Mixing Tips

Final balancing work on the album, though I can't proof it, or even listen to it properly, as I still can't hear properly, and may not be able to for some weeks.

The biggest tips I can give for audio balancing or mastering are:
1. High pass filter (bass-cut) almost everything to some extent, because a natural mix will tend towards pink noise (far too much bass) and we want to turn it white. Apart from this I almost never boost or EQ anything, unless I want a special effect to that end.
2. Use ears and judgement to mix all mid range frequencies: the vocals, piano, guitars, all main instruments that form the melody. This is based on a feeling of balance, a feeling; but for bass levels (and probably high frequencies too) use a spectrograph/tools to balance. The difference between 50% lower or higher bass is huge in a mix, but it's hard to hear this because ears aren't sensitive enough to volume levels at these frequencies.

Except For The Hatred and Falling Apart Vocals, IndieSFX Music

More vocal recording today, new vocals for Except For The Hatred. I naturally sang the higher notes here without the falsetto present in the 2020 version, my voice is that much stronger, though there's still room for growth here. I rather liked the falsetto sound though, so will use that as before.

Finally, work on Falling Apart Again.

The album is nearly done in this stage, but needs further mixing which is hampered by my deafness. I must wait.

In other news, I've deleted the music sales part from IndieSFX. I licenced one or two tracks a decade or more ago, but nothing since those Share-It days and now this sort of electronic music is easily done by machine, or by a myriad of cheap or free composers. The market for this is as dead as that for paper piano rolls. The music I wrote for it remains pretty good, and the majority of tracks were never licenced or used by anyone at all. I could publish or use it elsewhere. 'Shadows' was/is indeed part of The Flatspace Soundtrack, and the Oldfield 1 tunes represent a unique source of inspiration.

FOTI, Angels, Fingers, I'm Falling Apart

More work on The Dusty Mirror remaster today, as over the past few days. FOTI took a lot of time, then new vocals for The Arm (such fun!), and a few small and slight changes to the two most creative and interesting tracks; The Escape Angels and The Fingers Of Evil.

A slow day today, much of which was spent on programming. When layering the FOTI vocals I had the need to slightly delay a sample by a few millisecs. I can do this by inserting a delay engine, but thought that I could build in a simple count-down pause before any sample plays, saving memory and hardly making any difference to execution speed. I added this today to the monotone sample players and the code is almost as fast and efficient as without the feature.

I also have some random sample engines, 'Randy' engines', which have an internal delay for a random delay. This is an buffer-based delay so that any custom volume envelope is also delayed correctly, but over the years I've hardly ever used the delay, and I hardly ever use a volume envelope on these engines. I'm not sure if I've ever used an envelope AND a delay, so I've modified the delay to a count-down instead, thus saving the memory needed for a true delay.

This took until about 4pm.

One problem track is 'I'm Falling Apart Again'. It is/was a free-form piano song, but a little too free; the timing was all over the place, with too many notes and half-measures here and there. This isn't too bad per-se, but it makes singing to it a nightmare, there's no way to know when the chord is due to change. It's a really simple song with very few chords, so I've played the backing alone and will use that to create a new version.

Struggle

No day is easy. Every day you must battle something, struggle with something, strive towards something. The mark of a worthwhile day is overcoming difficulty to move one tiny step forwards.

Fear Of The Thing Take...

Sigh, a long and hard, non-stop day of hacking away at the rock face of music today. The most complex track on The Dusty Mirror is Fear Of The Thing Itself, a song I'd already recorded years before. Today I revisited it and started to note and re-record all of the vocal layers.

Many lines have one vocal, sometimes at one octave, sometimes at a octave higher. Some lines have 3 or 4 layers, and some sung in certain ways. When singing in my normal voice of today the results are much more musical and similar than the old vocals, but more conventional as a result. There was a certain Tolkien Dwarf-like chant to many of the vocals, which I like. They aren't tuneful but that very fact makes them work in a nice way. To sing them like this I'd have to do an impression of myself from years ago - but there's no need; I'll keep many of the old vocals, and add a few new when needed to make a unique duet with a person now gone, the me from 4 and a half years ago.

There are so many layers here that the recording process is time consuming and exhausting even when I know what I need to record. I have 56 individual wav files, some in stereo. Many need lining up multiple times.

My left ear is still horribly blocked. I'm as deaf there as an ear with ear-plugs, or underwater, so very muffled that I can't recall what the real world should sound like. My voice is resonant and deep and strange there. It's annoying. I must continue with my ear-oils and make prayerful offerings to Apollo, Asclepius, Hygieia!

Onwards we forge. How quickly the days fly. How precious each hour is.

New Dusty Mirror Vocals

New vocals and production work on a new Dusty Mirror remaster yesterday and today. There is a stark improvement in the vocals, which is my key reason for updating the album, though other aspects like balancing and limiting, backing vocal grouping, and vocal ducking and clarity, have also improved substantially since 2020.

The vocals of the first version are/were adequate for several key tracks, like Since You Kicked Me Out, Except For The Hatred, Norman Bates, but even there the new versions are a clear step up in musicality and consistency; as well as taking me hardly any time or effort by comparison. Vocals on some of the old tracks were poor or strange or inconsistent. All will benefit from new versions.

Singing and Dust, Scores, Philosophical Notes

I distinctly remember recording the vocals for The Dusty Mirror, my first great attack at a vocal album - I can't count The Modern Game, that was an experiment in every sense - and still an incomplete one which I may return to, one day, for the 4th time. Warm Comfy Sofa took so many takes to record back then, all bad. Now I listened again and prepared a new backing track. The vocal guide melody was an octave too high; a common mistake of that ancient era, that era a mere 4 years ago.

I re-sang the vocals and in a first take it was simply right, about 10 times better than the best take from those days! At long last I can sing! Though I know that skill levels are always a gradient; I can sing better, I can sing worse, but now the results are on another league to those of 2020. Would that this be true in 2028!

These old songs were often pitched poorly, perhaps good for my untrained and weak voice, but too low now. I also, experimentally, sang Two Parents Of A Child, but find the song more natural an octave higher. In my mind and heart though, it is in the lower pitch.

It's been a slower day generally. I completed the scores to the new Fall in Green album, though I haven't scored the two tracks that need vocals (and need finishing - I don't want to score until it is complete). I also wrote a few philosophical words on the nature of life, life forms that is. Philosophy and inward thinking is something people with too much time and too much solitude do; but sometimes, wisdom or something interesting can appear from such endeavours.

I've made a plan, outline, for a new album of new songs, and will mull these over. Money is a constant worry but art is a constant goal. That itself is a good title for a song.

Onwards we charge!

Asylum Escape Dream, Square Spoon Scoring

A somewhat sleepless night. I dreamt of going to some sort of event with Chris, we sat next to each other. Later, the event moved, so we had to get into Chris' car and follow it. It seemed to stop in some low sand dunes with harsh grass, like a beach area of sorts. I walked with Chris into the dunes among the scattered attendees who had dispersed. I discovered Noel Edmonds there; he was secretly gazing into a crystal ball, a transparent orb, shortly before burying it in the sand. I wanted to tell him that a transparent orb is no use, that scrying depends on random occlusions in a real crystal.

The scene shifted and I found myself in a dormitory in an asylum. I think Sabine was in another bed there, and she wanted my help on some technical matter. I offered to help if she would help me escape this prison, and she agreed. After advising her, I fixed up some wooden object with bolts which I'd been working on as part of my escape; a part of my bed. I realised that it was 5am and that the time to escape was running out, so I opened up the window and jumped a great height from it. I landed on some triangle rooves of terracotta, then leapt to lower rooves and into the snowy garden, then ran away, to bushes, trees, and a beach beyond which was something like the earlier one. I found myself indoors, in some sort of conference area, a large business gathering. Annie was there, and I asked her to help me escape, I needed a disguise or other form of practical help. She said yes. I can't remember much else, apart from that I felt that help would be given, that my escape may succeed.

I woke late to a good day of working on the sheet music for the new Fall in Green album. I score the music in all new albums now, and aim to score one old for each new one. 14 of the 15 tracks are now scored. Some tunes have many parts, so not everything is scored as it can be, but I try to at least have a piano version which contains important musical bits of audible parts, and make more expansive options if possible.

Mixing, Cause and Effect, Scoring

A slower day, yet the day has flown. I woke at 9:30 and didn't want to get up due to a million sighs. Perhaps suicide is the answer I thought, as Tom Baker also once thought, to the pointlessness and poverty of my doomed existence - but no! We are to die anyway, so that is no answer. All existence is equally doomed, and yet equally valid. We must do our best to extend our life.

Borges writes about infinity a lot; of course there can be no infinity in the real world. I read that if each effect is the result of a cause, then that cause must also have a cause, and so on forever, which proves that the universe is impossible. My refutation of this argument is that causes and effects are human perceptions built from our evolutionary need to make predictions. There is no actual cause of anything in the real universe; it merely is. Our belief in a 'cause' is a probable, and personally validated, prediction based on our life experience, nothing more. If we move our eyes up a tree, a branch may appear, so we may predict a branch every so often, but that doesn't mean the trunk has caused the branch - it's merely there as part of the tree.

I eased my body up.

There are often times when things have been done, dangerous times of relaxation, when in actually a job is never done. I started by adding the vocals to the last track we've recorded, The River Where You Used To Swim. I'm still too deaf to mix anything, which is annoying, but life is never perfect. Each day is to precious to doom away.

I got to work on Mr Tambourine Man, the sequence for another Fall in Green track, but this one destined to be a single release not on any album. Then started work on transcribing the sheet music for the new album. This wasn't on my list of jobs, but it needs doing, so I began, and made good progress. A few tracks are already transcribed well, notably 'Sunchild' and 'Sky Robes Of Celeste', and a few have well scored versions for live performance, though these have changed now I've recorded them.

So, today I scored We Used To Store Sunlight, The (very beautiful) River Where You Used To Swim, and Kingfisher's Handcup. These are all rather time consuming, and involve importing the MIDI sequence to Prometheus, then exporting a neater version to Sekaiju, then neatening it all up yet more, then importing that into MuseScore.

More Square Spoons, Production Work

Three jobs today. first, updated indiesfx.co.uk with the new SFXEngine logo, Bluesky links, and a few other small things. Then making the spoon even more square!

Then, work on yesterday's vocal recordings. Adding these to the tracks involves noise gating, then compression, then editing into sections, and inserting at the right time. A few tracks needed special edits due to mistakes or retakes, just the odd word. All tracks generally have one full take and that's all; we don't record lots of takes (or even two!), but some little mistakes can happen like stutters or misspoken words. Given the tongue-twisting complexity of the words in these it's a testament to Deborah's brilliance as performer that there aren't more retakes. Generally, I say 'go' and everything is done perfectly first time in the right voice and perfect timing.

Adding the words can take time because of the timing, which is quite exact, yet it's not like a pop song where it is 'obvious' where the vocals need to be. The mixing is fairly easy for me now, but hampered at the moment due to my deafness in one ear. This means I simply can't mix at the moment, but I can do this workman-like job of inserting the words and work on the details later.

Today I added words to 'The Cabinet of Dr Eckelmann', 'Kingfisher's Handcup', 'Lilac 12 Fold Dodecahedron', 'We Used to Store Sunlight', 'I Slip Into French Like Tolstoy', and 'The Candle Burns'. Sunlight and Candle are typical Fall in Green fayre of piano, strings and beautiful melodic romance. I like all equally, and strive for that. Kingfisher and Tolstoy show the influence of Björk.

Square Spoons, Ty Pawb, and Vocal Recording

Two very full days, I'm feeling overwhelmed and need to pause. The tracks for the new Fall in Green album are now finalised, there will be 15, though 8 lack vocals as yet. I bought a spoon with the aim of making a square one. Here are the stages of sawing, sanding and carving:

It's not square enough, so I'll do more work on it. Then, a trip to the Ty Pawb Open 2024 opening event. The artwork was great, imaginative and skilled. There were one or two boring landscapes; a portrait, no matter how conventionally done, is always more interesting; but generally, the artwork had huge variety in styles and themes. There were no trending themes or media, it was a wide gamut of media and of theme, but all works skilled and professional looking.

There have been four such open exhibitions and I've featured in three (I didn't apply for the first!) and I feel doubly honoured at this statistic; the quality here is really high.

Today Deb arrived to record vocals for the new album, and we managed 7 tracks before darting out to a Christmas event, a purchase of some 'Alphabetti Spaghetti', and other essential duties. Social duties tonight with a gamer night, my second and perhaps last of the year. Perhaps tomorrow I can start clear the backlog of jobs. I've barely had a few minutes to myself to think, but I know I have messages to respond to. Sisyphus cannot linger. Onwards we much push our weary selves.

Rhymin' Simon, Slip Into French, Bluesky

A really nice evening last night at the Paul Simon event in Congleton. Mine was the only original song, though there were a few original poems inspired or connected to Paul's words and life. John handed me a creator's copy of the album, which looks really nice:

I remain hard of hearing, but it's gradually got better each day, my treatment and remedy is hope and trust in my evolutionary biology; that treatment from Beethoven's day. Today I've expanded a few of the Fall in Green tracks. There are 14 on the album now, including an instrumental about the solstice. Most tracks are under 3 minutes, the album 35 or so, and overall it compares with Revolver by The Beatles, so can't be that bad.

One of the possible inclusions was 'Soaked Monet', so I listened to Deb's performance of that from the Wonderland Knutsford concert in 2021. It was spoken only, over sounds of a swimming pool, no music. I set up a string sound and played something, which sounded rather nice, but too long for this poem, and perhaps too solemn. I may work for one last track here, perhaps We Slip Into French Like Tolstoy.

Deb's had a fraught and stressful few days. I hope that we can make it to the Ty Pawb opening tomorrow. I've been looking forward to this for months and now it might be that we can't go.

Oh, one other thing done yesterday was setting up accounts on Bluesky, a Twitter alternative. I will probably only post there from now on, and have updated many Twitter links to point towards Bluesky. I dislike Twitter and I feel that the world has been waiting for a credible alternative for some time.

SFXEngine Finalisation, Lilac 12 Fold, Back To The Zoo

Much of yesterday was working on SFXEngine again, though only a small program update. Most of the time was preparing new graphics and organising new DLC.

Today I worked on and completed 'Lilac 12 Fold Dodecahedron' for the next Fall in Green album, a poem about Rudolf Steiner's educational philosophy. The process was difficult as my left ear is blocked, so I'm working partly on instruments but mostly relying on my right ear.

In between I've written and practised a song for tonight's Paul Simon night, a sequel of sorts to 'At The Zoo'. It's musically very simple, using a beat that's a bit like 'Refuge' from Synaesthesia, with a bit of 'Pinball' by Brian Protheroe thrown in. The chords are largely A-minor, E-minor, E-Major, so easy to play on guitar, but I'll use the Microkorg.

Back To The Zoo

Someone said somewhere that it's still happening
at the zoo.
Must be true
Let's go back to the zoo

The jungle drums are clichés
like the plastic desert rocks
Let's buy a toy
A little mannequin of nature

The elephants are matriarchs
The tigers are the oligarchs
The penguins are the populace
The jackals laugh at them but hiss at you
When they see you in the queue
For the zoo

The bats all fly Deliveroo
The chimps have nothing much to do
The butterflies are dolly'd up
The vultures reminisce about the, old days
When they had desert skies of blue
Before the zoo

We should build a prison here
to show the animals that we cage
people too
If they only knew

If they had a choice of home
would the animals choose the zoo?
If you had a choice would you?

SFXEngine Filing, Prometheus v3.51

Well, I made a few changes to SFXEngine first thing, a few relatively small things, mostly concerning fallbacks if the core frequency can't be met upon initialisation, and a test for the success of buffer locking. When testing it in Steam, it seemed to work with no sign of either of yesterday's problems.

I feel that the problems were, like that Taskforce issue, something connected with security or some form of Windows validation because a lock-out is a rare thing. In code, it would be an infinite loop, but that's easy for me to spot and fix, and the only cause here was reactivating the main window after opening the manual. My code pretty much does nothing in that instance, so it seems to be a Windows system issue.

Well, I immediately filed v2.00 for the time being, and will revisit it next month for more testing and new graphics prior to the public release.

After that, I updated Prometheus with a few changes discovered while working on SFXEngine. One was the correct deinitialization of the floatutility and longutility variables on song exit. One was the correct deinitialization of the text file after various text-based imports. One fixed (and improved) the sample and modulator resampling. The only new features were a new cursor skip, which can jump by a fixed proportion of a beat (eg. 1/4) or based on the notes in track 1 (a guide track). This is now a toggle for both settings, so from now I'll use keyboard keys only for toggles or commands, never a cycle - a key should never be pressed many times. This became confusing.

The other feature skipped to the next valid parameter rather than moving though many blank ones, if prev/next were chosen.

Finally, I updated a few plugins for speed vs. size, repating the small code 16 times rather than use a for-next loop.

Today was a generally happy rest day compared to the extremely busy and stressful past 7 days. I now have a couple of days to work on a new song for the Paul Simon night, and some other art things which have been neglected.

My left ear remains annoyingly blocked with wax, though not painfully so as it had been, so perhaps progress is being made.

Onwards we move.

SFXEngine Battles

A massively long day of solid work on SFXEngine. I ended last night thinking it was 'nearly finished' but have worked solidly all day programming, updating, adding. I found and fixed a few existing bugs; all small, updated the manual and compiled everything for Steam.

Then, this evening: disaster! The program freezes for some reason when running in Steam. I can't work out why or how. There are two bugs. First, sometimes the program fails to start at all, there's no sign it's doing anything. Second, the program freezes, much of the time but not always, when opening the manual, which is doubly mystifying and really difficult to test. Perhaps it's memory infringement of some sort; which is the worst kind of bug, there could be literally hundreds of causes. Neither error wasn't present in the old version, and the program seems to work fine when not in Steam. My initial guess was that it's not me, but a security problem, like the old Taskforce lock-out which seemed to be caused by Windows security, and 'magically fixed itself' after a short time.

I'm utterly deflated after a deflating week and year.

My plan for now is to file it as broken. I'm exhausted and I can't afford to spend any more time on this for the moment.

SFXEngine Progress, Castle Park

Two full days of work on SFXEngine. I found and fixed a couple of bugs, including one that was part of Prometheus too and concerned with not liberating memory structures when a song is cleared. I can't work out why it should have caused SFXEngine to fail. Old structures should still be automatically replaced on the fly, though it is correct that these should be freed when a project is closed.

I've toyed around with a new logo. It's a pain to remake all of the Steam graphics, there are 10 to so images per product and 15 or so products, not including the new sound packs, but Steam's standards have upgraded the resolution so perhaps I'll have to do it one day anyway, and a new major version is a good reason for a new logo and icon. Here it is:

Yesterday evening I went with Linda, Yuri, and my mum, to the Castle Park Open Preview.

A highly eclectic show. Most of the work was a typical country painter's fayre of animals, landscapes, with work from complete beginners to professional artists. Only about 10% of the work was particularly imaginative or 'challenging', but a few works caught my eye. I noted that the prices were probably lower than 15 years ago when I first started exhibiting. It was nice to meet a few artist friends, and to see work by others I knew like Marc Turner and Janice Lazzarich.

I slept badly, with stomach pain and the recurring ear-ache. A productive day today, finalising SFXEngine and creating a new sound pack to be part of the new distribution. I had hoped to finish everything today, but the final filing and completion of the upgrade will extend into tomorrow. More work will be done on this in December. I'll dart to other jobs in the new week.

Dark Times, Ty Pawb, SFXEngine Updates

An awful day in a year of hard times. My left ear is blocked and in pain, the 'fungus gnats' from my houseplant are buzzing around. I've formed a plan there of buying new compost and gravel and removing all of the soil; a fresh start. It's my worst year financially by some margin with losses in the several thousands, and my income isn't covering the outgoings for the first time in decades.

But, I'm working well artistically, and today dropped off a painting at the wonderful Tŷ Pawb gallery, and tomorrow I attend the Castle Park Open launch where I have three paintings. Artistic painting is becoming a luxury, both the supplies and more-so the time. I must aim for more joyous subjects, as all seem to be about death, murders, or other sorrows! Of course, such subjects are chosen for their emotional power. Perhaps they echo this dark year, but darkness makes the lights stronger. Musically too, I'm working better than ever.

Deborah is my light and the highlight of my year. I wish I could afford to be married immediately.

It's impossible to know whether an action or event is good or bad; we can never be sure. Anything can be good or bad depending on context and scale. For all of us, life is struggling along and then dying; so we must do our best as we struggle. We must take care of our cells. We must take care of our fellows.

After the Wrexham trip I worked on the SFXEngine upgrades and have completed the complex load and save process. Testing aside, the changes could be considered complete, but I will add a little more.

I look forward to next November. I look forward to the November in four years. The Donald Trump victory made me think that our government will face the same fate as the Democrats if they fail to deliver their promised economic growth and fail to stop illegal immigration.

Onwards we roll our Sisyphean rock.

SFXEngine Plugins

Well, Donald Trump's victory defied my prediction, but such are polls.

A full day of programming, updating the SFXEngine plugins. The work is taking longer than expected, and is complex and meticulous. All have been updated to a draft level. Next, back to work on the main program. The biggest job is the song loader and importer for new and old formats, and adding some temporary structures. The new version will be much more memory efficient. It will look and work identically to before.

The first job of tomorrow however is a trip to Wrexham to deliver my painting to Tŷ Pawb.

SFXEngine v2.00 Work

A massive amount of recoding today. SFXEngine started as a branch from Prometheus, but the latter has had 150 updates since, and many major changes over the years. Many of the innovations weren't reflected in SFXEngine. There's never been a file format change to SFXEngine, but 5 in Prometheus, each a major feature upgrade.

Now I've added the best Prometheus improvements. The double pointers, variable sample rate, and optional interpolation on a per-sample basis is one feature. Another is dynamic 'floatutility' and 'longutility' variables. Each plugin needs extra variables, some more than others. The reverbs, for example, need to keep track of delays and cycle various sine waves. In early Prometheus, and in SFXEngine until now, these were a fixed quantity of 64-per effect. The new reverbs, however may need more because now the core frequency affects all of the internal delays which used to be constant; and yet the other engines use very few. The sample players only need 1, so it's massively wasteful to have these large (empty) arrays on every engine. 12 engines per program and 12 per environment add up to large memory drain in a project of 100s of sounds.

Years ago I made these variables dynamic in Prometheus, so each effect must specify how many floats and longs it needs and the program reserves these as needed, very much like the effect buffers. Today I decided to add these to SFXEngine too. This is big coding step.

The problem with a lot of this coding is that both programs are hugely complex. It's hard to hold the whole thing in your head at once, so every change and alteration must be meticulously inspected and checked, mostly for silly accidental errors. Knowing what every change does to everything is nigh on impossible. For the most part I'm duplicating Prometheus code and hoping it will slot in. I've already found one SFXEngine bug which I'd fixed in Prometheus years ago.

There's a great advantage to working on two similar programs for this reason. Every time I upgrade SFXEngine I discover improvements to make to Prometheus, and vice versa. There's something about two that makes this error correction and enhancement property optimal. I can quite understand why DNA is a double helix, not a single line, and not a triple.

In addition to these changes, every plugin needs editing and recompiling; another meticulous and exhausting job. I've made a start on the sample players, the reverbs, and the delay effects. Those are the most complex. I have 66 to work on this week.

Meanwhile, the world is watching the American presidential election. The polls are extremely close, but I think that they are wrong and that Kamala Harris will win decisively.

The Candle Burns, 12 Fold, SFXEngine v2.00

A couple of days work on The Candle Burns, which I've played live many times since its premiere in 2019. This took a few takes, but it's mostly a piano-based piece of work, with a huge and overly complex finale, a jangle of notes in odd timing, overly romantic and not at all to time. I'm already shuddering at needing to transcribe it.

Then, yesterday, an outline of a new piece which we've not performed; Lilac 12 Fold Dodecahedron. I found this very difficult. The words are all about softness and, specifically, roundness, so the music generally follows suit. What is difficult, is coming up with new melodies and keys each time.

Today I've charged into the major SFXEngine upgrade, which will take all week. It's now running with only two test engines and no load or save capability, but the core frequency can be changed. The next step is all-new sample engines, then all-new engines, then the new load and save conversion, and finally tweaks and testing.

Filing, Castle Park Drop

A quieter day yesterday. IU filed some of the Flatspace (and Future Pool and Future Snooker music), with music codes. I also worked out the structure for a new album, and sketched a new song for it, but it will need careful consideration. At the moment it's structured into three groups of four songs. The songs a recently penned, but mostly lyrics only. I now start with lyrics, then add music.

Today, a trip to Castle Park Arts Centre to deliver the paintings for the exhibition. My last exhibition there was 2021; I mainly miss them because it's down to luck if I should see the call-out on social media. I've accidentally missed the Castle Park Open, the Stockport Open, and the Three Counties Open for this reason, and I enter Bickerton and the Grosvenor because of their email call for entries.

It was a lovely trip. We briefly met the nice artist, and always reliable and well organised - which for me (and Deb!) are the highest of compliments - Ann Bonner there. We wandered around a few shops.

Once home, I completed my monthly backups, then sprayed an old frame black, it was brown before. Black on brown works quite well; black paint should have a medium or dark coloured ground to work best, blood red works well as a primer. This is for the Scarecrow painting. Then fitted a new plug to an extension lead, the old one disintegrated!

I need to complete The Candle Burns music, and a few other Fall in Green tracks, but I keep avoiding it. Life is too short for this. I must charge into it, then will upgrade SFXEngine.