A very busy Valentines Day yesterday, starting with a trip to Wrexham to collect my painting from Ty Pawb, plus a walk around the town. It's a larger than Crewe, though about as desolate; somewhat similar in many ways. The Primark shop was the most deserted of any I've been in, a nice thing for a shopper. The mass and tangle of the Chester store is an unpleasant contrast.
After that, a brief attempt at scoring 'Loneliness And Divine Love'. It has many automatic arpeggios which are a pain to transcribe. The simple arpeggio in 'The Dream' was bad enough. The primary saw-wave lead, audible from the start, has two arpeggios: 0-3-7, and 0-12-0-7 and half that speed. So I calculated the note offsets:
So, it's a sequence of 24 notes. The root note changes per chord, so calculating the actual note from a certian root would be nightmarish and tedious. This shows the power of electronic composition to some extent. Nobody (Schoenberg?) would score this complex sequence of semitone offsets, yet it's simple in its core. Complex though this is, it is simpler than the sequence for the bass, which also shifts in timing. It is 0-0-12 in semitone pattern (3/4) but the timing shifts between half-beats and whole beats every two beats. When running it does strange things that I can't exactly score, perhaps due to electronic nuance and the way the timing is calculated. I'll try.
All of this is near impossible to manually score note-by-note, so I started to program a feature into Prometheus which would generate the correct note from a sequence of arpeggio offsets. So, I can feed it 0-3-7 plus a timing of half-a-beat, and it would run through a track, and finding a C would generate C-E-G-C-E-G and so on, until it hits the next note. This works, and will allow me to transcribe these complex arpeggios. I've no idea how anyone else does this, or if anyone else does this. I'm doing it because nobody else does, or can.
I started programming yesterday, but had to dash out to the launch of the Crewe Art Trail, a town event for the next few months of which my mural is a part. It was at the new Crewe Create Hub, and was a nice social event, although we couldn't stay for more than 45 minutes or so.
Then, a nice meal and evening with Deb, and completion of the programming today. I can choose to cycle the arpeggio sequence (note and timing) or choose either at random, so this can be used for interesting and unexpected types of music generation.
Now to score that most difficult of tunes.
