Last night I dreamed of meeting The Beatles. I went back in time, and the c. 1970s group, were playing themselves in a documentary film about their entire future lives. Someone played the start of 'Imagine' on a piano and John Lennon like it, saying he could almost imagine how the song continues. I brashly, perhaps even braggingly, said that that happens to me too. I suddenly felt slightly ashamed at the boast, not least because I made John lost his train of thought with Imagine. I feared that I'd porlocked him, changing the future and stopping the song from ever being written. Oops.
In a second dream, I dreamt that Andy Stubbs was offered a record contract to record a single by a Dutch record company owner, after playing live. One song was one of his, the B-Side due to be a cover, I thought 'Runaway' at first, but it was actually a Sam Cooke soul song (I can't quite remember which). I tried to warn Andy about retaining ownership of any songs that he wrote, but he wasn't interested in publishing or owning the right to his songs at all; his focus was on the record deal and getting it sounding right.
Dreams led to a long long day of programming, trying to crawl forwards a tiny step while working on 'Another Dead Morning'. The piano wasn't quite right, so I wanted to adjust the MIDI velocities. One easy way is to set these at random between two values. I really needed two actual floating point value settings for this. Argus has this exact option and uses three generic values (FX, FY, FZ) for use in many editing features, so I thought I'd add it to Prometheus today.
Another upside is that these utility numbers can be used elsewhere, such as when scaling all events to a specific timing, such as when moving from say, 120 BPM to 109. Until today, fractional scaling (like 120 to 108.5) was not possible.
So, this was added, plus a host of other minor features connected with MIDI velocities. At 16:00, work on the new piano for the song began. The old, sequenced, piano sounded like an ape-robot hammering the keys like a monster. It did have a somewhat nice, and very bright timbre. I read somewhere that when mixing, pianos should retain their bass (most mixing desks have a high-pass filter switch) - complete nonsense! Pianos in most records are bass-cut, sometimes to the extent of sounding very little like actual pianos. Today, even piano-centred artists like Elton John use synthesized pianos, and those are often bass-cut and treble enhanced. The reason for these EQ changes is that the piano and the human voice span about the same frequency range.
I tend to not do much at all with pianos, except cut the bass a bit, but here I've added a bit of a notch at 450hz as the song has a lot of mid-range sounds.
