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.
