A busy and tiring day, but one of dramas and artistic highs.
The day started with work on my studio light design, floor-standing horizontal lights for photographing my paintings. I couldn't decide whether to make several smaller lights which could be added to as needed, or aim for strips 1 metre wide, and if the latter, how many bulbs to use? I'll start with 2 I think but perhaps drill space for 3 as an experiment to see what works best... the backing will be 6mm MDF, with 3mm boards for the top/bottom reflectors (I cut these today), and polyester drafting film as the main diffuser. I'll need to make two lights in total, a matching pair. A key problem is storage as I'll probably use them only once or twice per year, so they can't be too big, yet they need to be as big as my biggest painting to provide an even light, and need to be as big as my biggest paintings, almost half of the room in length! The legs (the light must be 1M off the floor) will need to be collapsible for storage. I'll use 6mm bolts to fit them and they'll fold like my studio easel.
I drilled some 5mm holes, and did some experiments with bolts and hinges, I'll need M4 bolts/machine screws. Normal screws are not an option for fixing hinges to 3mm wood, and it also makes everything dismantlable and reusable.
Most of today has been spent working on the production and composition of 'A.I. and Celebrity', a song which I didn't particularly like at first and needed a lot of work. Essentially, before now the music was a thudding bass line and some smooth chords. I decided to break up the rhythms into fast and slow, with occasionally breaks of the very-electronic sounding bass into slow bends of the sort which appeared in Commodore 64 tunes a lot; the Zamzara theme by Maniacs of Noise is one example, it broke between fast, and sustained bending bass, and my pulse-wave based bass very much echoes the C64 (as the song is about A.I. and computers, these allusions are intentional).
This sounded okay, but my initial sub-melody/counterpoint sounded morose. Sub-melodies are crucial to a song. It is these, rather than the vocal lead, that stick in peoples' minds and songs that lack them are second rate; but they can so alter the mood that their composition (rather than the method of playing or timbre) is the key driver of the emotion. I started with a strange oscillator synchronised lead, but it didn't work, so I switched it for a pulse wave (which has a stabbing start; a 50ms pitch jump, and a rapid pulse width modulation). It's melody romanced the lead melody. I then added layers gradually to build up energy in this race of a tune which gains energy during the verses. Another instrument, for the chorus, was a bleep that emulated the ancient beep that old IBM-PC speakers used to make upon start-up.
The chorus has an epic feeling, and breaks into a half-speed beat, like a rollercoaster that has hit the peak and has taken off into flight, so timing is used as much as anything to build; swell the mood and drama of the song. This first chorus ends in a slowed down solo, which I played along to live using the MODX, before charging into a second verse, a mid-section, and a second chorus which has a slightly different structure.
At one point I found a bug in Prometheus concerned with the expansion/contraction of notes, so it's been fixed and updated to v3.12. I've also been working more on SFXEngine promotion and update plans.
Onwards I charge!
