A 12-hour day of musical wonders. I wanted to rework the song I Think You Love Me. It sounds okay, but needs more, needs to be better. The original draft version (from over 10 years ago) was actually 'sung' by the computer, a speech synthesizer to sound like the old 'Daisy Bell' demo by Bell Labs from the ancient days. This version kept haunting me, but I didn't finish it because it was devilishly hard work. Today I vowed to redo it.
I started by tuning my ancient speech synthesizer software. So I experimented with pitch values, making the robot say aaah (although, actually this is one vowel sound it resolutely will not make, so I had to use another), and an online pitch detector to find the note, then I created a table of roots in a spreadsheet to calculate the 12 tones:
This was step 1, and was done by 9am. Then I wrote out the song, the notes for each syllable, and durations in seconds. The old version of the song used loops for each vowel, but they sounded poor and took an age to make, so I decided to simply make the synth sing the vowels for longer ('aaaaaaaaaaaaay thiiiiiiiink' etc.). This worked well, so I spent the next 6 hours or so, typing each syllable at the correct pitch and duration, eventually mapping out the entire song.
The results were perhaps less musical and less intelligible than those of Daisy Bell from the 1960s, but rather similar. Overall, I'm unsure if this helps the song at all.
I went out at 3pm to meet Deb, and for a walk, and to get some chicken for tomorrow's soup.
Once back, I paused on the music and started programming instead, changing my chorus/flange/phaser effects. I've had basic chorus and flange effects for some years, and a stereo flange, but I thought that I could add more parameters, separating everything into left and right for more control. I also have a 6-channel ChorusX plug-in, but that has a 500ms delay, and I've been using that because I have no stereo chorus. It can create interesting effects with such a large delay, however.
So, this evening, I've created ChorusS and FlangeS; two stereo versions with full left/right parameters, and replaced ChorusX and FlangeX with slightly better versions, and at the same time upgraded the Phaser to PhaserS too. The programming was trivial; the hard part was finding every use of these plug-ins in old songs and carefully updating those song files. I have 1500-or-so songs, so every update process is large, and extreme caution must be used so that everything upgrades correctly. The new plug-ins can exactly replicate the old ones, but with more functionality, so all is fine there. For now I have Stereo Flange AND FlangeS at once. They effectively do the same thing, but with parameters in a slightly different order, but Stereo Flange is used a lot, several 100 sequences, so I don't want to update those right now.
So, I must complete the work on the songs. The album sound really good so far, my best I think.
My stomach is largely better but I'm not eating much and am probably overworked, but such is poverty and the short fuse of life. I'm not so much slave-driven as driven, a lust for life spiced with a fear of losing that which I have. I'm not a deaf German, but one thing I do have in common with Beethoven is the love of challenge, battle, struggle, and these are key elements of my satisfaction, and goals. The deathly relaxation of contentment is pointless and to be feared, and 'happiness', that transient emotion, as a goal is idiotic; the preserve of fools and animals. Any emotion is irrelevant to the world. The world cares nothing about how I feel, or how Beethoven felt, or how Vincent van Gogh felt on a particular Sunday afternoon. Only actions matter.
