A slower day today, a time of switching between jobs. Started by more work on the Gunstorm release, contacting the few previous customers.
Then turning towards music and the new album. The only tracks complete are American Lawyer and Excessive Consumption Has Laxative Effects, though there are a few others in near-complete state that are candidates: Go To Bed And Miss Me, the new Rock And Roll Is King track (which lacks vocals and a solo) and Thinking About The Cats I Used To Know. Those are all secondary possible songs.
The song I worked on today is Cat Parasites. It began as a morose piano melody, then explodes into a more lush arrangement of piano and strings with drums, something like Wuthering Heights or a Carpenters production.
One odd thing about is the tempo. The live piano flows oddly in Romantic swells, but I've made this the marker for the tempo. For most sequencers, this may cause problems. One can line up parts with specific piano notes, perhaps gazing at a concurrent MIDI sequence, but that can be a time consuming pain, so I've programmed a feature which adjusts the song tempo in precise jerks so that the patterns of the song exactly match the tempo of the manual piano. It works rather marvellously and makes it easy to add strings, drums, lead or any other parts to a song as though the tempo is fixed and regular, when it's actually ebbing and flowing all over the place.
The chorus has a different (sequenced) tempo again, and then a solo which is even faster. It's rare now to have tempi that change so dramatically, yet this is a crucial part of mood; as in volume. Those are the two key components. This will be hard to get just right, as the tempo and volume/power vary hugely.
