A delivery of art to the Macc Art Lounge in the day. Met the artist Laura Grace and had a catch up with the wonderful artist and arts champion Ché. A delightful morning all round, and I'm excited about exhibiting there again. There have been a few changes to the look and feel of the place that have made a big difference to the look.
The afternoon was spent largely on Snow Business admin. Deb saw the lyric video. There are a few things I'd like to do to improve it even more.
After that, preparation work on my two live performances of this month. These are complex songs. I'll need to work out how much to play live and how much to use backing tracks for. I'll be using my first generation Zoom H4 for audio playback, which has pros and cons compared to the cheap 'Allreli' player I'd used before. Neither device is designed to be easy to use as a playback device. The Zoom instantly flows into the next track, and the controls are fiddly and this makes accidental presses possible. I plan on using the MODX audio input to mix the result, but that too has pros and cons. The main problem is that each MODX sound has different settings and volumes for this input. The audio input is supposed to be part of sound play and generation, not plain mixing. Perhaps external mixing would be better.
'Robot' uses three live parts for different parts of the song, and 'Christmas Smells' two. Of the other From The Mic Stand tracks, two are instrumental, and I'll probably play 'Silicon Carbon Genesis' as a piano and voice track in the manner of Kate Bush or Elton John. I must work out the best options for 'Do You Know Where Your Heart Is?' and 'AI and Celebrity'. The former is particularly highly sequenced and has few vocals too... yet it's a good track and an explosive start to the evening. Perhaps it would work best as a 'mostly instrumental' track in the style of Jean-Michel Jarre.
These live performances are now my key focus for the month.
