A busy couple of days. Updated Prometheus yesterday with more tweaks to the sample trimmer, and then immediately used it on the Fall in Green tune Velvet Gelt. We have several tracks now that have been performed live a few times but not recorded, so I sequenced that and used the live 'accordion' sound I use, with auto-trim and auto-loop making the sampling process all very quick.
Today, more changes to the program, adding separate fade-in and fade-out times for the auto-trimmer, as musical sounds are generally fast attack and slow decay (sounds that gently fade in and suddenly stop feel somehow odd, disturbing, or just too slow).
I then got working on Sunchild, another track that we've performed live a few times. This one is unusual in that it's all (so far) MIDI sequenced, and done in Prometheus, using the complex parameter modulation effects to make the sound swell and fade, and make the tempo ebb and flow too. This method is slower than 'direct' sequencing because I can't hear the results. I type the notes and parameters, then I have to export it out as a MIDI file and reload it externally to play. It's a rare process for me, but the fading timbre of the superb MODX instrument is vital to this track. After an hour or two, it was broadly working.
I made some tweaks to how the parameter modulation controls worked. I've rarely used them and this track is a good test. I also found and fixed a small bug in the MIDI export-to-tempo routine.
The day has been dark and wet, the weather bleak. I won't see Deborah until Saturday, our Christmas day, or perhaps Friday, our Christmas Eve.
I've started to read Making it So, the memoirs of Patrick Stewart. Being poor and northern, I can relate to several aspects of his childhood, and recalled the unique delight of bread toasted on a coal fire. I noted that Simon today almost lives like Patrick Stewart of the 1940s: a coal fire, no hot running water (but an electric immersion heater, rather than Patrick's gas heater), an outside toilet, and other ancient remnants of the mid-20th century.
Though united by a terror of fathers, Patrick seemed to be more boisterous and out-going than my child self. Or was he? Memories - how they can sometimes trick one. Perhaps my child self was boisterous and out-going, supplanted by a silent, fearful and solitary adult. I had no friends or spoke until my mid-30s, but perhaps as a young child I felt part of humanity in a way I've not felt since. I clearly recall, as a child, thinking my parents were homicidal androids who had kidnapped my 'real parents' (who looked exactly the same), and recall not feeling human myself, but an outsider somehow trapped in a their world; and in truth, I never lost this feeling. My name is ancient Irish for 'otherworldly', and at times I think my ancestors were beings from the SÃ, the Celtic Otherworld. At times I feel that part of me lives there in parallel.
An inspiring week.
