A surprisingly full day given my very poor sleep and initial mood! I started by sending off the penultimate copy of The Flatspace Soundtrack on CD, just one CD is left from the original batch. It dates from 15 years ago or so, so I had to check it hadn't deteriorated.
Then, some small work on Prometheus to fix a mild bug; the renderer would continue when the output file could not be created.
Then I continued work on 'Cat Covid', a song which, like many others here, has been in progress for months or years. This had practically the same tune and feeling as another called 'Rat People'; they were essentially the same with different words. The Cat covid words are surrealistic to the point of nonsensical and whimsical, whereas Rat People was more of a social comment. The latter may have been more of a candidate for a song then, but Cat Covid made me smile and was more different surprising.
After the success of I'm In Love With My Car, I did a lot more work on the arrangement. It's not the mix, not the performance, but the composition and arrangement of a song that makes it good. Perhaps more than frequency room, time room is better, simply moving instruments out of the way to sound them when others are quiet. This has many advantages, such as the ability for a second layer to mimic and complement the first like a conversation, and it helps keep the mix clear. I added a few new parts in the gaps in the melody.
I also re-wrote the music a little. The music was originally almost all A-minor and almost all A too, even in the chorus. I changed it to a more interesting descending series of chords ending in D-Major, and expanded the post-chorus circle of chords. Then set everything out to fill out the full song, and made the organ/pad sound a little distorted. The overall song is something like Gimme Some Lovin' by The Spencer Davies Group, but faster, happier and with more fun in the mood, like J-Pop Spencer Davies (I sense that Spencer/Winwood fans just shuddered with horror).
This has taken all of the dark and dreary day of constant winter rain. There are more decisions to make, but I need to consciously find and make them to make progress.
I experimented a little with spatial placement of the drums by feeding them through a filter, a pan, a delay-pan (Haas), and reverb, then restored the original. The effect was very spatial and made me think that I could unify these into a new effect to simplify the complex chain.
