Another sleepless night, loaded with energy and anxiety. Last night, I thought about the formatting for my sheet music, and the mammoth task ahead of scoring other albums. The Fall in Green albums are most urgent, as I often have to perform these. I have some notes (notes of notes) for them, but a full score would be useful, as well as part of my long term ambition, yet with 30 or so albums, it's a full-year's work to transcribe all of them. Still, I must try. I want to do everything.
A good day today though. I started by reformatting my existing scores; 210 scores, with a slightly neater layout. This is a start. Then assembled my new wooden music stand for the MODX, and then lots of singing: vocals for 'Hydroxy-Chloroquinine-Aspartame', 'Fake Plastic Lies', and then a super-ambitious 'Someone Else's A.I'. which was (and is) a complete joy to sing, and so very difficult; it's a gaggle of words at 210 beats-per-minute, barely room to breathe, and very high. My singing is better than ever but I have a long way to go. I must aim for practical improvements; learning to sing from score would be good, but I'm currently too impatient to bother to print the notes. I have noticed that even writing the note letters on the lyric sheet helps with accuracy and that most of the errors are due to not knowing what is coming next.
The resulting music for all of these tracks, when the vocals were added, is sparse. 'Someone Else's A.I.' is only half finished anyway, it needs a lot of layers, and all of these songs could benefit from more vocals too. I generally don't like vocal layering, it can sound inauthentic, but, sonically, usually sounds better. Fake Plastic Lies is, in production, somewhat different from the highly electronic (to my generation 'Yazoo-like') tracks. It reminded me of Bucks Fizz a bit, with its acoustic guitar strums. Their songs were very layered vocally. It's rare for a single line of any of their songs to have one voice.
One other job was filing the recordings for the Midsummer Musical Picnic, our last live event, which Mike had sound-recorded to great effect. This feedback is vital.
