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.