A full day yesterday of recording Christmas Is To Go. When I wrote it, the mood was, in my head, something like Bowie's 'Always Crashing in the Same Car'. In the end it came out quite different.
I've spent quite a lot of time programming yesterday and today as a result of this song. Yesterday because the 90 B.P.M. MIDI import failed; I rounded it down so that an integer value of 666667 divided into 60,000,000 (which is the 'correct' value for 90 beats) rounded to 89. This threw out the timing.
I like the irregular timing of live instrumentation, and I use the piano and the main driver of rhythm and mood for the whole song. Rather than try to fix everything to a regular tempo (no metronomes here!), my tempi are often wildly irregular, and I tie everything to that feeling instead. To do this, I can use the MIDI notes as a guide track, so that the chord changes and time of the notes are not guesswork but exact. In this case, everything was failing, so a little upgrade made the timing round to the nearest beat rather than always down.
I spent today upgrading the EQ tracer. I programmed it a few weeks back, and it makes it easier to monitor the EQ. I had neglected to actually test it, however, and did so today on pure sine-wave 'standard candles'. These tests led to a change of how the relative balance from source to target are calculated.
Both changes are a result of Christmas Is To Go, an innocuous B-Side to a single that I didn't need to make; but this exactly indicates the value of it. These are long term corrections, improvements to my main music tool and way of working. It's been a busy two days working on the song, but worth it for this improvement.
Those benefits aside, it's rather good song in itself. The melody climbs in an odd way, and it's this which appealed to me as I wrote it (in my head the chorus also climbed A to B to C; that may have been just too atonal, but for whatever reason, when I played it, I automatically played the more conventional A-minor, C-Major, E-minor, A-minor).
I played all of the piano in one go, so part of the composition was spontaneous. I've no time to notate it all just yet.
Here, by the way, is the cover to the single:
My idea of using a nose-shaped Christmas tree worked better than expected.
