A sleepless night, a lack of tiredness for some unknown reason. Awake since 3am, I felt adrift and distracted. Musically I had a couple of standard jobs in the day: to extend I'm In Love With My Car, or try to, and to work on the 'Samurai' solo part for Cat Parasites. I worked on the Car song for a little, but it didn't seem to work. Perhaps the song is destined to stay at 1:49; but I won't give up just yet.
I still felt distant and unmotivated. Rather than work on music, I decided to tidy up Prometheus. I have a few plugins which are outdated now. Basic Pan, Pitch Pan, and Random Pan all have better featured newer versions: Vector Pan, Pitch Pan II, and Random Pan II. I also have the old Oxyverb and Nitroverb reverbs, which have upgraded versions.
Many old sequences use the older plugins. I can keep both new and old plugins, but it's possible to automatically update a sequence, swapping all of the old plugins for new ones. If I did that for all of the existing sequences I could delete the five old plugins. I'll never need or use them again and I dislike the inefficiency of having them around. For the pans, the results between new and old are identical (the new ones are the same but with more functionality), and similar for the reverbs. The upgrade here is not mathematically identical, but very close, the only difference being a literally imperceptible cut to the lowest bass frequencies in the reverb tail.
So, I decided to do this today, upgrading all of the sequences which feature those plugins, and this meant updating over 800 songs created over the past 22 years. The process isn't hugely complex, as Prometheus has the option to program such updates (I must be careful not to corrupt these precious old sequences), and can batch load/save a folder full of songs, but sheer the size of the data makes the process slow and somewhat precarious. I also found a couple of sequences that had even older and not-now-supported plugins, so those also needed replacing.
Overall, this process took all day until 4pm, and much of that time, pacing and waiting for the computer to churn the files. Once done, they needed re-copying over to various places, and the old plugins needed filing away, and Prometheus updating (to v3.30) too.
This felt like pointless work, though it was, I know, an act of cleaning and efficiency which is necessary and important every so often. All grooming can feel unproductive, but it is an important action of life.
Still, this task was something of a distraction from my main job of the Cat Parasites structure. Perhaps, unconsciously, I chose this job to secretly muse on the creative challenge. The songs starts morose, then enters a different zone of sweeping strings. We are clearly, musically, in two worlds. One of action: like Olympian gods we are viewing the victims of the song as we describe them. The music is concrete-y and morose. Then the lush chorus of strings, and a still somewhat lush solo, a steady march of time, like a memory or image sequence. Then another verse... then... the section I'm stuck on.
I've tried at least 8 different variations, violins and flutes, pianos, heavy rock guitars, and hip-hop style drums, but nothing seems to fit. Tonight I had an idea, that the lush solo in D-minor needs to recapitulate here, that that first sequence was a party, and that this later part can continue that narrative in the same chords, a drag race or other exciting rush by the song's protagonists, who are insanely, suicidally dangerous.
It's taken days, perhaps weeks to work out this structure, but I feel I'm ready to start.
