Like so much of 2023, today has been long and exhausting with little to show for it... but yes, I've made progress. I started the day with about 90 minutes of singing high harmonies and layer vocals for 'Someone Else's A.I.' and these sound pretty good, but the song itself sounds thin and tangly, like a metal spider dancing in the back of an old piano.
We've had confirmation of our Fall in Green gig in Nantwich Words and Music Festival, supporting former Poet Laureate, and general all-round great poet Carol Ann Duffy, so I spent an hour or so sharing this exciting news. The website decided to fail! Spelling mistakes and typos decided to leap upon me! And I sent five accidental Tweets with errors in, all strange errors which never normally occur! Such it is with important things.
Then I added the vocals to the song sequence, which itself took another 90 minutes of processing and editing, but this was experimental and later editing was needed (at time of writing about half of my recorded vocals were not used). I wanted the results to sound close and 'tight', so I programmed track volume changes to sharply cut and rise the levels to match parts. This sounded good, but the sparseness of the rest of the song, these tinny digital pianos, didn't help any of it. I used my Watergate plug-in, a noise gate, on stereo samples, and realised that I should really be tracking the volume as one, merging it all, rather than tracking each channel separately.
I created a new experimental plug-in, Watergate II, which did this. For mono samples it works as before, but for stereo (or hexio - Prometheus supports 6 channels natively remember) will now track a chosen volume (average, or left, right, or whatever). I realised that I'll probably ONLY use this from now on. This revelation gripped me and caused a great nervous anxiety: I needed to replace every occurrence of the old Watergate in every sequence! I also noted that my Randy Monotone Samplex plug-in was also slated for replacement, so I bit the proverbial bullet and created a new slew of plug-ins, a new Randy Monotone Sample II (replacing the Samplex) and compiled all 1400 or so song files for analysis. About 85 used the now-obsolete plug-ins, so I isolated those, and created a Conversion Matrix to convert the old to new plug-ins. By 7:30pm it was done (caveat: in my main archive, not elsewhere).
In a way, I'm nearly back where the day started BUT everything is neater now, more efficient. A lot of work is this. Life is about neatness, accuracy, efficiency. Letting things slip into laziness and error is a one-way entropic trip that leads to doom, and ultimately death. All death is a terminal collapse of information - not mere energy weakness (energy is needed for information transmission and storage, not the other way around). Our cells themselves must work to maintain accuracy: Accuracy! The key to life, youth, perfection! So my obsessive compulsions in this regard are not irrational fears like other obsessive compulsions, but a key application of the method of existence. Life exists to defy entropy. The universe is wounded, god is imperfect, and it/he needs us to help, to heal, to repair, to perfect. Like the fish that clean the teeth of giant undersea monsters, humans and all life-forms are the healers and essential assistants of god; not subjects.
