It's the start of a new tax year, so a day of filing and shredding. I store more than just financial records, but greetings cards, presents, competition receipts, train tickets, invitations, event programmes; memories. Sometimes I'll pass this on again, to keep them for long term sentimental value. I have a 'gold box' of life memories where the most important things stay.
This annual filing tends to take all morning, there's a lot to calculate. It's been a mixed year financially, poor really. My finances are so stochastic that even trends are as difficult to read as tea leaves. I divide income and expenditure into categories: visual art, book sales, performances, music sales, games and sound effects, and other (freelance income, and general expenses which cover all categories). I tend to spend the most money on visual art, but that's partly because paint and entering art competitions is expensive, and I've bought things like a ladder system and insurance for the town mural.
Things were better 10 years ago, and earlier. I spent years making games with joy, then in the hope of making money, but that never really materialised and I felt I was doing a job I disliked and getting nothing back, a worst of all worlds. I became an artist with the reason that I'd rather do something I enjoyed for no money than something I didn't, and then I started to make money from the art. This seems to be a pattern, but now I have many plates, new and old, to spin. Some might be more 'enjoyable' than others, perhaps all equally 'enjoyable' or all equally tedious, yet money from any of them as scarce and unpredictable as ever. Reasoning what to do can feel useless, as does feeling what might be best. The key thing is a passion, an irresistible drive. I can feel a few bubbling.
After the filing, I started work on adding guitar strap buttons to the Microkorg:
As luck would have it, and this was amazing because it never happens, the screws that came with the strap buttons were just about perfect, the right pitch, a tiny bit bigger in diameter (probably a metric/imperial difference) and the perfect length! I drilled out a 9mm recess in the wooden sides for the buttons. The self-tapping screws had pointed ends which I filed flat.
The tiny diameter difference in the already tight screws meant that I needed to very slightly enlarge the holes in the Microkorg's plastic sides. I used a tiny drill and moved it a little in the hole to shave off little fragments of plastic. This was enough. Screwing it all together worked.
I tested the synth and it was fine. Actually it was better to play than a proper Keytar would be, as I can use both hands, and access the pitch and modulation wheels. It does look ugly to perform with; big and lump-like, an unattractive top, but as an instrument, it plays well.
Doing so made me realise that I needed better sounds, so I made some new presets in the afternoon. Most iconic synth sounds (from Van Halen's Jump to Gary Numan's Vox Humana) are detuned saw waves with a bit of vibrato, so I made a few. This took a while, of course. I still need to make some cool power-bass sounds, like the 'Hitler In High Heels' bass.
After that, I powered up OctaMED Soundstudio and MIDI-OX, and exported the presets using MIDI. I'm not sure if these SysEx messages work or will ever work, but it's better than nothing to have a backup made like this. The message in both programs was the same length in bytes, 37392, so that's one good sign at least, but it's a bigger number than the Korg manual says.
The mural can't go ahread tomorrow, it's stormy, so this will happen later in the week or the following week. My plan is to do more sheet music, which has zero chance of generating income, but it part of my long-term philosophy of accurate data storage.
