The End And The Beginning Remastering

Spent much of yesterday and today remastering The End And The Beginning waves. These all benefit hugely from the new Spectrum Analyser. For me, bass levels are just too hard to judge by ear, these really benefit from being mixed by analysis, but mid and high ranges are easily heard. The final step today was equalising the volume. I tend to master everything to -10 or -11dB LUFS now. The album is a little louder than the 2009 version, while the wave looks quieter, a good mastering result.

Half of today involved editing and updating some art articles for publication on the forthcoming Galleria Balmain website, if they approve. Plus, work on the 'Parents' song, which is now called 'The Parents in the Walls'. I recorded new piano parts for that, unusually, recording live like I do when playing guitar, not sequencing it with help from MIDI.

Generally today and yesterday have been quieter days, despite working non-stop. I had agonising stomach pain all night on Saturday, so was awake for most of it, and so tired yesterday. This was perhaps a sign that I needed to slow down a little.

Life still remains to be battled. I'll practice guitar a little now, to prepare for the live music day of Wednesday.

Arcangel Videos

Today, converted and proofed the Arcangel videos. The note music timing was correct in the end.

After that, a trip to Sandbach to see the local art club's exhibition. The realisation that I could do better was than everything there was inspiring. I bought a large frame for £25, more inspiration.

Then, considered result analysis options to add to SFXEngine. I've noted to add those at the next update.

SFXEngine Update, Arcangel Videos

A full day with two primary tasks. First, updated SFXEngine by adding to it the wonderful 'Stone Compression' and the marvellous 'Gothic Limiter'. These will be useful for general processing, particularly for mass processing of things like audiobook readings, which is something I'd like the use it for myself, and more importantly make it useful for others. As long as it sells, I'll keep updating it and adding more.

Then, started work on making basic Arcangel videos for each track on the new album. All are animations based on the logo. The MIDI files can be used to approximately synchronise parts of the music, but the results aren't as accurate as in Prometheus sequences. I guess that the MIDI using MED and the SY-85 was not quite at the correct speed. Here's a still from 'Inside Messiah':

I wanted simple videos, a YouTube equivalent of Spotify Canvases, but of course I want some sort of feeling connected with the music, beauty, awe and sadness despite the constraints of time. They certainly have an 2000-era feeling, something like Quake and those other corroded-metal style of game-art of the time. All are now complete in draft. The new distribution via Emubands is smaller; it will be limited to iTunes, Amazon, Facebook for the content registration more than any royalties (which they do not pay), and YouTube. I have new features, and will now use this as an opportunity to remaster each album in turn, ensure full sheet music for each, full resolution album artwork, 24-bit hi-res files, and videos for each track.

This evening, I transferred the lyric reading videos of We Robot from my music channel to my art channel. This meant rebuilding those in higher quality, 8000kbps, temporarily. The process took an hour or two. There are 4 or 5 more albums worth of reading videos on there, but I'll move those as each of those older albums are remastered.

My success in art and music is inevitable, though my battle often feels like one of attrition. I'm full of new ideas and will continue to create new things as well as care for, support, promote, and document my older artworks too.

The day has flown, and how the week has flown. The best I can do is fill it, and so I have and shall.

Onwards I charge, towards victory with strength and joy. Onwards to a new and greater sunrise.

Breakfast of Delight Vocals, Parents Production

I'm overwhelmed with artistic possibilities and jobs to do. As SFXEngine sells I will continue to upgrade and update it, so I will do this at some point soon.

Music, recorded music as an artform, is so overcrowded at the moment but I can't escape its draw and I'm more capable than ever; though knowing that this is the case for countless thousands of music artists. I have a few ideas for paintings but feel I mut strike at this music album in progress while it's pertinent and feels good for me.

It follows a structure like many of my albums since Synaesthesia, a story of images and places. My albums follow this pattern for me, Burn Of God, and The Myth Of Sisyphus for example. So far I have an opening 'Violet Night', then 'Breakfast of Delight', which I recorded the vocals for today; production is complete.

Next is a song penned in July 2020 called 'Parents'. It was inspired by memories and false impressions of the meaning of David Bowie's song 'Sunday'. Today I got working on the production after writing the core melody late last night. That core is piano based and it always pains me to abandon (if indeed I do) the expressive played performance for a sequence, yet the latter is needed to add structure. Drums and a regular rhythm often feel like ropes thrown around a melody of love and expressive freedom. The new 'Light Bulb' song uses live parts only, big recordings that vary in pace. This can work, but here the music is more regimented, and I don't want a song that will be too massive in size with one huge piano part for the whole song; the piano is backing here.

So, the core of the track will be sequenced, with some guides for live playing later. The music is slow and sad, in C-minor and then Bb-minor, but lowers to F#/G# for the warmer chorus parts. Much has been done. Here are the words so far, updated to fit the melody:

Parents

You will find us
Behind the wallpaper
At the end of the country lanes
Of your soul of myrrh

We were always there
Waiting for you
We were always there
In your days and darkness

We wept unseen
As you stared at the screen
As your neck bent
Into its hook of solitude

Yet we were always there
Waiting for you
And still we wait

In the dull flesh
Of the automaton
Tied to the chairs of a distant day
Like a trampled sigh

Waiting for you
To say
Goodbye

Arcangel, The End And The Beginning, Software

Most of the time since yesterday afternoon has been spent working on new new Arcangel Soundtrack remaster, and a remaster of The End And The Beginning for a future release on one distant day. Most of the audio for the latter was re-visited in 2022, and rendered then in 32-bit float format and much better technical quality, though it sounded very similar to the 2009 version. It's amazing how many technical leaps I've made since 2022, perhaps as many between 2022 and 2025 as I'd made between 2009 and 2022! The bass levels are higher than I'd apply today, I'll work on the remaster bit by bit. I also needed to create new 3000 pixel artwork, and other tedious and repetitive jobs I've done countless times before and will probably do countless times again.

The Arcangel Soundtrack is all set for release and the admin for this has taken a few necessary hours today.

Aside from this, I feel lost and unsure about everything. So much of the last 6 months has been spent programming, updating various pieces of software. SFXEngine has been upgraded considerably over the past 18 months, ever evolving. Although it's probably the best piece of software I've made that's on sale, the solitary review on Steam is critical, a little unfairly I think, of the capability of the basic program vs. its apparent brilliance in the trailer videos. The videos were made using SFXEngine when it was a one-off $100+ product, now it costs $20 + less than $100 to upgrade it with all DLC to make it the 'pro' version; still cheaper than it was then. I'd still prefer to sell it as one premium product, but I was hit with such severe fraud each day, tens-of-thousands of dollars, that it had to be pulled quickly and a new sales model sought. Well, all I can do is keep trying to make it the best it can be with the model it is.

Nothing I've done in software has been popular or liked, but my tools have been useful to me. With SFXEngine I've built a sound effects library that's been far more popular and useful than perhaps all of my games and software tools combined. Without Prometheus I would struggle to make music at all. I'm not sure if I'd be an artist painter or what, that software has been integral to my life for over 20 years, just like SFXEngine and IndieSFX. Such tools are transformational.

Prometheus v3.62 Fixes

The last couple of days have been busy with essential anniversary duties. It is exactly 9 years since I met Deborah on ArtsLab. Aside from my primary mind being attending to her, my secondary mind was working on an annoyingly simple and annoyingly complex Prometheus bug which has taken two days to fix.

It's not a bug as such, but a slight error regarding precalculation. If I have a song that's, say, 4 seconds long and 4 beats. I can render the whole thing, a 4 second wave with beats 1-2-3-4. I can render just the first half, beats 1-2, and render just the second half, beats 3-4. Joining that first half and second half should produce an exact a copy of the full song; but this didn't happen. It was annoyingly a few samples out, 60 to 200 samples or so, a few milliseconds.

This has been the case since I added 'precalculation' to Prometheus. When playing from the middle of a song, the program runs itself from the start so it can know the correct timing (and even calculate the audio, if required) at that point. A few samples out here and there don't make a difference here. Precalculation is primarily used when previewing a song, not as a final result, so it didn't need to be 100% accurate.

But if I'm to use Prometheus to master an album, it does.

I knew this was due to the timing calculations during the precalculation loop but it took hours of musing to work out. In the bath last night I had a eureka moment; that rather than run up to the second half, I had to run up to one sub-tick just before the start time, so that the very next loop would start with the variables set as though the full song were rendering at that point.

This was fixed today, it works! And now the CD timecode quantisation too. With this, rendering any file will skip to the next 'global' 588-sample boundary and extend to the next frame boundary at the end; so I can, if needed, use Prometheus for CD mastering with exact timing.

Prometheus v3.62 and 32-bit Mastering

Another small update to Prometheus yesterday and today.

The recent remastering of Arcangel was different to before as I may now require hi-res versions of the files. In the early days I'd render the files in 16-bit (not even dithered) and those would be the final waves. Since April 2017, I've rendered in 32-bit, and transitioned to using the beloved (but unsupported for years) Sony CD Architect to master a CD, then extracting it's beautifully mastered 16-bit output to form the final waves. But, as a CD software, it can only output 16-bit, not 24 or 32.

One day I may have to use Prometheus so that I can export in 32-bit, at least it has dithering and good quality output now. The 64-bit update also makes it easy to load an entire album of tracks, so I can use it for mastering; but for CD mastering tracks should be divisible by CD timecode frames, that is by multiples of 1/75th sec, 588 samples. One step to helping with this is a new feature to extend a rendered wav to that multiple by adding blank space to the end of a file. This means that separate tracks would be identical whether rendered, or burned and extracted from a CD. Without this feature, the lengths would be a little different. This little feature was harder work to code than you might imagine.

For mastering an entire album though I'd still have to render the whole thing as one big wav, then chop it up, ensuring division by 588 samples, I may have to do that by hand and calculator (possible, if tedious). If I wanted to blend and segue tracks, which I often love to do, it may help to program special features to export sections of a song while starting and ending at those frame boundaries.

On other news, Deborah visited Vinyl Exchange in Manchester yesterday and they agreed to stock a few copies of Letters From A Square Spoon, out first ever CD in a record shop, which of course filled us with delight.

Arcangel Remaster

The day has flown, but I feel I've hardly done a thing. I've decided to remaster Arcangel with the second option of new tracks of the same length as before, but better quality. The original recordings were very bass-heavy and rather compressed, and in 16-bit, and I can at least help address those problems. I don't compress any tracks now thanks to my lovely Cathedral Limiter, though this magical clipper might be considered compression by purists.

The new tracks sound about as loud but have far less compression. The quality isn't perfect; I'd prefer to remix, or prefer to re-record everything with Prometheus, but I can't do the former without an SY-85. That is probably the best option in terms of sounding like the original, as the analogue sound from the SY-85 was warm and different from that of Prometheus. Some of the sounds in the newer 2021 recordings, that I took just before selling the synth, are missing or panned oddly; but the recording quality is higher, and my only other source for these tracks are the final (compressed) 16-bit waves from 1999. Even if I had an SY-85 I'd need a mixing deck, as I'd want to high-pass many of the tracks.

The new album is certainly better than before, and I could consider these 24-bit files 'hi-res', to attach some label like an 'Apple Digital Master'; though I'm not sure if I'm proud enough of the mix generally for that. The results are, however, the best they've ever been.

Standards of naming have changed since 2001. I remember that the title 'The Arcangel Soundtrack' was considered incorrect, that 'Arcangel (The Official Soundtrack)' was preferred, though Arcangel wasn't released so one could say that it's not a soundtrack at all but an album called 'The Arcangel Soundtrack'! Secondly, the track 'SPDF' may cause problems, as since 2017 and the first digital release, tracks with letter-names have more restrictions. We shall see.

Here's an image from the iTunes Digital Booklet I've made for the album. All newly re-issued albums will probably include one, AND I'll have to update most of the album artwork as I've made it smaller than the 3000-pixel standard of today. Anything connected with technology is a matter of constant revision and updating.

The original 2001 album had a few (under 20) CD copies made and I sent a few to REV Records, who also had a few copies of the first Synaesthesia album. I don't think or expect they sold any, and I didn't either, though a few review copies were sent out. The rest were probably destroyed. Will the album ever be released on CD again? I'd like to think so, but not for a while. It's rather short at 21 minutes and I'm much more proud of many other albums that demand CD release. For this, I'd like to aim for a full remaster first, with other tracks from the era perhaps, I have many that used the same tools.

Letters From A Square Spoon Release, Video Admin, Arcangel Remaster

A busy day of various jobs. First, it's the release day for Letters From A Square Spoon, so lots of basic launch admin; scant online promotion, emails sent, launch effects on Bandcamp. I've sold the last of the first edition of The Flatspace Soundtrack, so had to attend to that happy event. Then, essential shopping duties for Easter.

After that, I transferred the lyric reading videos for A Drive Through The Town to my art channel, part of a long term migration of those videos. So much of music, like my painting, has a long term component. For every new album I update an older one, and there are 4 or 5 older albums that I know I can update now with far better mixing (and sometimes vocal or guitar) quality. Progress always marches on (or always should), so doing all of these now would only make them seem poor in future years or decades.

I'm also experimentally switching music distributors and having a change of strategy here. This initially means a necessary re-release of The Arcangel Soundtrack, my first album from 2001. My initial idea was simply to switch distributor with the original tracks, but I have a few options here. I've made a better quality recording of all of the tracks a couple of years ago, just before I sold the Yamaha SY-85 (this process is probably documented in this blog!). This means I could remaster the tracks, this is option 2. Option 3 is a bigger remaster, as there were two contemporary tracks: Archetype's Theme, and Gabbro, which were not used, so I could include those. Archetype's Theme is annoyingly poor in quality though, its mix quality, the track seems to be entirely mono except for the reverbs, which I don't like. I can't update, tweak or change anything without an SY-85 synthesizer and a few days of work.

If I remaster I must think how. Most contemporary remasters boost the volume, but I'm inclined to reduce it, to improve the quality. The mixing of many of the tracks was poor by my standards of today, too heavy in bass, but they remain pretty, not too bad. Choices choices.

The latter half of the day consisted of experiments with these tracks.

Canvases, Breakfast Of Delight

Most of yesterday was spent creating new Spotify Canvas animations for Letters From A Square Spoon. I noted, annoyingly, that all of the Salome Canvas animations have been deleted by Spotify without warning or notice, an action typical of this terrible company. Now, most of those canvases will not upload, perhaps because they are exactly (to the frame) 8 seconds, which is the limit. My newer canvases don't have this problem as they are now 7.68 secs.

Most of the canvases are simple and based on the album art. Several animations were recycled from others to save time, and half of the tracks use a simple loop of the cover art with some extra smoke and layering effects. The Sunchild and Anthem ones are rather pretty, a simple 'glittering sun' effect.

After that I started work on a new song called 'Breakfast of Delight', following on from the 'night' of the start of the album. It has a samba rhythm made entirely from breakfast making sounds. Here are the words so far:

Breakfast of delight
You are my
Breakfast of delight

Smoked salmon
Bacon and eggs
Grapefruit cherry
Coconut muesli
Maple butter pancakes
Fresh whipped cream

Breakfast of delight
You are my
Breakfast of delight

Snap and crackle
Coffee a-froth
Caviar toast
Marmalade sticky fingers
Plums-a-fancy
Champagne volcano

Vocals For More

I'd considered moving into painting today, but I found I had space to sing, so recorded the vocals for 'More'. I'd planned for many layers initially, but these were gradually paired down, and in the end only a sole lead vocal was used. The rest of the day was spent adding those vocals and making a million tiny changes to the song, including adding the organ solo which was played live then quantised in MIDI, for the sake of two notes which were annoyingly out of place.

Then some more stabby organs in the main song (these are all sequenced, they're crude Korg samples), and finally a telephone effect and other little things. I'm thinking that it might be nice to have a phone conversation in here.

I've re-listened to a few older songs today. Not too old, from Remembrance Service and The Golden Age; two, three years. Mike Drew said that The Golden Age was my best album, or at least his favourite of the ones he's heard, which are only the two since it. The Golden Age songs are the more rocky than the albums after that, and I can agree with him while appreciating the good songs on the other albums too. I remember how I was happy with Remembrance Service at the time, that it sounded good and produced well, but now it sounds in need of better mixing; too heavy in bass and the vocals too quiet. We Robot was the first album which to use the oh-so-useful spectrum analysis feature in Prometheus.

I can do better now. All of the albums since 2020 were experiments, intended to be re-mastered later. Only The Dusty Mirror has been redone so far. I can't wait to do the others, but making new work is more important than polishing old work.

My singing is certainly better today than ever before. How much better some of those old songs could be (though there's no way I'd mess with the expressive vocals on tracks like Be My Jesus). I must add more feeling to songs. Quality of production must not compromise emotion, but this tightrope is easily fallen off, especially today. Good art is an equal balance of order and chaos, no more, no less.

What next for art? Who can say. I must learn to slow down a little. I must roll my rock rather than push with all of my intense might and speed.

SFXEngine 64-Bit

A full day of programming. I charged into making the program 64-bit, a simpler but similar affair to the Prometheus conversion. A new file format was only necessary due to the modulator upgrades. The new program can now load much big wav files, and I loaded all of my Intangible Man audiobook with x4 oversampling with relative ease; it would be better practice to switch off oversampling for large files like this. There's no benefit to oversampling when playing at the root pitch.

I'm still full of ideas for upgrades and features for this.

I also updated all of the Prometheus plugins with new dial gradation. Hardly important, but I'd made some changes to the automatic compilation script, so it was a good idea to file a new version of plugin.

Now I need to think about art and must pause while I muse.

Violet Night

A mix of small things done today. I must remember that image is key to creation. I'm a visual artist artist, so I tend to look at my hands when I play an instrument, I lust learn to play by feeling. I wrote some words today and played some music on a new MODX preset which swells and soars. It's a strange song overall, part monk chant. It reminds me of some of Kate Bush's Ariel tracks, the misty rusty songs in the second part. I've added lots, then removed, then added. All seeking the best. Almost all of the song is the raw sequence as played live.

I've realised that much of my music is starting to be the same, the same themes, feelings. The influence of Jarre is that some tracks are strange and artistic, some very 'commercial', but also I tell a journey of images. For all of his variety, most of Beethoven's music was a struggle for freedom, a cry of freedom above the rabble; all of the symphonies bar the 6th had this theme.

Violet Night

Close the book
Switch off the light
Sleep alone, again
The house is bleak

The stars' rays prick
My skin again
My night coffin friend
Says hello again

Like the moon at sea
Like a house on an ocean's dream
Like a child pirate
On a raft of bed

Like an adult in child's silk
After the party
Torn and sad

The Flip Side, David and Sabine, More Recording

A busy few days.

The appearance on The Flip Side show was brilliant, though took quite some setting up. I needed to have the keyboard to play live, set this up in front of the screen, and connected it to my audio interface. Then connected the mic to the other channel. Lighting involved three lights; amber, cyan, and white, plus a fourth disco light behind me, where I hung a painting rather than the usual blank wall there.

I made a special stand for the camera (seen with the wood base above) so that the camera appeared level with the faces of the presenters on the screen; thus my eyes would naturally be looking at the camera as I talked. The show itself started at 7pm, and at least half of the day involved preparing for it. The hosts kindly involved Deborah a lot too, and we performed a live rendition of Clown Face, but the spoken audio was quiet. Without headphone monitoring, this was difficult to get right. I should have worn headphones here.

A delightful and friendly show, but the other Flip Side episodes I've seen were/are too. It was a joy an honour to be part of it.

I spent Friday morning writing a little more to my painting book, but the chapters and structure needs work. I've re-written the same thing many times, each in a new chapter with more depth and information, but I'm unsure if this is at all a good way to do it.

In the afternoon Deb and I went to Chester to meet the miniaturist David Lawton, who has become a good friend over the years. With most of my friends, I hardly ever see them, and often don't communicate for months or even years; yet whenever we meet it's always a pleasure and like we've never been apart. After our chat about many artistic matters; artists, techniques, sharing our recent works; we went to Sabine Kussmaul's graduation exhibition which opened yesterday in Chester. I've not seen Sabine since before Covid (that threshold of our shared lives) but again, it was like we'd not been apart at all. Artistically, we've both moved more towards music over the last few years.

It was inspiring but I'm still feeling a little lost. Painting, writing, music, and even programming, all competing. I enquired about showing work in the Crewe community art space and was told that they'd have to check out my portfolio - which felt like a rejection by a place which shows scribbles by school children. Perhaps, I could assume, my work is considered too adult, rather than them not having a clue about any aspect of my art. Well, we met Estella Scholes yesterday and with kind words said that I should be aiming higher than Crewe; true. If my work is to be seen, I must be the one to show it. Of course, the vast majority of my exhibitions have been like that.

Some kind soul on the video show asked if one artform inspired another and I was reminded that this has often occurred. Music Of Poetic Objects was an album of music for paintings, and I often wrote poems about each painting. Perhaps then, I don't need to be torn. Perhaps I can criss-cross and make paintings about songs, and songs about paintings and it can all be one gesamtkunstwerk. My life is a Gesamtkunstwerk - we really need a snappier word for this!

My emotions have been wrangled by getting a new mobile phone, a gift from my mother, as she bought one too, but hers was a different and worse model, which filled me with guilt. My old (merely from January) phone was/is terrible, and so full of bugs it was barely useable. This one is still full of bugs and flaws, but better than the other one (I still managed to find a crash bug in the first 2 minutes). Mum's is more awkward to use, and the lettering is tiny; but both phones were rather expensive. I would, could, should have warned her to be careful with things like phones; they're so technical and such a gamble to try or buy! Much research is needed. Sigh. Well, it is done.

Today, after a slow start I've been working on music, a song called 'More', which I started a few weeks ago. It needed guitar parts and recording these, and experimenting with them has taken all day. I've made rather screechy sound, like the guitar in the Beatles' 'Tax Man' with a setting of ATA on the guitar (away, towards, away, all three pickup active). It's very buzzy/hummy, but this can be all be part of it. I've hardly edited it, all of the noises and hums can remain.

Hours, over an hour, was spent with a mute-strum of one string, with lots of experimental settings, lots of plectrum choices. In the end, I only used it for the verse and ditched a lot of complex parts that were in the chorus.

Many Small Jobs

A busy day, lots done, but sometimes it feels like little progress is made. PC updates took a first hour. I made an enquiry about exhibition terms in the Crewe community space, announced my appearance on 'The Flip Side' video show this Thursday, made a new box for new paints; I store these vertically but my 4x6 box was full so I needed to make a new one.

That took all of the morning. Then, tests in Prometheus of loading and importing older formats, this let to the discovery a bug which took an hour to fix. Then updated my 300+ phone contacts, using my computer. My old phone stored contacts with one name, one number, but my newer one separates first and second names, so it took over an hour to edit them all, in preparation for setting up a yet newer phone.

Then preparations for the live music on Thursday evening. I'd planned on performing 'Robot' and 'American Lawyer', but the latter tune is difficult to play, yet sounds trivial, if not actually boring or easy; this is the worst combination! I thought that 'Style Guru Fashion Queen' is much more fun, so I've created a new sound and backing track for it on my synthesizer.

Tomorrow will be dominated by the evening appearance, and on Friday Deborah and I are off to Chester to see Sabine Kussmaul at her end-of-year degree/doctorate art show.

Tax Year, Prometheus 64-Bit, Stock Market Turmoil

A new tax year begins, so Sunday was spent working on that. I put birthday cards, Christmas cards, leaflets from exhibitions, letters and other personal memories in my tax records. This means that I can look back at them 7 years later. Some of this year's memories included an early mention of Fall in Green in a magazine, in Acton Church's magazine, and the first publication of 'Sunchild' which is about to be released as part of our next album. Stephen Barry's funeral too, fond memories of him and the old art club. He came just about every week. The painting is by his friend Bryn Sutcliffe.

After that, dived into upgrading Prometheus to 64-bit. This is a major upgrade mainly because most of the program structures are saved in files, including pointers (obviously, the pointers are invalid, they're there just because it made saving easier). This means that a lot of structures now need replacements, yet old 32-bit ones need to import correctly. This is Prometheus's 6th file format. It took me while to realise that HANDLE variables are pointers, therefore bigger on a 64-bit system.

As part of this, I've upgraded the Modulator pointers and loops to double precision resolution. This isn't as useful as double pointers in Samples, but the better resolution means more accurate timing, and the memory cost is low, just a few extra bytes per modulator and there aren't that many modulators per song. I considered increasing the timing resolution of fades and parameter settings, but those are per-engine; 12 engines per instrument, 12-per track and many more. This small change would increase the memory footprint by 20% with a minuscule benefit.

I also thought about reducing the bite-size, the processing chunk in plugins, from 64 to 32 samples. Lower numbers means better resolution but slower processing; but 64 samples is fine. I can't say I'd noticed or wanted more.

One last step was finding a way to batch-compile all of the 100+ plugins. Normally I'd copy over the source file, compile it by hand, then rename it and copy it over by hand, but I thought I could automate this via a script and the handy CONCATENATE command in the Libre Office Spreadsheet. I've done this this morning.

The stock market turmoil is a cause for concern, I'm sure that global markets are artificially high, and the markets are assuming the tariffs will not continue. I can understand Donald Trump's desire to make more things in America, but I don't think most Americans would consider working in a factory sweat shop an ultimate dream. The whole point of importing is not to need to do that sort of job. Most countries want more imports than exports. Consider an opulent king's life; more is done for him by servants that he does for them.

Painting Book

More steady work on the painting book for the past two days. Reading and researching a lot, but I must remember that the most important parts of the book are the parts that can't be found elsewhere, those unique insights gained by my experience.

Good Vibrations, Guitar Hooks

A regular visit to Congleton Library's Good Vibrations event. Valuable as performance, but I found it all difficult, difficult to even match chords to time, never mind singing at the same time. The best results were those of single notes or leads along with the tune, though this depends on enough other musicians to handle the chord and main melody. I need to practice this much more.

After that, I some nice DIY work putting up some guitar hooks for Deborah. The heads of the screws supplied with the hooks didn't fit into them. I needed to re-drill the holes bigger because I had no screws with smaller heads. Drilling into the wall was as hit and miss as ever; one hole hollow, one as rock solid a metal, unable to drill more than 15mm. In the end, however everything worked out well. I cut down a rawl plug and used a shorter screw for the 15mm hole (for an acoustic guitar, the weight was inconsequential, one good screw would hold it).

Writing: Underpainting, Shading, Glazing

More days of writing, underpainting, shading, glazing. 31,402 words so far. ArtsLab number 5 is also now online thanks to Ray Hayes. Tomorrow we'll be going to Good Vibrations.