Another sleepless night, but not due to dog barks this time, just uncomfortable. I feel as though my blood pressure is too high.
In the night I wrote two songs, inspired and enthused by Tuesday's open-mic. Both are tropes in a 1950s style of rock and roll and blues, a pair. The lyrics are simple, the tunes even more simple, standard fair, but they fit nicely, are easy to remember and should be enough of a push to improve live performance of this sort of material. I'm unused to playing the piano and singing at the same time. The first time I ever tried it was the Congleton Bob Dylan event, and the second time the recent We Robot performances; so certainly less than 10 songs in a live setting. I'm in a learning phase, my favourite. Exciting.
One song is called, at the moment, Rock and Roll is King, but I know of the E.L.O. song of the same name, so I'd rather avoid that title - yet it seems to be the most appropriate one. The second is called Pictures on my Telephone and is pretty easy to play. The mood is a cross between old style blues (Blueberry Hill, Blue Christmas) and a cowboy drawl or 1930s dance hall. As such, it already feels warm and friendly, fuzzy like an old friend. Here are the words. You'll note as much surrealistic humour as any of my songs:
Pictures On My Telephone
I can't get lonely without you.
When I'm alone I still feel alright
I have your pictures on my telephone
They're all I need at night
When I feel blue
and need you
up you pop
It is a thrill
to see you
I can not stop.
I can't get lonely without you.
When I'm alone I still feel alright
I have your pictures on my telephone
They're all I need at night
I've spent much of the day procrastinating when I should be producing some of these songs, but waking late and feeling tired would limit my capacity for this anyway. I've been procrastinating proactively though. My MODX music stand design has worked well enough, but in live event it's fragile, even a slight brush can make it tumble to the ground. This happened on Tuesday twice, though I caught it the second time. The sound engineer said to use gaffer tape to secure it, but no, never! I hate sticky temporary fixes. Would NASA use gaffer tape? (I ask rhetorically; I know that they did during the Apollo 13 crisis). Still, needing tape is a sign of bad design, so yesterday evening I took to the existing stand with Polymorph to make a tight fit, hopefully one which would 'click' into place. It didn't work.
Instead I came up with a new design using a bolt as a clamp, which should be more stable.
As before, it will fit a variety of 'plates', so will remain flexible. The MDF is old and slightly damp, a poor finish, but it should paint up fine.
My mother, like her father, is a tinkerer and repairer. It's from her I get my desire to fix and improve every design, but her repairs are always ugly, slapdash things. If it uses screws, each screw will be a different size and shape. Each bit of wood would be a different random part, as though the resulting design was made by a magpie. My grandfather had a home-made stepladder where every step was a totally different piece of wood and every step wobbled in a different way. It worked, just (it fell apart in the end, while a workman was atop), but certainly looked 'home made'.
For me, aesthetics are as important as functionality. An item must look beautiful, and in a performance setting presentation is even more important. Why else are pianos made in burr walnut? If I designed a synthesizer I'd make a few changes to current designs: First, the principle would be symmetry, that all controls and modulators would be available on left and right, because a keyboard is a two-handed instrument. Second, it would have a video connection so that a screen could show an image on the back, to the audience. Drums are commonly branded with the band's logo and a synth could easily be so. The cable-infested appearance of the back of most synthesizers seems to be rarely considered by the manufacturers.
