lack of productivity or sense of doing anything useful. A few days 'holiday' will shorten my life by weeks and I never take one voluntarily, but sometimes one must acquiesce for social reasons. I didn't sleep at all last night and I'm counting down the hours until I return.

Welcome To My Gallery

One track of The Golden Age remains. I wrote the words a few days ago, I now much prefer to start with the words. Songs sometimes magically appear, words and music all together, but they tend to be simplistic outpourings of the mind at time and often musically and lyrically predictable, easy, and trite. The words are so crucial for painting a picture, telling the story, that I use these as key hooks for the music, what to represent when. Music can suggest an idea, too, however, but doing things this way seems to extract something unusual, unpredictable from the music. I also prefer the words to be semi-poetic, not too poetic, not of regular scan or rhyme. Again, that would be too easy, too boring. The words must tell a story all alone, as must the music, and both together should be better than either alone. The first draft of the words were:

Welcome To My Gallery

So you want to be an artist?
Are you ready for some times of pain?
Of madness?

Welcome to my gallery of failed ambitions.
Pull up a chair, and pipe and muse upon your greatness
before you worry about the bills and the void of indifference, the scorn that awaits your quest for something pretty,
worthy of your name,
your quest to extract the best
of your soul's marrow.

Take your oil and your earth
and run to a grave of glory.

Will you pay the price?
Will you pay the price?
Welcome to my gallery.

I divided them to form approximate verses:

So you want to be an artist?
Are you ready for some times,
of pain?
of madness?

Welcome to my gallery
of failed ambitions.
Pull up a chair, and pipe
and muse upon your greatness

before you worry about the bills
and the void
of indifference, the scorn
that awaits

your quest for something pretty,
worthy of your name,
your quest to extract the best,
of your soul's marrow.

Take your oil and your earth
and run to a grave of glory.

Will you pay the price?

Will you pay the price?

Welcome to my gallery.

Then started on the music by improvising. I watched an Oberheim OB-X8 demo yesterday, with some incredulity and amusement. It's a lovely instrument, but, at £4000 for an old-school analogue synthesizer, is more like a toy for rich people than a practical instrument - at least, everything can be duplicated in low-cost software or even much cheaper synthesizers. I listened to the presets on a YouTube video and, simultaneously in Prometheus copied several with ease. Perhaps this is also an indicator of the power of my software, but many software synths, even free ones, can duplicate 90% of the sounds. There are some specialised cross-modulations, like 'hard-sync' and different uses of the LFO and effects like a semitone-step-portamento (this is technically glissando) but Prometheus can do that, and everything the OB-X8 can and more.

My digression is here because the sounds (which are indeed beautiful - the OB-X8 is a lovely instrument!) inspired me to compose an analogue synth sequence. I made some dancing saw waves and shifting, modulating chords using detuned saw waves, one with a synchronised reset. The chords were C-minor, Bb-Major, C-minor then D#-Major. I chose the chords because they were pretty and a little odd. I left that and went to the piano, with the words, and decided on those chords for the first 4 lines, but broke into D# for the "of pain" line - hitting an awkward B note for ugliness, then moved to E-minor and then E-Major for the "of madness".

This lead easily into A-minor, then down the G-Major for the second verse, which is something of a main chorus (as the title line suggests). For variety, I then shifted up into the unusual G#-Major and then Bb for the next two lines which pulled me back towards C-minor for the "bills" verse. This, I imagined as a single note and chord, blusey and wailed in the vocal.

This breaks, in my plan, back to the chorus chords, which then break into F-Major and C for the "oil" and "grave" lines, before we return to the opening chord sequence for "Will you pay the price", but I'm not sure how it will all fit yet.

So far I've put together the first two verses and they sound surprisingly good considering the odd chords and melody. I'm struck by the amazing amount of musical influences on this single song, but pleased by them too.

Go To Bed And Miss Me, and Queen

Some more work on Go To Bed And Miss Me today. I thought that the solo guitar part needed a fill for the rapid chord change in there, so I played that. This is my first song to feature two guitar takes in the left/right ear, which is something of a sign that I'm getting better at playing.

The song really reminds me of Queen songs like Seaside Rendezvous. When people imagine Queen songs they, perhaps, immediately think of high vocals with close harmonies, surrealistic and amusing variations in pitch and tempo, and heavy guitars laced with fun, an idea capitalised on by The Darkness in a few intentional tributes; but there's another Queen too, one with 1930s & 1940s ballroom/music hall influence, with bouncy piano songs by Mercury, and songs like Good Company by May. My song here has similar roots (and indeed a nod to When I'm 64, which also paid homage to the past).

Go To Bed And Miss Me has turned out to be an unexpectedly good song on many levels. I need to work out what to do with it.

Alien Dream, Cover Art

I felt ill in the night, I awoke queasy my skin very cold, perhaps mild hypothermia which I've had a couple of times, and not surprising when the 'warm' room I went to sleep in was 14 degrees and gradually cooled overnight. I got up and had a hot drink which instantly revived me, but I lay awake with stomach discomfort for hours afterwards.

I dreamt that I was part of an astronaut crew sent to visit alien world, our space ship shaped a bit like Captain Kremmen's ship, Troll-1. The world was desert-like and initially had no people, only strange vertical structures, like stalagmites, some of which were cacti or spongy alien plants. This imagery was probably inspired by Deb's new lava lamp which creates many strange shapes while warming up. We left to explore, and soon noticed the occasional android, but it was clear that there were no living creatures here, only robots. I suspected that some living puppet masters were somewhere hidden. Suddenly, several members of the crew were captured, leaving just me and one other in an alien city. There were suddenly lots of robots around, a thronging metropolis, and we tried to fit in. A parade down the main street included our ship, the crew members proudly shown off as prisoners. A flying robot flew by us on the pavement, a metal pizza box advertising its contents in a cheerful robot voice. The aim was to open the box and eat the pizza as it hovered there, it played pop music while you ate. I wanted some pizza but sensed it was a trap as none of the robots would want to eat.

I woke late. A slower day than yesterday due to lack of sleep, but I've worked on the Rembrandt tune, and the cover art. I'm unsure why I put so much work into the cover art, as I'm unlikely to make a CD, and I seem to waste many days of life doing it - but it's all part of the art. I've been making artwork for my albums since the late 1990s, having these printed in the local copy shop. Nobody back then saw the albums, and the tiny number of reviewers probably don't have a copy now, so perhaps that time was wasted too? No! The artwork is no less valid than the music, which is as equally alive or dead. My motivation is to do my best, and better than before. This will be my first album in a new, larger format with 3000x3000 pixels each side, which is something of a digital standard (as advocated by Sony). My albums up until now were slightly smaller as 2850, but with a bleed so could possibly extend to 3000. 2850 is enough anyway, and 3000 isn't really big enough for a 300dpi 12-inch record, so the size is somewhat arbitrary, but I'll use Sony's guidelines.

Here's the cover so far:

And the rear:

Leaps on The Golden Age

A wonderful productive Monday. I've been getting frustrated with The Golden Age, the time it's taking, but this is party due to a change of computer and new versions of my music software, getting used to Visual Studio 2022. I awoke keen to make good progress.

I started by recording the vocals to The Legend of Zurbaran, then more vocal recording for Tycho Brahe. This is a troublesome song, partly because it was written a few years ago and pitched too low for my voice, so I took a radical step of removing the melody and improvising over the backing instead and this worked far better. In the end, the track was far easier to sing, all done in a take at an 8th higher than originally written. I know the melody backwards, so the freedom of removing the 'training wheels' is something I'll do more often, if not all of the time.

The Legend of Zurbaran sounded great first off, so that's as good as complete. Then back to work on Cotan. I wanted to expand the intro and general mood, painting something of the night, a cold monastic cell, so I recorded a MODX sound which had that mood (and robot crickets!). The whispered vocals sound good, but perhaps only to me because I know the underlying melody, which is now totally removed, so I had the idea of an instrument playing this melody, and tracking it to the vocals. This sounds ok, but perhaps the lead instrument needs some toying with.

Then, in the late afternoon, a new guitar part and interlude for Rembrandt. The song is fine, but the structure was a little boring; two verses interspersed with a solo in the same chords. This song was partly inspired by Something's Burning by Kenny Rogers, a song I loved when I was about 4 years old due to its pyromaniac undertones, but Rembrandt lacks the drama of that song. I thought that it also has elements of Something by The Beatles/Harrison, so I wrote a simple countermelody for electric guitar and added this to the start and used that to replace the middle section. This sounds much better, but the song still needs more drama.

Eleven tracks are just about complete. The first planned track, Welcome to my Gallery, has only words... not even a mood, but there's pressure on as it's the opening track.

I'm most pleased with my vocals this year and, again and repeatedly, reminded that I've not recorded an album in nearly a year. I'd like to re-record a few songs from previous albums, I can sing them far better now and some of those old songs make me cringe, but perhaps this is negative thinking despite this plan being considered from the start. The year is running away. I must fill it.

Lots more album work to go, mainly that first song, and the cover art. There's also a few other songs to work on, notably Style Guru Fashion Queen, but that's electro-pop and will need a special platform.

Self Judgement and the Locus of Control

When you think of yourself, it's always a comparison of your current personality relative to one of your other personalities (which may include your mind-echo of another person or external object) so the judgement is powerfully tainted by that.

Yesterday, I read about the locus of control, the judged amount of control we have over our lives. On one level, we don't have any control. When something bad happens out of the blue, it was always destined to happen and there's nothing we could have done to prevent it. When something good happens out of the blue, it was always destined to happen and there's nothing we could have done to prevent it.

Yet, on another level we can, just about, do anything. Can I, I imagined, put a man on the moon? Well, as part of humanity, my (meagre) taxes and compliance with western civilisation has and does, to some tiny degree, contribute to the current space program, so a tiny part of me is working to put a man on the moon. Yet, on a daily basis, it's hardly a concern or considered within the scope of my control. I'd never think that I was consciously acting to put a man on the moon (although today, I might!).

So it seems that our actions and influence on the world are one thing, and whether we consider those under our control is quite separate. This reminded me of a childhood belief that the television news people relaxed and stopped reading the news when I switched the set off or to another channel. I'd try to catch them out by switching back at unexpected moments, but - bah! I think they were on to me. They were always there reading the news.

Also, I thought of the belief that me watching a Wimbledon match was a transformation to the fate of the player, that Andy Murray's fortunes had turned because I'd started to watch at that point and that, before this, his performance was tired and lacklustre. So it seems that belief in control can occur even when there is no influence, just as influence can occur with no belief.

A twist of this is that Andy Murray as a player feeds off an audience, so one could say that, the more people who watch one of his tennis matches and believe that they are helping, the more he will become inspired and improve; so, like the moon concept, even a casual watch of a tennis match may, to some tiny degree, contribute to its outcome. This may be true only if that glance was registered, but even mere television audience figures may be inspirational to those on screen, and our belief of the importance of our glance may be picked up by those around us, and also spread.

Plugin Programming

A final day of finishing my audio plugin programming; today time updating 41 'old' modules which use the 'Randy Monotone Sample II' effect and changing that to the new 'Randy Monotone Samplex' plugin, which can be a 1:1 replacement but with a few extra functions. Things change over the years, so Prometheus has a feature to auto-update any existing plugin to a different one, copying over or changing any parameters as needed. This can be used for upgrades like this, but also to simply change one to another, like changing all saw wave generators to sine, for example.

The day has been generally too anxious and horrible. Programming is about the fear of breaking something, a facing up of human inadequacies to computer perfection. I've a folder which keeps reappearing on my system, ever since Jan 2nd. I've deleted it twice today alone. It's a common Windows problem and I've done everything in the online lists of ways to fix it, but it keeps coming back. I've set all permissions to full mine, all permissions to full everyone, deleted to Recycle Bin, deleted outright, checked for errors and malware. I think it stems from my changing the drive letters (Windows probably hated that). Today I tried CCleaner but, terrifyingly, the sound suddenly vanished from my system after a 'clean up'. The driver was there, everything looked there, but no sound came out. I managed to undo the changes, but I'm not sure why or what happened. I hope all is well.

Generally, the past two weeks have felt like treading on proverbial eggshells, walking through a proverbial minefield with this new computer. I expect I'll settle down, as things continue, but I hate this feeling and it's not generally like me. I like to dive into new technology and new toys, trying everything with fearless zeal, but this machine feels both super powerful and delicate and buggy, as well as containing my life's work. I have an amazing knack for finding bugs in Windows.

I'll get back to music next and try to avoid programming or system changes. Hopefully a few days or weeks of this will help my quivering mind and body. The freezing weather this week and weekend hasn't helped. Onwards we roll our rock.

Plugins v195, and Future Music

A full day of programming, recompiling and checking the last of the 120 audio plugins. In the end, the files are about the same size and about the same speed, so there was little point in doing it. There is always the risk of accidentally adding new bugs, but now all plugins should support a change of master frequency. I'll probably never do this. I hope never to, but sometimes technology forces and change and I am reliant on this software for all of my music.

One thing that will/would need tweaking are the time slopes for things like compressors and gates... those are based on multipliers eg. multiplying the level with 0.999 every sample. This means that a different sample rate will create different timings. There's no easy way to change this (apart from to recalculate this value for a new rate, but this may not be a perfect conversion, at these tiny levels, the floating points can sometimes spiral into strange values). I'll worry about that when needed. When someone decided on 44100hz for compact discs, he may have set an audio standard for centuries to come, and I will hope and assume this is true.

Other changes include a change to the white noise generation. The old version, for nearly 20 years, had effectively generated a number from -1 to 0.999979999 rather than -1 to +1; and its seed was reset at the start of every play of an instrument so it wasn't as 'random' as it could be. Small changes. Part of me was hesitant to change this above all else, as the sound of the noise is a key part of the sound of the system. It's odd that every instrument, even software and digital electronics, sounds different, unique, and Prometheus has a unique timbre that I don't want to harm.

All of the other changes were essentially adding defined constants to the code rather than using numbers. In all cases, the output result should be identical to the old versions, and a simple test of rendering an 'old' plugin song vs new one shows them to be identical. So far so good.

I find this nerve-jangling, as the ideal is that it's the same as before. Programming causes a strange nervous illness in me, a quest for unattainable perfection which the computer demands. It's a horrible illness and one that, ultimately, was the cause for me giving up programming for the joyous life of art. Still, the power and control that comes from programming my own musical instrument is good to have. One of my main motivations for programming Noise Station (and then Prometheus) was lack of money for music software, but now my creation is priceless.

I can get back to music tomorrow... and therefore testing.

I'm full of ideas and potential music. I am reminded that my last album (Remembrance Service; Heart Of Snow was the most recent release but that was finished last January, before I'd started Remembrance Service) was nearly a year ago. I have about three albums worth of music already! This is getting a bit too much... I listened to the old Harlequin Kings songs yesterday and I realised just how much my singing has improved since then, and also notably since a year ago. I could re-record songs like Incomplete Version of the Writer, and many others... but why? All it may do is overwhelm anyone who might like my music, but at the same time, it would be a shame if these songs remained unheard forever, and, of course, no matter how much music I made, I'd run out of energy and growth soon enough.

So, new work must at least be a certain step-up from previous work, technically if not saying something new; or I must focus more on other aspects, like videos, the sheet music, and book publication work. For now, I'll complete The Golden Age. It began as exactly that need to share songs that it would be 'a shame to remain hidden' - but that's a weak ambition and I've changed the album, added more, tried to push for some new artistic unity or creative progress. I've certainly made a few technical production, as well as performance, improvements, but those things should be an incidental benefit, not the purpose for art.

Well, I need at least an opening track, and I penned a few words last night about art and its course, which may suffice.

Tonight; a nice meal with Deb to celebrate Chinese New Year. Onwards we charge.

Bits of Plugin Recompiling

I had a couple of hours gap in the middle of the day to get out and around Crewe with Deb, a delightful snowy trip. Because of this I decided to work on programming to make the best use of the hours each side. As I now have Visual Studio 2022, I could benefit from re-compiling the 120 Prometheus plugins to make use of its (hopefully) more efficient and (certainly) more up-to-date compilation, so that's one reason. While doing this though, I'm making a few changes:

First, making the random algorithms used by any plugins, from white noise to random volumes etc., use defines for the seeds and processing. I'm also putting the seed initialisation in the initialiser for the plugins. Currently the seed is either set when the plugin first loads, or (in some circumstances) when a note (or track) is played. If it's in the initialiser I can call that to reset the seed and create an indentical 'random' outcome of a playing song. I've never needed this, but these changes at least make it possible.

Second, to set the master frequency in the plugins (currently always 44100hz) to a define too, to make it easier to change this. Plugins which use gates or slopes will not convert perfectly as these are based on sample-by-sample multiplications (it would be hard to make these comply with time-based values efficiently). Playback, however, should work on any master frequency.

Thirdly, checking the defines for note limits, some of which weren't updated for 10-octaves; in particular maximum pitch shifts and sample starts. My synth can shift/transpose an instrument up or down, but Prometheus can now shift a sound 120 semitones up or down - way beyond what's audible or useful, but that gives it the maximum power and flexibility.

These changes aren't urgent and will take a day or two, but they are something that is ultimately needed. The Visual Studio 2022 programs are smaller and faster, it seems, but I'm destined to compile everything on it, so it's neater to compile everything on it at once. Visual Studio crashed several times when saving code under extant filenames, all due to IntellSense. When my 1KB code hit a project size of 1.3GB, I switched it off. VS works fine now, my project is very small and still picks up Warnings and Errors correctly. I don't know what use IntellSense is at all.

Auto-Phoneme

I hate meetings, and fortunately, I rarely have to go to any. One time consuming problem is taking the minutes, making notes, keeping a record. I thought today of a new way to speed this up.

A live meeting on Microsoft Teams or Zoom could have the audio recorded, and translated into written language too, though the latter is not very accurate. An accurate translation might be ideal, but it would have to recognise all words and accurately transcribe all languages as well as invented, new words as a human typographer would.

The sound could be recorded, but this is a huge increase in data storage even for a 48kbps (low quality) MP3 file. Meetings tend to be long, numerous and frequent and almost ubiquitous in the modern world. The quantity of data is a cost, as well as the cost of the work of all of the transcription, the red tape of transcription can be a significant drain on any organisation.

I thought that the two could be crossed to solve the transcription problem of the first. Rather than whole words, phonemes, short sections of the sounds of words, could be translated from the source audio, and during playback reproduced artificially at the same time and volume as the recording. This phoneme-coded data could be a simple list (phoneme/time/volume) and the resulting audio-stream should be intelligible while having very low storage. The lack of transcription of the words would be a benefit; it would support all languages and all future words and not require a dictionary or database. Current transcriptions from audio are not designed to play back those transcriptions at the correct time/volume and this information is very emotionally important to the meaning of phrases, and something which is lost in all but full recordings.

BIOS Fears, More Music Musing and Work

An awful day yesterday, I one of my first experiences of what is called depression, something I've rarely, if ever, experenced as my logical mind tends to take over and keep working away when emotions start to interfere with the rational running of life. This was triggered by an early-morning doubt about whether to update the BIOS on my new PC, which is always a nerve-jangling occasion as a power failure during this will probably break the machine. This led to a day of angst about various computer system concerns. The code to the Prometheus plugins remains huge, 100 to 10,000 times bigger than the raw source files due to problems with Visual Studio's IntelliSense. I have about 200 pages of source for each plugin, and I rename them to the same file, 'Plugin.cpp', as I work on each one. This behaviour really seems to confuse the parser which loves to index the same files over and over, causing massive databases. I can delete them, fortunately, but it's a pain, and sometimes Visual Studio will simply crash at certain combinations of renaming and reusing files.

I decided to code a new plugin. This is a more advanced variation on one called Randy Monotone Sample II and is designed as a replacement. It will play one of four samples at random, with a random volume, random pitch, will start at a random offset, and pause for a random interval. This is useful for adding realism to an instrument in some circumstances. I've not implemented it yet, though, because I'll need to plan the full replacement of the old version first (the old one had but one sample and no option to set the starting offset).

I hardly did anything else yesterday, crippled by these silly fears of wanting everything to be correct. There is also a folder which I created on Day One of setting up the machine, then later moved to another volume, which keeps reappearing. I've tried everything I could find online to make it delete, but it keeps on coming back!

Today has been much more productive. I woke early and updated that BIOS - all fears, when identified must be talked with, reassured or faced. Then I recorded some new vocals: backing vocals for Art For Me (20 layers/takes recorded for the layers); some very short vocals for the Kiss Me song to fix a few difficult-to-make out words. The hardest part to sing of any song is the very first syllable. The timing and pitch have to be spot on, but also the attack has to be just right, not blasting with joy at the start of the song, not too gentle and running to catch up either. One trick is to sing something first and lead into the 'start'.

I also recorded some verse vocals for Cotan. These work better in the breathy and monstrous vocoded versions, but I thought they might benefit from a layer, and they sound alright. It's an artistic choice rather than an aesthetic/mixing one. As the chorus and climax really benefits from the real voice, it makes sense to include one in the verses.

Singing is different from any other form of instrument training for many reasons. Several instruments do need muscle training. A piano doesn't need muscles, just muscle memory, like proverbially 'riding a bike'. A guitar needs a little bit of strength, and probably other string instruments, but brass probably needs more. Vocals are unique in that the singing muscles are delicate and difficult to instruct by others. Training for an hour each day will give you good arm muscles in a month or two, but that's too much for singing, which requires gentle a repeated training over many months and years. There are more than muscles involved, but also vocal folds which don't always like being trilled and flapped, and the the muscle control memory needs simultaneous training, as does breathing. I find it fascinating.

This afternoon I've worked on the music to the song 'The Legend Of Zurbaran', which is largely complete. I love the odd chords to this. It sounds finished already.

I've watched a few videos from the local recording studio, Arena Studio, very interesting and engaging. Chris Cragg talked about songs with hundreds of tracks - how mind boggling! I don't think I've ever extended to 50 in my 15 years of music making, but 'layering' can be somewhat non-linear in Prometheus. My tracks are always organised for utility/ease of use rather than anything else. Prometheus shows 18 tracks on screen at once, and the majority of my songs and pieces of music, from the symphonic to pop, fit in those 18.

The Golden Age Continues

I thought last night on how to tie up the album, ideas to unify it and pull it together thematically. This is always a priority for me, but this is difficult to do for a 'standard' 12-track album (and bah to the eternal popularity of vinyl! We may be forever trapped with the restrictive structure of two 22-minute-movements!). With Nightfood (the two halves) and Cycles & Shadows, (the two halves), and the EP works, thematic unity seems easier. I came up with plans to use the Lace Maker theme as some sort of linking theme, making the whole album about fate, but many of the extant tracks end quite naturally and well on their own. I recorded a few Lace Maker-themed sections in different instruments, but they aren't yet useful...

Today I revisited Autumn's Shadow. It was a simple song of harp and vocals and not much else. It needed more, some image, location, so I've added a turned page at the start, and some rain, rain beyond the window, and a storm later, plus more strings and backing generally. The fake-sounding flute lead has been switched for a harpsichord, which ties it to Girl Reading a Letter as well as fitting in the mix better.

I've made a few tiny changes to other tracks, a change to the synth sounds in The Girl with the Pearl Earring, and adding more bass drums.

Then some initial work on cover concepts. I always had in mind my The Art Of Painting (and Vermeer's!), so produced this initial idea:

The grey areas represent time before and time after, so the coloured zone is a visual 'golden age'. One of my goals must be, though, to be a little different. My covers can't be too samey. As with the tracks, I ask: What does it have? What does it lack? What is the best part? What is the worst part? How much contrast is there? What images does it conjure, what emotions, and how do they fit in with the whole? And I ask the same of the whole too. I want to touch all areas with maximum contrast, while recognising that that goal itself is a limitation.

As with atoms, we can't attain perfection, only dance around it, which is why quantity and variety is important.

After that, I worked on The Myth of Zurbaran track. The album is about 28 minutes. I need a first track (an overture?), and perhaps interspatial material to pull it together. One key for creativity and progress is to very specifically know your aims, and if these are too vague, break them into steps, or ask alternative questions. "I want to learn to play the piano" is too vague. "I want to learn to play Beethoven's 3rd Piano Concerto" is instantly easier, the music is there waiting, the steps and vison of attainment clear.

Prometheus 3.05

A relatively steady day, more relaxed than usual, working out plans for The Golden Age, and looking towards two other album projects. I found a fixed (hopefully) another bug in Prometheus, an accidentally double-initialised label in the Sample List, taking it to v3.05.

Randy Multisamples, 50 Words For Snow

A day of programming yesterday. I wanted to change two things about my Multisample plugins. The first change was that the correct sample is chosen based on its pitch (which is how it should be) but if a note is bent across a boundary between two samples it will switch, starting the new sample from the start. This is rare, I've got used to not bending multisamples, but I thought that it shouldn't be too hard to choose which sample to play only when a note is triggered, not every cycle (and this would be faster too). So I programmed that.

I also added a new 'Randy Multisample II' plugin which lacks the optional random delay (these, in practice, are rarely useful, so it can be more efficient to have an engine that lacks the delay and therefore buffer) and added a random pitch option. Before this it was not possible to detune Multisamples at all, except by using a different Pitch Modulator engine which applies to the whole sound, not just one engine. The rationale behind the new engine is that it would allow a slight, random pitch change to each note, which when layered with many others will sound more natural.

This is because real life is a dance of high-speed random events which are averaged out, or quantised, by our minds to produce reality. CGI, Computer Generated Imagery, in films looks awful. The movement looks really fake, even in the latest and most expensive films. It works best when non-natural objects are animated, like the toys in Toy Story, or for machines; plus, the audience suspends belief when confronted with it. We all know it's fake, so don't care that it looks fake, it's just a story. After 40 years, CGI still looks terribly unrealistic, from Star Wars, to Lord of the Rings, to Avatar II, and one reason is that real life is an amalgam of lots of hyper-fast random movements which are quantised into an average by our perception. The CGI simply picks the average, so all of the motion looks too smooth, too liquid, and unrealistic (of course, this applies to appearance as well as motion; this random dither is a universal attribute of existence).

All aspects of reality, not just imagery, are a dance of random motion and its quantised average. Atoms themselves dance around an average and never rest on what is 'correct' because that mathematical perfection is infinite, which is necessarily beyond the scope of reality.

The programming was something of a distraction. It annoyed me that my source code is now huge under Visual Studio 2022 due to 'IntelliSense'. The plugin code is about 4MB - and that includes all of the old and unused prior versions of the code, but the whole project can be 400MB! - one hundred times bigger due to look-up database tables that Visual Studio builds to (so-called) 'help'. I don't want any of that, but I can't switch it off for this project, only for ALL projects, and even then it's not clear if this will reduce the project back to a reasonable size. The odd thing is that these tiny plugins are now way bigger than the whole of Prometheus itself, when their code is but one small page per plugin. They really need to add the option to disable IntelliSense per-project. I don't need it.

In the evening I listened to Kate Bush's 50 Words For Snow, which was as sleepy, achingly sleepy, so achingly boring, as I remember. It does have a mood; that of a late-night, drugged-up jazz club. The poetry is as good as ever but everything takes about three times longer than it needs to be and there is close to zero drama, or variation in tempo, pitch, chord. Beethoven's Late Quartets are hummable pop tunes by comparison.

I've finalised the words and tune to The Legend of Zurbaran, which continues the idea of inspirational artists, like van Gogh, being inspirational because they can be copied and bettered, rather than as guides for one's life. Of course, this isn't exactly true - there are many realities to 'inspiration'; the best of which is one who simply makes great things that enhance the world and our souls; but it's a good enough viewpoint for a song. The tune switches to an F-minor and F-Major improvisation for the central words part.

Song Progress

Great and full day today. Wok early and recorded vocals for Go To Bed And Miss Me, Autumn's Shadow, and again for Tycho Brahe. Go To Bed is fun, though I don't have a plan of what to do with the song. The close backing harmonies work particularly well and I expect I'll use their technique in other tracks. The many backing vocals needed at least 4 layers, so this took a lot of time alone.

I'm still learning and growing in vocal production and singing. I noted today, with some glee that when adding the difficult solitary vocals to Autumn's Shadow that they fitted rather well, and that the synth flute stood out as the worst part of that song... I haven't got a real flute. Even the synth flute is better than none, it's melody is important.

I also started the composition and sequencing for a final(?) Golden Age song called The Myth of Zurbaran, about a painter dying in poverty on the street. I'd heard of this fate applied to Zurbaran (via Dali perhaps?) but Wikipedia has burst the bubble of this story, so the song becomes a myth. The music is interesting and words are rather touching, however, so I'll include the song. Musically, the verses fall in semitones, a bit like the old 'What Goes Up' song, but also with shades of that 'Lunatics' song by Pink Floyd.

The chords cycle oddly, and I had (or have...) trouble getting back to the verse which starts in C-Major, but the 'chorus' (if you could call it that) explodes effortlessly into B-Major and F#-Major, so I have the idea of shifting back to C using G# as an intermediary. The sketch for the backing is, so far, piano and strings in the style of Calling Mister Wilson.

I'm feeling much more myself; positive, even joyous today. The difference an early morning and a day to sing can make.

Go To Bed And Miss Me

A somewhat rubbish day, I haven't felt like doing much, or at least I'm so torn between ideas, and at the end of many of the Golden Age tracks, that I've hit the standstill of infinite possibility. In such circumstances I keep working at something, reading, watching, listening, seeking inspiration. This is the minimum of work... searching. Inspiration is data; in particular incomplete data which you may want to complete. I've read about Kenny Everett after watching some of his television programmes. How alike we are in many ways, even my love of radio, but unlike him I've very rapidly given up trying for anything like a job there. He should have become an artist earlier!

At about 4pm I wrote a song with a bouncy rhythm. In mood it has elements of Beatles songs like Maxwell's Silver Hammer and When I'm 64, and Mercury's Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon, and a sped-up Daisy Bell. The melody seems like something eternal that's always been around but (I think!!!) it's all new. I've put together a simple sequence and the song feels finished - though not remotely connected with painting.

Go To Bed And Miss Me

Kiss me.
Go to bed and miss me.
I'll miss you. (I will miss you)

Sleep tight
all alone and all night
like I do.

Dream of wishing at the old well.
Dream of kissing at the school bell
like you wanted to.

Meet me
somewhere in the street-y
here will do. (anywhere will do)

Maybe
we could spend the day in
love with you.

I could spend the day
in love
with
you.

Burns Night Dream, Some Music Progress

I dream of being taken to Burns Night by the poet John Lindley. The event is in a location in a Wistaston housing estate. We commented that all of the houses look the same and that it's easy to get lost. I entered a Primary School, which, I think, was to be the location of the event, but John wasn't there, he was lost somewhere in the school, trying to find us. The children were gathered around and I told them about John and that they must get ready.

I'm feeling artistically lost, frustrated and unsatisfied, wanting to do more. I've made good progress on music, but it's slowness doesn't feel creative enough. I work best when I'm working on several things at once and this simple and short album of simple a short songs is taking weeks, too long.

I've finalised the new melody to Tycho Brahe but now the guitars feel wrong somehow and the vocals, of which I recorded a guide today, need work. I can't sing here due to my parents. When collecting from Ty Pawb, the wonderful lady there said that she remembered meeting my parents when they went to see the exhibition, and mentioned that my mother said that my painting there was not her favourite. I'm reminded than none of my paintings are her favourite, nor any of my music or books. She dislikes all of my art and often tells me how much she dislikes my work. Of course, I hide all of my creations from her, yet this doesn't stop the comments, and I know that this is her nature, and that she was as critical and unsupportive of my work with computer games too, but I'm also aware that, on some level, she doesn't mean it, and will on occasions completely forget previous criticisms and utterly reverse her position with no recollection at all about ever seeing or hearing the work.

Perhaps the Tycho vocals could be sung an octave higher. The climax of this song is the guitar solo; this works, but the song as a whole doesn't push me or prove enough.

I recorded an instrumental solo in synthesized electric piano for Art For Me. This has taken ages and about eight different versions in different instruments.

Peter came for his lesson as usual, and then I worked on Autumn's Shadow, which is a gentle song with a medieval quality because of the instruments of stroked harp chords, strings, and flutes. It's as much a poem as a song, and artistically interesting because of it's difference. The solo is sequenced and based on the gaps between the notes of the main melody.

Musical progress is achingly, frustratingly slow, yet the best I can do it work every hour of the day, and that I do.

Tycho Brahe Reworked

A busy day, started by updating the album pages on my website and Cornutopia Music, to list albums by year in a matrix format, like the artworks. This has pros and cons. For a small number of albums, a list can look better, and having just one in a year can look empty, but it is simpler. Generally, the fewer links and pages, the better.

Then spent over an hour printing the new maintenance manual for this PC. I may need a hard copy, as if it breaks, I won't be able to read it on it. Printing double sided was problematical as the paper tended to stick. About 6 pages were wasted!

Then lots of work on Tycho Brahe. The dour and morose middle section is now gone. It dropped a semitone in key but it sounded too ugly, as well as not having much meaning or feeling, so I've rewritten it. Now the song has an AABCBA structure where the C is a solo, and the chords grow through E-minor, F-Major, G-Major, E-Major then into an A-minor guitar solo. This then breaks into the old D-minor part in 'outer space' which reflects the start of the song. In the first draft, the whole solo was in D-minor, so the break made more sense, and that led into the third verse as it does the opening, but now, it breaks into a second refrain. Well, in music anything goes; we can learn and accpet anything new or startling. I could drop the D-minor section, but some 'peace' of outer space is beneficial to the mood and the concept.

The new words enjamb over the lines which adds more excitement and tension than before. Here are the full words so far, with the new middle sections:

Tycho Brahe The Noseless Astronomer

Hey, I'm Tycho Brahe noseless astronomer.
Wide brimmed, copper skinned I pose like a foreigner.
Nobody knows what it's like to have no nose like me.

I gaze at the moon an orb of serenity.
I look at the stars and feel them look back at me.
What can I find in the universe to unwind with my mind?

Inside my hall of stone,
beneath the golden claws
of dome, I seek to un-
derstand his plan, I seek escape.

(solo)

And I, in vaulted space
and free from Earthly care,
my body whole, my mind
at peace, can see God's eye
watching us live and die.

Brush my starry eyes with dust of eternity.
See my many wives they pour love all over me.
Count up to ten, take a telescope to bed then, my friend.


The 'watching us live and die' line was originally 'watching the world go by' but the new line has more emotion and drama, a reflection of the casual lack of care of this God; perhaps a sentiment echoed from Star Maker, which I've just finished reading, although the Star Maker there wasn't as cold as I expected. Apparently, C. S. Lewis didn't like the casual uncaring nature of the Star Maker, but he's a far nicer deity than Philip Pullman's.

The guitars are rather loud; grungy, clanky. I recorded a great guitar solo but forgot that the music bleeds on into D-minor, so had to cut off over half of it. The physicality and time of guitar recording is tiring and tedious, even for these small sections.

I've put in so much work, too much, to this song, which was partly sequenced before I even started on this album (which is now called The Golden Age). The problem with this song, and Girl Reading a Letter, and Franz Halz, is that they were written before I sang, and are set at a poor pitch. For me, perhaps most male singers, the high C area sounds best, with a transition at the E above. Lower pitches may suit a mellow song, but not a rocky or powerful song. Art For Me really benefits from being written with vocal pitch in mind.

Well, I'll need to record the new Tycho vocals another day. I'm unusually exhausted now. I didn't sleep well, worried about life, money, stomach pained as usual; yet I'm full of joy, enthusiasm, ideas, lust for life. On we charge.

The Power Of Filing

I've spent today and yesterday rearranging the galleries on my website; it's the start of a year, so a good time to do this. Historically, my website had a page-per-year for each creative endeavour: a page for paintings for the year, a page for poems for the year. People complained that they couldn't find certain paintings, so I've gradually grouped them into 'periods', though this started originally by genre or something similar. Poems always remained per-year, but the number of shortcuts and the size of the menus grew and grew...

But I realised that I had more zeal to create when I had a nice blank year to fill, and it felt nice, as well as neat, to look back at each year and see (hopefully) progress, or at least memories. Gradually my website if more of a tool for me, a personal museum, rather than an advertising space - though one could argue than a museum is a sort of advertising space for art... but still. The website is more a catalogue than a game. Even in a museum, it's hard to find the work you want.

So, I've spend the days rearranging the paintings by year again. This normally takes an age. I have, to date, 1339 visual artworks filed, so looking at each one to work out the date has the potential to take months. I now have two master files for these; one diary index (as detailed in my book, How To Organise Your Computer Files - you've read it, of course?) and one simpler list of one artwork per line. The latter is much easier for finding the year, so I've spent today typing a year for each artwork.

I've used the year of completion (obviously) not the year I started a painting, but a couple still have ambiguities... the Starcrossed Escape was repainted a little in 2021, but painted originally in 2012. I can't list both, so chose 2021, and the same for Love Is Dead. I've also included many more works that are catalogued; including studies and early painting which were, for me, not up to scratch and which I threw away. Perhaps it seems odd that I'd catalogue and photograph a work, then throw it away, but space is limited, and it would be even more foolish to throw a work away without recoridng it! Then it would be totally useless - the aim is, after all, to learn from mistakes, not toss things away like a wailing baby.

There are one or two paintings which are sexually explicit, however abstracted. I'll keep painting them if my unconscious requests it, I won't censor my ideas, but I've excluded those from public eyes to keep everything reasonably family friendly, partly because search engines will increasingly flag and block such things, even the finest of art.

So now, the painting galleries are grouped by year once more, and the poems/songs too are divided in decades, so I should now have room for the next 100 years of art. I may do the same for music and will work on this tomorrow.

2020 remains a year without paintings. If I'd had this format on the website then I'd probably have painted something to stop the page from being blank - thus the power of this format is revealed.

Ty Pawb Collection

Collection day today for the Ty Pawb Open. I must paint more. Meanwhile, my desk is full of notes for the next album, which I think will be called The Golden Age.

Back To Music, Van Gogh and Inspiration

I wanted to charge into work, and generally I've got some things done, perhaps even more than I'd hoped for, but I feel strangely unsatisfied.

I started by updating my website, naming the oil galleries by year. Then back to the Painters album beginning with new vocals for Cotan. The sound quality with the low sung vocals was odd, so I wanted to experiment with the breathy vocode sound that I originally envisaged (enauded?) when the song came to me, so I recorded some new vocals via the MicroKorg, and they seem to fit wonderfully. The higher pitched (an octave up) sung vocals are great in the chorus but the transition from 'monstrous' to those was too strong, so I've layered some 'monstrous' vocals over the chorus.

This was the first time I've used the PreSonus Studio 26c to record from an external source. It was relatively painless, and today the device has recalled after each sleep. I had some odd clipping distortion for the first few takes and could not work out why, as the level was 50% of the max, far from a peak. I think it was down to the sound itself, perhaps some distortion was set on the Korg, because other sounds were very clean, and different combinations of source signal volume and recording level didn't improve things, but I'm suspicious because it sounded like intermittent hard clipping, not anything Korg would design.

Oddly, the 'Virtual 1/2' input - supposedly a full-duplex simulation to allow recording of the sound card's output, does not work. It remains silent at all times. I can't get any software to detect any sound from that input while playing back. This is annoying as I could have used this for Spectrum Analysis. Also, the sound has stuttered, tiny amounts, once or twice when recording in SoundForge, and in Prometheus.

It's amazing that this PC, in some ways, is performing worse than my 11-year-old machine. I have 8 times the memory, 50% more hard drive space and 14-times faster CPU power (hah!), yet, in most software it's only 2-3 times as fast, and some aspects are slower even for this virgin Windows installation. I absolutely blame Windows 11 for this. At times this computer 'upgrade' seems to be more of an expensive same-grade... or even downgrade.

After Cotan I recorded some vocals for Rembrandt again. I didn't really need too, each take is very similar, but I wanted to restart after the week of break and the song was not completed. These were fine and subsequently included. I played a simple guitar solo with 'clean' electric guitar for this. This simple and gentle song is mostly finished. While listening to it, I worried that the music is too simple, too gentle, too romantic. I had an image of singing this in a pub and having insults thrown at me for being boring. Of course, the song is valid, and is how I imagined (all of those years ago). Such self-judgements are really useful. I keep wanting more rock-and-roll in the album...

Then I worked more on Tycho Brahe, which is an odd song but I can't say why. Part of it is very conventional, but it seems to be missing something and my change of key in the middle to make it interesting seems to make it ugly and morose (of course, that also makes the ending brighter, just as the horrible noise of She's So Heavy breaks joyously into Here Comes The Sun on the CD version of Abbey Road - the highlight of the entire album, and utterly lost on the vinyl version). It has something of the mood of 'We Will Rock You' but, only the verses, not the rhythm which is the whole point of that song.

I thought recently about van Gogh, that people find him 'inspirational'; that 'inspirational' people are those who we think we can copy but do it better. We like van Gogh because we think we can be like him, but be better, be more successful, perhaps, yes, even paint better. Nobody is inspired to copy van Gogh and be worse, be more mentally ill, be more of a failure, or paint worse. So, is inspiration merely the glimpse of opportunity to improve by copying, by stealing? Often, yes. Beethoven and Bach are inspiring because they can't be copied. This, perhaps, is why Beethoven seemed to lack a great following by composers while alive - he didn't want to copy or be copied. He was too antiosocial and beyond musical conversation with other artists, contemporary trends. I feel like this. Of course everyone is inspired by dead artists, but again because they are easy to beat, are no threat.

I must move to complete the album, need a title and a cover. The album is now 25:21.36 long - too short, but Autumn's Shadow is yet to add, and as I've said I need more 'oomph'. I have a few ideas for other tracks. I can't waste too much time and life on this, but am pleased with its progress, its lessons so far. I must move onwards though. To stand still is to die.

Drive Fitted At Last

Hurrah! The new PC is now up and running. I sawed off some of the L shaped plastic angle, which kept the tray springy while allowing it to fit, and an 18-inch/450mm left angled SATA cable arrived and worked to plan. I've been in virtual limbo, not having easy access to the old hard drive, but now I'm up to speed.

The only remaining niggle is the powering off of the PreSonus Studio 26c USB device, which sometimes doesn't wake up after sleeping. Sometimes it does. I don't think it's connected with Windows's auto-powering off of USB devices, as it seems to misbehave even when the two power-off options are disabled (one in the Power Settings, one in the USB Settings in the Device Manager), and the card can sometimes restore correctly when the power-off settings are active. Perhaps the 'awake' but unused time is causing the problem, but that would be odd. I will disable them for a few days, to see if that helps.

With my Lexicon Alpha, I could run a script: "cmd.exe /k devcon restart *VID_1210*" to reset the device, where VID_1210 was the codename of the device. DevCon isn't in Win11, and the replacement, pnputil, doesn't permit wildcards (bah). This is a little problematical as there seem to be several device handles for the Studio 26c; one active starting "TUSBAUDIO_ENUM\VID_...", and two inactive starting "USB\VID_...".

Oddly, after a failed restart there IS a 'working' PreSonus Studio 26c in the device manager, but as a USB device, not a soundcard. I tried to reset this with:

pnputil /restart-device "USB\VID..."

Stating its address. I needed an Administrator Level Command Prompt for this, but after the reset it (amusingly) said I needed to restart Windows to finish the reset - which rather defeats the objective!

Another option is to unplug and re-plug in the USB cable, but I don't want to do that. I would love a USB on/off switch but, oddly, none seem to exist. Some do which switch the power line off/on, but I can't find any which switch power and data. For now, the only option is a Windows restart, or avoiding Sleep. Bizarrely, this PC is faster to shut-down and switch on again then to Sleep/Awaken.

Apart from this minor niggle, I'm ready to start work. I've compiled a new version of Prometheus with very minor changes to update the code to VS2022 standard; as I said it seems to be a bit faster as well as double in size. I could also recompile the plugins for a similar effect, but that will take all day.

I must rest tonight, refocus, and make plans. Step one is to complete the painters album...

The Ebb and Flow of Being

Being ebbs and flows like a swarm of objects in an ocean, like the teeming wax in a lava-lamp, because we are composites made from cells. We are one being, looking at our others, then another looking back. We are all of these at once, but only acutely aware of one at a time due to the flow of language. Perhaps when we stop in the middle of a sentence, lost, another being interrupts. In a dream, we are all of the characters, and when awake we are all of our characters, not merely the one perceiving the others. These others can, and perhaps must ultimately, reflect actual other beings, objects or instances in the world; our thoughts and impressions of a friend reflect that friend as part of us. In this way we are all symbiotic with reality, rather than observing it, and like our being in the swarm of our cells, we are a being in the swarm of all cells and all atoms of data in the universe.

Hard Drive Fitting, Prometheus Musings

Still in work limbo, I need to fit this new drive before I can actually work with confidence and efficiency. I'm impressed by Visual Studio 2022. Visual Studio was always one of the best things Microsoft have done (that and the Intellimouse). My VS2013 code compiles without a hitch, and the resulting program seems to be faster (though 50% bigger).

The plastic drive caddy for the new computer arrived, surprisingly, at 12pm, but there were problems. I realised after a few minutes of trying to jam it in that the hard drive is supposed to be mounted upside down; most unusual.

It also won't fit, it really needs to be jammed in. The plastic 'springs', at the back are just too stiff, and I didn't want to force it to click into place. The fact that its upside down means that a normal SATA cable won't fit, you need a relatively rare 45cm 'left angle' cable. I have 6 SATA cables but none would fit, and without the ability to click the caddy into place, I'll not be able to close the case.

So, to try to address the caddy problem I've used a clamp and hairdryer to bend the prongs on the back of the caddy, trying to soften the plastic and bend them inwards. The similar things on my ACER PC worked like a dream, but because they were not as tight could vibrate and buzz so I needed to attach blu-tak to stop it. Ideally, the thing would be engineered well enough to hold snugly but not impossibly tightly. At the moment I can't tell if my bending has had an effect. If I still can't fit the thing I may have to saw the plastic prongs off the back of the caddy to a greater or lesser extent, to effectively customise the shape to fit (somewhat ironically, as this caddy IS designed for this exact case).

The loose power cable which is usefully nearby, did fit - phew (though untested). This is one small mercy.

Other PC niggles:

The PreSonus external USB Sound Interface is working ok, and will survive a sleep and wake, but has now, twice, vanished upon waking, requiring a PC restart (unplugging and re-plugging the USB cable would probably also reset it, this was the case for my old Lexicon Alpha which needed restarting after every sleep. I created a batch command to do this, to re-initialise the device and avoid all of that plugging and unplugging as it was starting to wear out the port and cause crackle).

My first thought that the vanish was connected to me pressing buttons on the interface while the PC was sleeping, as I'd done this when it failed to reappear. I did it again today experimentally and things seemed to work, though. It may be the Windows USB auto-power suspend options, though it's odd if those options are applied while the PC was sleeping (perhaps it can dream).

Turning on the desk lamp could also wake the sleeping PC. The PC and the lamp are power-spike protected and on two different mains plugs. I hypothesize that the lightbulb sends out an EM pulse of some sort, causing the network card to wake the PC. The network card was indeed the cause of the problem, which was fixed when I disabled its ability to wake the computer.

I don't want to do any proper work until the drive is fitted.

I have given some thought on how to upgrade Prometheus for higher quality audio formats. For me, 44100hz 16-bit is good enough (to listen to - I can render out higher even now with relative ease), but I worry that future hardware will stop supporting it because this is the lowest quality some hardware now. Upgrading the playback frequency isn't too difficult. I'd have to resample all samples and modulators from 44100 to the target frequency using the same anti-aliased code I use for sample playback. The plugins may need recompiling too, as 44100 is considered to be 1 second. That's all. Upgrading the bit resolution is easier as everything in the program itself is IEEE Float based like most (all?) DAW software. When things are back to normal, I'll add a few basic defines to prepare for a possible update, but I'd rather not do it. 44100hz 16-bit is big enough - I have 1GB of audio waves in that format, and in terms of sound quality it's enough. Sometimes though, hardware and Windows can force an 'upgrade', so it would be prudent to make some contingency plans.

For my music, Prometheus is everything to me. My 1000+ lifetime song output from the last 20 years are in its format and I don't use any other software. Nobody but myself uses it, and after my death probably nobody will ever use it either, making me an even more unique and eccentric musician. Every sound I make is made by my own software, algorithms, samples - well, except when I record something live from an instrument! but even then the recordings are played back in solely by Prometheus as base waves.

So, the day has been nothing but musing and trying. I feel like a lazy philosopher, a tinkerer - not a working artist. I ache to produce, do. But I must be patient, prepare, plan.

Cotan Vocals

I remain in a creative limbo, waiting for my hard drive to be fitted into George. The cradle is due to arrive on Saturday.

I have got audio capabilities now though, so today recorded the, or some, vocals for Cotan. In my mind, the song was strangely whispered. The vocals start at a low D, so can be sung low or high, so I've sung the intro low and the chorus an octave up. It's more of a jump than a growth, but the effect is something like the Alphaville song Victory of Love. The mixing isn't easy as the low vocals are in the same mid-range as the backing, there is little treble, so I've boosted their volume and distorted them to add some fuzz, which mimics the sound of my original concept. I've also added a 10ms pitch-wobbled version of the vocals too, which sounds a bit like an evil Dalek, but it seems to work.

The strange limbo of not having full access to the computer, and the stress of fitting a new drive, which won't happen until mid-Saturday, is stopping a lot of work. I can't update my website, events for the year, programming, or complete the 2022 backups.

At times I barely feel like an artist; out of touch with the world, irrelevant because I'm not working. I must use this time to prepare and foster plans.

Promethean Steps, and Visual Studio 2013 vs 2022

I'm still in a sort of limbo while I set up my new computer system.

Much of today was wasted in panic when I noticed that Prometheus didn't work. The DirectX8 CreateSoundBuffer call for the secondary buffer (the main buffer used for playback) failed with a DSERR_BADFORMAT... it shouldn't have. The format was 44100hz, 16-bit, stereo, a very basic format and the same format as the Primary Buffer, which Created fine. I tried many formats. 24-bit was my first call, also failed, and 32-bit (the PreSonus doesn't even support 32-bit, but it was worth a try), and 4 channels, and other bitrates. All failed. At this point I was in partial despair. The main reason I bought a new PC was for music, and my music must be made with Prometheus. This is the downside to programming your own software; you must maintain it yourself.

Then I noticed that the sound in my games also failed. This was good news, because it showed that it wasn't anything special about Prometheus AND that it wasn't a widespread fault because my games tend to work (and have been tested) on many computers. Someone online mentioned that their USB sound device also failed for some games, and the responder was to update the driver, so I simply installed the latest driver and, in an instant, it all worked. I should have done this from the outset - that's obvious now, but my first thought was that it was my fault not Windows' - but it was indeed the latter. Strange that the Studio 26c driver that Windows 11 automatically installs is neither DirectX8 compatible or Microsoft Authenticated, but there we are.

Prometheus compiled under Visual Studio 2013 rendered Art For Me in 37.444 seconds (yes, it was very slightly faster the other day, these tiny changes are to be expected). The exact code compiled under Visual Studio 2022 rendered the song in 35-point-something seconds which is nice. I've also noticed that I've not used a high-res icon for the program, so will rectify that in the next build.

Here is the look of the program in the new (rounded-edged) Windows 11:

I need art goals now. I normally retreat from creating at the end of a year, as I file the year and formulate plans, calculate my art-attack on the world; but this year I've been in an anxious period of work on this expensive new tool. I feel unfocused. I do need to complete the album about painters, of course, but then what? My plan for last year was to create and release an album each month. I didn't manage that, but I did a lot in music, and it was worth it; I learned a lot about music production, notated lots of my music for the first time, made lots of software and musical capability upgrades (a new synth!) and more...

When I feel at the top of mountain, I must remember that I'm at the bottom of a far greater, unseen mountain. What is difficult is good. What is scary is the thing worth doing, and worth doing first.

Shops and Tedious Computer Tasks

An anxious night. I feel in creative limbo. I'm keen to get this new complete setup completely.

The morning was spent out, exploring shops around the ghost-town of Crewe which gradually grew into life like a concrete petri-dish activated with a droplet of shoppers. I bought a recorder for £2.99, and some gifts for next Christmas!

Then a productive day of setting up the new computer, which is mostly complete. My biggest need is for a cradle to move the existing hard drive to the new machine. It's always a worrysome moment to open up the case.

I've not been creative in days, but I've at last started to sort out the annual tasks. The start of the year is a time to examine the past one and formulate some plans for the next. This is done on the computer, so I've, at least, copied over these text documents for temporary absorbtion.

The main job was to install a new USB sound device, a PreSonus Studio26c. Installation was so good, so painless, that I didn't realise it had occurred at all. It's similar to my existing (old) Lexicon Alpha one, so I'm all ready for recording. I can now make music.

I must start to think about creating... but I still feel in flux as the complex setting up process isn't complete, and won't be until I can transfer that essential drive. Onwards we march.

New Year, New Computer

An unexpectedly busy few days. I'm now working on a new PC which arrived unexpectedly on the 30th and so needed lots of setting up with great anxiety.

My first new machine since 2009. I always smile at Moore's Law at times like this. I remember when, in optimism, they said that computers double in speed each year, then it became every 18-months, and now apparently every two years. In 13 or 14 years then, this new PC should be between 64 and 128 times faster than my old machine - ridiculous! My old PC has an Intel E8400 3.00Ghz Quadcore CPU. This one has a spanking new Intel Core i7-12700. Tests by third party CPU-speed measuring websites rather poor scorn on my old CPU, listing it there merely as a comparison of its relative patheticness compared to just about every other processor. The new 12700 is praised and at the top of today's ratings. In the tests there, the new one is 14 times faster than the old one, far from 64 times...

I have many concerns and worries at this major upgrade. All of my software has been made for the old machine, effectively, and compiled on Microsoft Visual Studio 2013, which is also obsolescent, so I've upgraded to the 2022 version. I've managed to import and compile the Prometheus source code with great ease, far more easily than upgrading the Visual Studio 6 files to 2013. I expected this, but was still relieved when it happened. There was a long pause when running Prometheus for the first time, a seeming lock-up/freeze was induced something of a panic moment, but I wondered if it was due to some security issue... Windows 11 is far more paranoiac than Windows 8. I was right, and after a few minutes, everything worked.

I performed a test render of my latest song, Art For Me. On my old PC it took 2:19.554 to render (139.554 seconds), the new PC renders the same tune in 37.093 seconds. This, for me, is a better test of speed, a test in an actual Windows program, not an abstract 'sprint'. So the new computer is 3 or 4 times faster than the 13 year-old one. Fast, but not amazingly so; almost disappointingly slow. So much for Moore's Law.

In other ways it's remarkably similar to my old machine. It's the same size, slightly quieter (joy!) though contains 4 fans. I don't remotely need the new fancy graphics card, but it will do for now. I had little choice. Oddly, if not amazingly, it has two hard-drive bays and they support at most 2TB each. This is actually less than my 2009 PC. My lifetime of very efficient data storage and use, in music (50+ album and single releases), in visual art (all of my 1000+ artworks have 300DPI scans), 300+ videos; totals about 500GB so far. 4TB is, I can envisage, in my range of the next decade. However, one could say that a computer is for use, and that long-term storage could be done externally or elsewhere. External hard drives can be huge, and, as a 64-bit machine, are probably supported up to massive sizes.

The computer didn't come with a hard drive caddy for a new drive (I've spent a fortune on this machine, I would have thought a few bits of plastic enclosure would at least be provided). This means that I can't move over my existing drive, so I'm in an odd limbo and can't do any work for now apart from setting up Windows and installing things.

This is interesting. I've so far just installed Visual Studio 2022 and Windows. This has already resulted in two bugs. One required a reset of the tray notification icons which had become corrupted (this involved an edit of the registry, a switching off-and-on of Windows Explorer, and a restart. An internet search reveals that this is a common problem. Why doesn't Windows have the option to auto-clean the taskbar? Anything to do with the, increasingly massive, registry is nightmarish. Windows is designed so very badly).

Secondly, a Windows Update for a piece of hardware has failed and repeatedly fails. Windows Update is by far the worst (worst and most bug-ridden) aspect of Windows. It's about 100 times slower to update Windows than to update any other program. Failures are so common that I've never, in 15 years, encountered a computer that doesn't fail at some point. Every error code is a useless 'unknown error' - this, and, (and this is the worst part) it forces updates whether you want or need them and is expanding its power over other programs and drivers like a mind-controlling dictator. The graphics card on my old PC, for example, only worked with the oldest driver. Any update to a newer version would cause the card to fail and it was very difficult to tell Windows to stop automatically updating it.

All it needs to do is actually update! Copy over the new versions of things over old - yet this simple task is beyond a 2022 operating system, as it has been beyond any version of Windows.

The biggest change over Windows since the old days (golden ages?) of XP, 7, 8, is security, which, like the over-arching mind-controlling dictator of Windows Update, is gazing over every activity with a massive, and very inefficient, eye. It feels like half of the OS itself is security, the secret police. Inefficiency, yes. I suspect that it's the badly designed, overlapping and paranoiac security systems that have made this PC 4 times faster, not 14, not (ahem) 90.5096 (which is 2^6.5).

It has some good points. The tiny M.2 2230/2280 solid-state drive(s) are amazing. About the size of a stick of chewing-gum, they can hold a TB or more and are so fast that 'starting' Windows doesn't happen. It's there by the time the monitor activates. I've got a new Beetronics monitor, which is expensive, supposedly a Rolls-Royce of monitors, but is a bit rubbish. It's slow to respond, wake or sleep, would not auto-detect a sole input, and requires a remote-control to access most of the options, and it has a base so badly designed that I had to make a new one to stop it tipping forwards. It is solid though - made of metal, and the screen is clear and bright; again, very much like my 2009 one in capability and look. It is, however, 2-inches bigger.

So, this new machine will take up the next few weeks and I remain in an anxious state of flux. Computers cause me great anxiety because so much of my life has been invested in them, and to some extent my entire life's output, as well as current and future living, exists on and by them.

The new year, in other ways, was lovely. Deb has avoided work-contracted Covid (yay!), so we could meet up for the first time since before Christmas. So yesterday was a second Christmas, with an exhange of gifts, Christmas crackers, and a meal with Deb, mum, and dad. We watched the (frankly not very good) Very Muppet Christmas Movie (I am reminded what a sad loss Jim Henson was to the world). We toasted the New Year by playing Auld Lang Syne on two acoustic guitars due to a gift of songs-for-guitar.

2022 was a rubbish year for the world and had ups and downs here, but each year has ups and downs. I (and we) can but learn as best we can, try our best, locate and address problems in a logical and efficient manner, and build paths to better art, better things, aim for the best.