Spent yesterday transferring 30 to 40 lyric reading videos from my YouTube music channel to my art channel. These have hardly any views, 1 to 30, but they usually have some, and are a unique art form. They're as much a historical document as anything else, and if they remind me how good these old songs are, they will remind others too.
After that, I started work on music videos for Another Violet Night, even though I should be painting at this time of the year. The music admin work is now overwhelming, with many albums to transfer, remaster, transcribe, update.
One thing I do is get better over time. This is a key part of my philosophy, and why I work so hard on older material. I'm a proverbial tortoise not a hare. Even my oldest games, like Radioactive, have changed hugely over their life-span, always getting better. This is achieved by working out what can be imrpoved, and after a good level of improvement, going back and making that change to older material.
My albums have many versions. In music there are 'remasters', where the source material is not re-recorded, or even remixed, but with some changes to the equalisation balancing, and changes to compression and loudness is applied. I've rarely, I think never, remastered an album like this. New versions always at least rebalance tracks to some degree because I don't apply EQ to whole tracks, that's done at the mixing stage in Prometheus. The new End And The Beginning remaster is an example of this. Very little was changed apart from adjustment to the bass levels, and loudness. This is a fuzzy borderline between remixing and remastering, but the relative loudness of the parts (vocals vs. instruments etc.) are unchanged.
I also re-record parts, often vocals. This is particularly common since 2020 and my charge into (and growth of!) vocal music, and was intended from the outset. For the Burn Of God 'remaster', I recorded new guitars too; yet most of the rest of the album is not re-recorded (everything will technically, on a byte-by-byte basis, be different because normally two renders in a row by Prometheus will be different due to lots of randomisation/humanisation, which I tend to use). Still, these are technically 're-recordings', and most of my new album versions fall into this category, even if 90% of the new recording will be identical to the old one. For some albums, like the second version of Tree Of Keys, almost all of the tracks are completely unchanged, but one or two are tweaked.
Finally, I sometimes re-make an album from scratch. The four versions of Synaesthesia are quite different. The first was recorded from my SY-85 synth, driven by MED Soundstudio. The second used Noise Station for most of the tracks (but some tracks were duplicated). The third was a hybrid, with some Prometheus tracks, some from older versions. The fourth (current, but not yet definitive!) version is a complete Prometheus version. Crucuially, sometimes the tracks and compositions were different. 'TV Hell' from the first version is loaded with unlicenced samples so will never be released officially, and the track is unique to that version. 'The Journey', the equivalent track on other albums, is comparable in feeling. I still consider each version the same album. They're more than re-recordings, but for me, it would be a stretch to consider each version a new album. Jean-Michel Jarre has similar issues with his many versions of Oxygene, but of course he may let his record label worry about the filing implications.
So rather than call albums remasters, re-recordings, or 'new', I'll call new versions of an album 'versions' from now on. Today I've updated my artwork templates so that CD artwork will now include the album code, the version number, and release date for this version. It will also include the German LC code for the first time. I technically should have included this on all CD album artwork, but as I make and sell my own CDs, and have never sold one in Germany (or rarely anywhere at all!) this is less vital. The code is used to allocate royalties to myself, which I don't need to do, but one day my music may explode across the planet, so it's time I started to include this code.
Another Violet Night will list version number, LC code, and release date for the first time. So, another small upgrade which will be applied from now on.
