Writing

More writing, on impasto, metal substrates. Lots of time was taken up with research. Writing, deleting, writing. 25,012 words.

Oil Painting Book

A day of writing, about underpaintings and plastic surfaces. Everything is taking a long time due to research. Word count 22,760.

ArtsLab, Painting Book

Spend the morning updating the ArtsLab text, in preparation for any possible re-uploads of it to MixCloud. Added four more episodes to my account there, chosen by importance. I chose the first appearance of Deborah Edgeley, and the interviews with the since deceased Ian Parr and Dorli Nauta, and the first episode of Series 2, where the new format first appeared, complete with an interview by Jonathan Tarplee.

Worked from 13:00 writing and researching my book on painting, today mostly writing about imprimaturae. This book is taking, will take, a long time. I'd prefer it to be done in a few weeks like my novella, but I feel it will take several months.

SFXEngine v2.03, LFASS, ArtsLab

A full day. Began by updating SFXEngine, after discovering a small bug in my waking night. This led to discovering a larger bug (well, more like an error). I realised that I'd limited the Sine, Triangle, and Pulse waves to -24/+24 when this should be -48/+48. This was all fixed, tested and made live by 12:30.

Then, the new Fall in Green CDs arrived. I scanned and filed these, and did some more music admin regarding UPC codes. The admin of music is endless.

After that, I finally continued writing Oil Painting From Beginning To Master And Beyond, then launched the new SFXEngine pack. This evening, I'm typing up episode descriptions and track lists for the 118 ArtsLab episodes, to make it easier to upload the information to MixCloud (or any other platform) in future. This is a few hours work, but hopefully worth it.

20x20 Paintings, David Lynch, Zelenskyy, Bierstadt

I awoke early after many vivid dreams. I knew I had to paint today and started slowly. I looked at some paintings in the book '1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die' while listening to 'The Life Scientific' on Radio 4. At 10am I started painting.

The four works to paint were: 'The Magic Of Drama', 'So Many Profound Ways', 'Repercussions Of The Decline', and 'The Days Of Kronos'. All were 20x20cm, and I needed to paint all today, as they'll be sold for £20 each, far too little to be worth putting time into. This is the sort of challenge I like. I chose the titles at random using Wiki Quote, and had no plans or preconceptions, except that the first title, when chosen, suggested to me David Lynch, who's death a few weeks ago touched me deeply.

Thus, the first painting became a portrait, with a strangely angelic Elephant Man. The sky became smoke, as per a old plan for a Lynch portrait with smoking eyes and hair. The second painting became a portrait of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It needed a second theme, so I combined his image with a painting by the American romantic painter, Albert Bierstadt. His heroic portrayal of the American landscape would, I thought, be an ideal emotion to add. These themes: David Lynch, The Elephant Man, Albert Bierstadt, and Crows became themes, with Ukraine a tangible theme not present visually except for Zelenskyy here, and for the yellow and blue of their flag; colours the world has come to know.

The third painting became a portrait of a screaming girl from The Elephant Man, but in blue to a flaming sky and forest, from the Bierstadt sunset. The fourth painting became a simpler portrait of Lynch, but here blending into Bierstadt and smoke. I was struck by the fact that Lynch often used smoke and steam as antagonists, symbols of fear and evil; particularly in The Elephant Man, yet, he professed a love of smoking cigarettes. He died of emphysema, also indirectly killed by the California wildfires, so smoke, his nemesis in film became his ultimate killer. Were his smoke fears a manifest warning?

Painting felt good, welcome. I completed all four paintings by 17:30 as planned. How sad I remain that I can't paint more, that no commercial gallery to date has given me a break. I can survive, like van Gogh, without sales or support, but things would be so much easier (not to mention profitable for all concerned!) if I had a sales outlet. I would certainly paint far more, have painted more; paint larger and more ambitiously, have painted larger and more ambitiously. There's no point in painting a large masterpiece here, as I know it would sit here as unseen as most of my medium-large work, and I have no more space. My lack of painting, when I can now paint better than ever before, saddens me, but I will do the best I can with the circumstances and tools that fate decrees. With these small competitions and exhibitions I have at least a little outlet, and one I've always taken used.

The Letters From a Square Spoon CDs are due to arrive tomorrow.

Today's painting has made me feel like an artist again, revived my soul. Onwards we must charge.

Vocals, Guitars, Dentistry

A slow day. Recorded the main vocals for 'How Lonely', then for 'The Light Bulb 1', then a trip to the dentist. It's hard to find one in Britain, nigh impossible to become an NHS patient, so I'm a private patient which is expensive, but I am lucky to have found this after 6 years or so without any access to a dentist. I remind myself that this was normal life for Beethoven and most people of the 18th and 19th century. The NHS is effectively non-existent for dentistry, with a declining number of legacy services distributed by luck and nothing more rational.

A little more work on the music when I returned, and guitar parts for 'Written on Rice' and 'How Lonely'. I recorded lots for both, but after hours of editing and trying this and that, the latter hardly used any, and I'm unsure if even the fragments that remain are needed. These tracks are just about complete I think.

My plan is to paint tomorrow, the 20cm paintings. I must summon strength and crawl forwards.

64-Bit Preparations, ISRC admin

A full day of largely programming. Prometheus and SFXEngine have been updated to make a switch to 64-bit versions relatively easy. Both programs and plugins compile in 64-bit without warnings, and 64-bit Prometheus works with a test plugin; I'd have to spent a day recompiling them all to get it fully working. It can't load any programs or sequences saved from the 32-bit version, as the save-file structure sizes vary between versions. I'm confident that 64-bit SFXEngine would be the same.

There are two key benefits to 64-bit versions. Firstly, that 32-bit programs are limited to 4Gb, and potentially memory-hungry programs like these would benefit from more memory. I've only once (in 24 years) touched upon running out of memory with Prometheus, and the recent options to switch off interpolation on a per-sample basis actually save lots of memory, but larger capacity can't hurt. It would make some tasks, like making SFXEngine capable of processing full songs, or long tracks for audio books, would be a good thing. It may be capable of doing that now, but there's no harm in increasing the capacity. The second reason is that 64-bit programs on a 64-bit system are 20% or 30% faster. Prometheus is already faster than its ever been, and would have to go a long way on this PC to slow below real-time, but there's no harm in increasing speed either.

The downsides are minimal. A 32-bit program is smaller and has a lower memory footprint, but both programs remain small. 64-bit Prometheus is 1.03Mb, vs 834Kb for 32-bit. Plugins are 10Mb; perhaps then 15Mb for 64-bit. MuseScore 4, by comparison, is 81Mb, yes 8 times bigger, yet less powerful. The biggest downside is that I'd need to make new file formats for everything, the 6th new file format for Prometheus (the program needs to detect and import all older formats). This means new data structures for everything that can be saved/loaded, identical in all but size. SFXEngine would be the same, though it is less complex.

Today's changes took until 3pm, and SFXEngine v2.02 is now published.

After that, much music admin. I hand-checked every ISRC code for duplication and found 3 or 4 more duplicates. These were not too serious as all duplicates were for the same tracks with very slight changes, 2 or 3 seconds shorter, for versions shared between a core album and a compilation. Of these, only one version of any track is currently released on digital platforms, so the admin burden is low and not too important. Still, each track needs a unique ISRC, so new codes were created for the offline tracks. Since 2001 I've recorded and registered about 70 music tracks per year, so today's checks involved 300 or 400 text-file searches to check that each code was correctly assigned to a unique recording. This was 2-3 hours of tedious clicking, but it's all done now, my first such check in 24 years.

Writing

Up from 7am and a day of writing, with a pause to add the 64-bit enhancements to SFXEngine. Writing has been slower. I'm unsure of the scale of the work. I'd like it to be epic and huge, but I continually think that many technical aspects, like a list of colours or pigments can't compare with an online database. I considered an online component to the book. The job seems, at the moment, overwhelming.

Art Books, Flight Dream, IRSCs, Prometheus 64-Bit

A frustrating few days, I've kept busy but don't feel I'm on a track, darting between too many different things.

Most of yesterday was spent on my art book. There is much to write here. I also started to think about Prometheus and how difficult or easy it might be to make it into a 64-bit application. It is rather easy, but there are a few caveats. One is that the files have pointers in the structures, eg. "long* lppointer". Of course, the data there is irrelevant, it's zero in the file, it's there only to make saving faster, but it means that the file structure itself is a different size on a 64-bit system. The solution is to have a file structure which simply uses an unsigned-long as a substitute, not a pointer, thus it can be the correct 32-bits big on a 64-bit system.

Overnight I had many fantastical dreams. I dreamed I could see the end of the world, which took place at a music event. The event was planned by Creative Crewe, and included as an organiser my old headmaster, Mr Bowers, a well-liked teacher, and the father of someone in my school class. He appeared in my Facebook feed yesterday due to the sudden death of his wife. The event included musicians, and a piano or harpsichord which could be split in two, high/low, through the keyboard and each half wheeled around. I was disappointed not to be asked to perform at the event, but held a hope in my heart that I'd be asked, I felt that they simply didn't think to ask me, quietly desperate though I was to be part of the event.

The event took place in a circus tent of some sort, and three signs, like giant keyboards hung above the ring; left, centre, right. In the cobbled courtyard outside, Deb was there with a bowl haircut, perhaps a little like Princess Diana, perhaps a little like my memory of the school friend. I became aware that she was in love with another man, an electric guitar player who was part of the show. Without much fanfare or any words, she left with him, leaving me heartbroken. The grey courtyard was high up on some rocks, and jutted out into the sea like a castle, and there was something medieval about it all. In my suicidal despair I leapt from the walls to my death in the churning sea below.

To my surprise, my descent slowed and I started to fly forwards, low over the waves, rather than hit the bottom. I began to feel happier, and glancing up at the horizon saw a fantastical city in my distance, among brightly coloured clouds, like a painting. The city appeared to be New York, or a fantasy version of it, with the Statue of Liberty appearing in the centre as I watched. I fell to the ground, which was now a beach of rippled sand and sea water. The beach was full of small gemstones, transparent cubic zirconium and very pretty. There were strange women around, like angelic beings.

Thus ended the dream.

Today I discovered, by pure chance, that I'd accidentally assigned the same ISRC code to two different recordings, one on The Dusty Mirror and one on the new Letters From A Square Spoon. This is a disaster for record keeping, these need to be unique. These codes are used in many places to identify the usage of a recording. I'm so lucky to spot this today, 4 weeks before the release of Spoon. This timing allowed me to remove the release in progress and re-submit it correctly. I was also set today to order the CD copies, which also include this code; so I managed to do this with the correct code. The codes are used in many places, but today I've managed to correct them all.

Duplications like these are rare, I've done it once before in the 15 years or so I've been creating codes; but this error was much more important than my older one, as today so much depends on accurate reporting and detection of a recording. I'm blessed to find the error today.

After that I worked on Prometheus 3.60, preparing it for 64-bit. The first step was to remove (the old and deprecated) DirectInput which I used for key-press checking. I don't really need it at all, as Windows itself has enough function for checking the keyboard, so this was done. Then I had to change strlen() to my own routine, as strlen returns a 64-bit value in Win64, and 32-bit in Win32. 32-bits is best for both for me, so I replaced it. The only other change was changing ITEMIDLIST* to PCIDLIST_ABSOLUTE when using SHBrowseForFolder().

After that, Prometheus compiled and ran in 64-bit for the first time. It didn't and can't do anything. It needs 64-bit plugins too, and needs a new file format and converter for it; but it's an amazing step to get it this far. These changes will probably bleed into the sibling programs of SFXEngine and Argus.

How Lonely Vocals, Prometheus v3.59, New Book Begins

A slower day yesterday, started by re-recording the main vocals for 'How Lonely' as they were too gentle before, but now seem a little harsh. I've stepped back somewhat from the music to reflect. After that, a trip to a friend to help with computer maintenance. I also updated Prometheus again after finding some minor bugs. This allowed me to add a feature to batch load and save instruments.

I'm still considering options regarding ArtsLab. One option is to upload all of the episodes to YouTube but mask off the commercial song content. This would be a better solution than MixCloud, which would/will ultimately delete it all anyway.

Today, I've charged into a new book about oil painting and have written about 5000 words. This is something I've wanted to write for a while. One key element is that it is more of a reference guide than a how-to book, something foe beginners and masters alike, but something which can be referred to over a lifetime. The order and structure will be unusual, and something a little like Cennini's book.

Album Admin and Filing

Two frantic but productive days of album admin.

First, Deb pointed out that on her fancy PC, our album art was a little fuzzy. I examined a few common resolutions (I think she has a 4K monitor) and reasoned that it was time for an artwork upgrade. The downside is the bandwidth and memory of 81 albums/releases; which feature a thumbnail and (usually) three booklet images. Before, each image was 400x400, with 300x300 for the pages. After some calculations and tests, 1000x1000 for the full album seemed a good size, so I spent yesterday updating all 81 releases.

The older albums varied in their artwork standards, so many needed revisiting and tidying up. That, more than the actual conversion, took longest. All in all, the 289 images took all day.

Today, revamping my primary music catalogue. Each album has a main type code (called a Release Group in Musicbrainz) plus sub-codes for media or 'Release', which is normally a CD release and a digital streaming release. Some are concurrent. The Flatspace Soundtrack, for example, is released on CD, and Bandcamp, and Distrokid (Spotify etc.), and Steam, all at the same time. Some releases replace and supersede older releases (some CDs are on a second edition, for example). Some have different tracks/audio for CD and Stream releases, in fact most of the newer albums do, like the Fall in Green Salomé album, although most of my post-2020 releases (which is a lot, perhaps a third of my total artistic output) don't have CD versions at all. When I do make some, their music will be different from the stream versions. All of this information needs storing in a clear way.

All of those codes and releases are now in the public Cornutopia Music Catalogue.

This took all day, and also helped spot a few 'bugs' and inconsistencies in the filing. You can't create without a good filing system; you'd get tangled up and lost. After that, renaming some folder names to clarify and unify these standards in the album filing system too.

Next, I must make and prepare the CD art for Letters From A Square Spoon.

Letters From A Square Spoon Preparations

Attended the Spoken Word Open Mic at Hopes & Beams last night, a nice gentle night

A charge into a day of work preparing for the release of our Fall in Green album, Letters From A Square Spoon. The admin work is huge, and frustrating in that a lot of the same data (like who performed what, when, where, and who the studio personnel were, as well as who wrote/created it all, who owns the rights from when and why etc.) has to be entered in different ways for different organisations multiple times. All of that in addition to the basics of uploading tracks for sale, and the start of any public (or press, if one is lucky) information about the actual music and how brilliant it all is.

I still have much to do, but a lot is done. I'm struck with the irony that the public and hugely complex database on Musicbrainz is far easier and faster to edit than any of the official national music registration organisations; and Musicbrainz usually stores more information (it doesn't store the performance personnel information above, though). It's a pity that none of these databases or organisations agree to simply collaborate.

Onwards we forge through the jungle of life.

More

The day has flown. I started the day by listing another painting on Saatchi Art, having learned that I'll be a 'featured artist' next week. This is so nice; my profile there has less than 10 followers, it was dormant for a few years, but last year I started to add new works and focus more on it. I need a break like this. Contrast Saatchi with Society 6 which simply closed my account without so much as a single snippet of help, despite being more popular terms of hits and likes.

I've spent most of the day working on the melody and words of a song called 'More'. The words are deceptively simple, but have taken all day to craft into shape. Sometimes there is a difference in choice of words for a song vs poem. One line was 'To stop the worry'; this works well poetically, I changed it to 'To stop the panic', as it has a more music in it. The 'aah' vowel on 'panic' is nicer than the muddy 'orr' of 'worry', and the staccato p and c sounds add punch and drama to the sound.

The song has a Beethoven's 5th rhythm of xxxX with the last note being the first of the bar. I used the opportunity to try to simplify everything, and make the bass more of an incessant chug, which matches the meaning of the song, an endless trawl for more.

I wanted the chorus to climb and seek, so it rises in key and has a few unusual chords. The song is in my commonest key of A-minor, breaking into F-Major for the chorus (my commonest break too), but then switches to Bb, then B, D#-sus7 and D#, then G# before bending back to E-Major and A again. The effect is as I'd hoped.

The Light Bulb 1, The Fall of America

More of today's work was on 'The Light Bulb 1', a complex song in five parts. Part 1 is a simple melody in electric piano which emerges from a background sound of a record player and some sine waves. The scene takes place inside a light bulb, so the sounds are designed to paint this.

The music changes into more drama, and some ascending notes. Yesterday these were wide string chords, but today I worked on making these into a staircase of strings (in the mode of Handel), but changed these into a live piano instead. This introduction is about reminiscence.

These then switch into a deeper analysis, and here the warm strings appear, with a bass drum, but this collapses into stabbed piano chords as the filament of the light bulb is torn apart; before finally the last part revives the first, as we look at the broken bulb.

There are many challenges here, partly the transitions between parts, but also in painting images efficiently and clearly.

I listened to The Dreaming again last night, Kate Bush's best album (though closely followed by The Hounds of Love). This scene painting is my goal too. Her genius, and a large team, took two years to create it, and I'm almost moving to the stage where my albums are taking a year each. I should be grateful to creep forwards in micro steps, as I have today.

Meanwhile, America as a country and empire is disintegrating. The slight effects evident now are nothing compared to the huge effects which will be evident in a year, two years. The world may enter a new 'great depression' economically, or engage in new, needless wars, for no gain. All of this is more than the work of Donald Trump. About half of Americans, and a huge percentage of politicians agree with his completely wrong ideas and ignorant political philosophy. This then is partly a failure of democracy and political education. The most democratic country in the world voted to destroy itself, largely though ignorance, and partly though deception and a breakdown of trust. Nobody really knew what Donald Trump would do, but trusted that the systems of government would prevent him from doing much harm. Those people were wrong, but perhaps even now a majority are too blind to realise the harm being done.

America has a 'right to bear arms'. I presumed that this was an implicit right to use those arms to attack tyranny; that the right to bear arms was a right to kill tyrants. Perhaps it's merely a right to own weapons, but not a right to use them, which seems somewhat pointless (if sensible). Either way; this right was one failsafe of the democratic government against tyranny. Another failsafe was the right to free speech, but now 90% of America's media is controlled by about 6 huge corporations, all of which are espousing the same rhetoric of compliance with the government, due to coercions made by it. Emotional pressure is so hard to define in laws, and in constituions.

The first step of holding a government to account is knowing when they are doing wrong. One area where America excels is political awareness, in people's belief in and knowledge of their written constituion, but many areas of politics, in many countries, remain a mystery to so many of its people. Not knowing, or not caring, about how civilisation works is a dangerous decadence.

How Lonely, Written on Rice, The Light Bulb 1

Two full days of music work. I'm reminded how long it all takes. Some of the time is spent experimenting and crafting, but even when I know what I want, it takes days to record and sequence everything.

I decided yesterday to change the tempo of 'How Lonely' to 130 BPM from 120, and made many more small tweaks to the production. I've done little on this today, but have experimented with an electric guitar part. I finalised 'The Paper King' yesterday, and worked a little on 'Written on Rice'.

Today, the monthly Windows update led into work on 'Walls and How to Hit Them', a song I'd largely completed, but needed a little work today including one new vocal part. Then some work on the rather dour 'The Light Bulb 1'.

I constantly wonder, in song like this, whether it's work making. These strange arty songs, perhaps they will never be someone's favourite? But no! This is impossible to know. I listened yesterday to some Ultravox songs to analyse the production. The strange songs 'Waiting' and 'Dreams' almost fit into this category. I need aims; and one is variety, what is new, different. Sometimes these things act as bridges to other works of surprise and brilliance.

I recorded a keyboard intro for 'The Light Bulb 1', then added sequenced string chords. Pushing forwards is hard here, I struggle with the timing on moody songs, which have no regular rhythm, and so no opportunity for melody and sub-melody.

More Song Produciton

Two full days of song production work. Lots of vocals created an added for 'How Lonely', and some for 'Written on Rice'. 'How Lonely' has lots of vocal layers in the manner of 'Video Killed the Radio Star'. Certain lines have 3 double layers (all vocals are recorded twice to make a stereo pair) to form chords. This adds up to make a lot of layers and hours of tedious trimming and arranging. There are a few vocode layers too. 'Written on Rice' has a few similar layers for the chorus.

This all adds up to many hours of arranging. I found time to start a new track, though it's a strange atmospheric piece, which features the sound of the planet Saturn, and an arrangement of 8-note choir chords, creating an effect like the somewhat frightening sounds in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I started to watch a film called After Blue last night which was amazingly inventive, and inspiring. It looked crude at times, and reminded my of an early 80s pop video, like the one for 'Forever Autumn' as played on the Kenny Everett show, and 'Ashes to Ashes' (both were probably directly related, as director David Mallet connect all of these).

Easily an hour or two of today was spent singing, my voice better than ever before.

The Paper King and How Lonely Work

A bad night of constant stomach pain and poor sleep. Today has flown. First, finalising and filing 'From Eye To Hand To Paper', adding more bass. This was almost absent from the first version, it was so very subtle and gentle as a track. Only my EQ report alerted me to the frequency gap, so I boosted the bass. I also adjusted the sheet music to match the recording better (only the odd grace note differs between it and the live version we performed). I'm now using MuseScore 4, which is more buggy than MuseScore 3, and generally worse to use in most ways, but some formatting aspects are better, simpler, and it's generally a better idea to use the latest version of software.

Then compiled a test cover for Deb's new book.

Then, work on 'The Paper King' and 'How Lonely'. Only when I checked the global track for possible tempo changes did I notice that both tracks had a '-4' semitone pitch engine applied! This must have been done to adjust for my singing range of the day but I'd never do this now. I want to know what that actual notes are. Even when playing live I transpose live.

This led to new adjustments for key. 'The Paper King' is now in F-minor (the key it actually sounded in), and 'How Lonely' is now in C-minor. This is a lovely song, hugely reminiscent of Alphaville because it has a vocal range from mid-low to high; not quite as bold as in 'Victory of Love', but I rarely use low-ranged vocals.

Once the actual notes were established I could record a bit, and have recorded a couple of vocoder parts for both songs.

How the day is flying, I'd like to have recorded some vocals today, but cannot.

Looking at 'The Paper King' lyrics, they seem to be more depth than I'd thought. There are echoes of President Trump's orders, but perhaps more-so a psychological dimension; orders and commands ever being written by an insane but ever-active commander, our desperate mind ever finding things to do, never resting, even if self-destructive. I've made slight changes to the words today, to the last chorus, made the cows into birds, and changed the line 'Tastrophe in fernal guise' (?!) to the much more coherent 'Infernal catastrophe!'

The Paper King

Paper stretches eye to eye
Paper people paper trees
White as dwarves and thin as paper words
Ruler of this paper world
A literate and learned king
He the only pencil holds and wields

Write another paper rule
Write another constitution
Write another history
Write another me

All the peasants, all the lords
Held the words in great esteem
Everybody knew the king was just
Every paper person read
Noble deeds and noble laws
From the castle orders came and went

Write another paper rule
Write another constitution
Write another history
Write another me

Burn the rot the orders said
Burn the cardboard hermit men
Burn the old and build a better world
Burn the tissue paper birds
Burn all houses facing west
People set to burn as they were bid

Infernal catastrophe!
Storms of flame consumed the world
Every beast and every person fled
In the castle still it wrote
On the body of the king
Frantic pencil, terrified alive

Dancing like a hurricane
Frenzied like a revolution
Writing chaos in a torrent
Writing all alone

Mad as any paper king
Sane as any revolution
Never reading, never stopping
Writing every day

Eye To Hand To Paper, Tambourine, Spoon Filing

A full day. Started by editing and adding the 'Eye To Hand To Paper' vocals to the track. The sibilants were notably stronger, the frequencies squeakingly high, due to the new NT1. I thought that I needed a 12dB/oct low pass filter to fix this, so quickly programmed one for Prometheus. It was ideal! I then adjusted some default values for the Prometheus reverbs, a planned upgrade.

Then, work on the 'Mr Tambourine Man' vocals, which certainly sound better than the first take, primarily because of better timing accuracy due to a metronome in the guide track. This needs new tambourines I think. We have no plans for this track, merely to complete it and store it for the future.

In between this I've been polishing a metal sweet tin, cleaning it of paint. I tried paint remover, but it barely touched the paint, so decided to burn the paint off with a blowtorch, then use wire wool to clean its charred shell. This worked well, but there are a few recesses and tiny areas which are difficult to access.

After that, filing the new Fall in Green album which is now complete. The PRS codes were finalised today, so I had to update the sheet music and my records, then burn the archive CD master, and file other materials (and delete others). I've also burned archive copies of the other Fall in Green albums for Deborah, and prepared digital copies of everything too.

One other job was resetting some of yesterday's programming. The Band Distortion changes were perhaps not so useful or intuitive, so I reversed those.

A full and efficient day overall, partly due to focusing on strict jobs in turn. I must try to complete new vocals and new songs next. I've a few other goals this month, but I'd need to firmly commit to them, and when to do them, to make progress.

Onwards we march.

Good Vibrations, Legato Engine

We performed at the Good Vibrations event yesterday, which was as lovely as ever. I took my Microkorg and spent too long staring at the chords. We are handed lyrics notated with some chords, with a guitar in mind so the 'capo' is sometimes specified. On keyboard I need to mentally transpose up by that number. In practice, it seems to work best me playing a lead or bass than chords. Songs tend to start simple, with two chords, and them build up. The last songs, 'Babyface' and 'Daydream Believer' have lots of chords. It's all good training.

The day was exhausting to me, however. I feel I'm still recovering from my cold. We stopped off in Sandbach on the way back, and when home Deb recorded some Fall in Green vocals. I had time to eat, followed by a reasonably late night watching the last part of 2001: A Space Odyssey; a wonderful work of brilliance. The film isn't a story as much as overall spectacle, an artform to be felt and experienced in an indescribable way. It's cinema at its best.

At the end of the day, I ordered a muffler for the microphone. Life is about making tiny steps forwards, or preserving previous forward steps. We can't really tell if a step forwards is forwards or not, so we must also boldly experiment and try new things. Buying the muffler might be one such positive step, a small step forwards. It may improve audio recording by 1%, it may not. That may be the only positive step of the day.

I slept badly and have struggled to do anything well today. I decided to program two audio effects, initially to settle my mind and body, but it's taken all day. The first effect was a boost to a specific frequency; like a band-pass filter with amplifier. A new element here is that the key frequency is removed from the source, so I can turn the frequency down as well as distort it. That might make it useful as a de-esser.

The second effect was a legato effect that engages with the sequencer to automatically fade the volume between notes. Here it fades between 'tones', which are events which change the pitch but don't re-trigger the sound, as in samples. This particularly applies to strings, and some woodwind instruments which have an attack, but a tail which can be bent. The effect is common in scoring (a slur), but it can be hard to make it sound natural in a sample, it tends to warble in an odd way, so this effect fades it out a bit, then in again when the pitch changes. It doesn't fade the start of the note (the attack), only the changes.

I spent a long time striving for the option to fade in at one rate, and out at another, but it was futile, and perhaps not very useful. Then I added a setting to attenuate the power of the effect, as a subtle fade often sounds better than in the dramatic example pictured.

Well, that effect is all I've done today. Two days of work for tiny, tiny steps.

Too Lonely Composition and Production

A full day of work in one new song. 'The Paper King' can't really be adapted to another song easily, so I decided to rework many parts and the broad chord arrangement, but change a lot, including shifting the entire song up 5 semitones. For lyrics, I chose my most recently written song, 'She Held My Hand Under The Desk'. As with all of my songs now, I write the words only, then later fit music to them. To think up a tune and words tends to lead to writing the same song over and over, but this poetic method creates better lyrics and is more challenging.

In this case the original words were:

She held my hand
Under the desk
I was too shy
But I dreamed of her love
I dreamed of her love

If only I'd known
How lonely I'd be
The love I could give
The love I should have given.

Years later I discovered
She killed herself
Perhaps too lonely
As I dreamed of her love
I dreamed of her love

If only she'd known
If only she knew
the love we could have shared.

Only I know
the love we could have shared.

I started to fit them into the chord arrangement, and it worked surprisingly well. I had to move some lines into other lines to make everything fit, and change the odd word for scansion. The words are now:

She held my hand
Under the desk
I was too shy
But I dreamed of her love
I dreamed of her love

If only I'd known
How lonely
I'd be, the love
I could have given
I should have made

In passing years
I found out
Took her own life
Perhaps too lonely
As I dreamed of her love
I dreamed of our love

If only she'd known
If only
She knew, the love
We could have shared
We could have made

And only I know
I only
The loss and the love
We could have shared
We could have made

We could have made
We could have made

The only real accompaniment is an analogue-saw based bassline, which was crafted to fit the melody and give it some rhythm, and a lead synth instrument which acts like a sub-melody. There are some stabbing chords, and a gentle pad sound for the chorus. Unlike 'The Paper King', the melodic lines are adjusted for the circumstance. One thing that's recently grown in my music is the use of standard, staccato, and long sustain versions of each instrument to convey feeling. This is partly the result of my scoring and study of scores. Staccato and sustain can really transform a feeling, and here the bass and main lead have those three versions of each instrument to convey rhythm. The drum pattern, by comparison, is ultra-simple and has almost no bearing on the song rhythm. Rhythm is conveyed by the melodic lines; the whole song sings and dances.

In style and substance, it sounds, as I've said, something like a Yazoo or Alphaville track; perhaps closest to my songs like 'House of Glass'.

I'll complete and record 'The Paper King' too, even though the words and music are silly, and ancient, and simple. 90% of that song is complete, so it won't be much work, and it's very much of its time compositionally, so it can be (like 'Written on Rice') a reflection of those times.

Music Work

Lots of music work today. Completed the string arrangement, flutes and distorted mock-guitars for 'Written On Rice'. Apart from vocals and a lead (live) guitar part, this is largely done.

Then, started work on lots of little tunes, and worked on fragments and older songs. I've revisited a song from that time (2002) called 'The Paper King'. The lyrics area piece of silliness about a paper world where the king is the only person with a pencil (inspired by the old proverb that in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king). The tune though, however simple, is catchy and bouncy and fun. The song 'Robot', added to We Robot, wasn't that far off in date terms to the origin of this one. This too has a simple up-down-up bass, and lots of analogue sounds, so it sounds a bit like a Yazoo track (and indeed my other music from that time, like those on The End And The Beginning). I need new words for it I think, though this is a backwards way of working for me; I prefer to start with an image and create music and words from that. Still, variety of style and content is important. We can only push ourselves by doing things that we don't usually do, and we can only improve by pushing.

I've also started a basic sequence for the first Light Bulb song, and a second idea, a nice rock beat to build a feeling from; plus lots of work on a song called 'Bye Bye Spotify', though the mood is light and whimsical, a bit like The Beatles' 'Her Majesty'.

Written On Rice

I've plunged into music. I'm full of musical ideas; this is now my default method of artistic expression, and I'm enthused about studying scores, and about becoming a better piano player. The downside is that visual art would perhaps be easier to promote, and that a need to write a book too. Music, at this moment in global culture, is ubiquitous, somewhat underrated as an artform as a result, and extremely difficult (or impossible) to succeed at commercially. There are a thousand other reasons why I shouldn't spent all of my time on music; yet, at this moment, it is my passion.

Still, this month I have some paintings to paint (it's still a little dark and cold for this), and ideally a book to write.

I've written some musical notes for a piece called 'The Light Bulb 1', a series of three poems/texts about a doomed relationship and heartbreak. The subject, and style is utterly uncommercial, and perhaps close (in my mind) to some of Björk's avant-garde works. Still, the words are written and I really should do something with them.

Today, however, I've revisited an early song called 'Written On Rice'. It's a long and complex pop song in the style of The Beatles' 'I Am The Walrus', and was originally going to be part of a broadly anti-Christian EP. Ultimately I only sketched an intro called 'One Dream Is All it Takes' (I've lost this, I think I sketched it in Noise Station 1); and this song. All of this was begun in Nov 2002; 23 years ago.

Today I've revisted the song and have worked solidly on it for 8 hours. I've added new drum, bass, and piano sounds, and re-sequenced (composed, that is) all of those. Back then I used one note for the bass, a super-simple drum pattern that was as good as a loop, and a very basic piano. Now, I make each voice play along with the melody, and interact with each other, so the composition is much more complex. My voice, and my understanding of vocals, is utterly different from 2002 too. This version is that is raised by 5 semitones as a result of this knowledge, and is now in F rather than C.

Those three parts have taken all day so far. This is one problem with charging into music. It all takes me such a long time now. It takes a long time because the work is harder, more complex, more involved.

In 2002, Prometheus couldn't play this tune at full speed, even when dramatically cut down with external pre-renders. This, at least, has changed, although this project is one of my biggest songs in terms of number of tracks and instruments.

The Light Bulb project can, for now, wait too, but I plan on working on many projects at once. I work best when doing that.