You're My Candy Cane Production

A full day of production work on my Christmas song for the Christmas Tails album, 'You're My Candy Cane'. A song I dreamt on Oct 20th 2023 (dream music composing happens to most song writers, it's fairly rare for me), there's an old post here about it and the original song lyrics. I've made a few small lyric changes. The chorus was simply 'You're my candy cane, my candy' repeated 4 times. Now it's:

You're my candy cane, my candy
You're my candy cane, my candy
You're my candy cane, my candy cane

You're my candy cane, my candy
You're my candy cane, my candy
You're my candy cane, my candy cane

So, two iterations. The song starts with this catchy melody without vocals. In some ways, the song is similar to my first ever song (well, of the 'new', post-school-days era), 'I Love You For Your Money', which also featured repeats of the line, and was also dreamt.

I could make you smile If only You would stay a while

Has been changed to:

You could make me smile If only You would stay a while

To match the song's perspective, and the 'When you call' line is repeated only once.

In production terms, I began with the drums and aimed for an electro pop song. Despite my dance orientated plan, the song doesn't feature regular bass drums, few of my songs do. I seem to favour shuffle beats. I added saw-chord stab fairly early on, to match the rhythm of the melody, then added a pulse-wave lead, as imagined. In my head, it was close to the track 'Zoot' from the Flatspace soundtrack.

I added a few more experimental layers, and a second lead. Arpeggios there seemed to work well in the chorus. I expanded this lead, and made it converse with the pulse lead, one finishing the other. The basic tracks are pulse 1, pulse 2, pulse 2 quieter for the chorus, bass, bass drums, snare, hi-hats, toms. I added a Casio VL1 click as a sort of metronome pre-emptive click, evoking the beeps on the starting grid of a racing game, and added a white noise filter sweep, a classic 80s sound.

This is mostly it. The structure is as penned, but opens with a melodic chorus, and has an additional chorus for a guitar solo after the refrain; the refrain is the climax, the essential sweet-spot, and the solo is the coast down from that peak.

The next step is working on the vocals and arrangement. Songs like this benefit from layers and backing vocals. I already know I want a vocoder for 'my candy', but layered vocals may work there too. I'll certainly need layers for that climax.

I'm constantly amazed how many tracks pop songs seem to require, mine are positively frugal by comparison. Here's a shot of Prometheus with the intro, so far.

Make Her Sky Makeover, October Priorities

The migration to Substack is now complete. Blogger and Substack have different pros and cons, so for now Make Her Sky will be on both platforms for dear readers to choose their preference.

Many other jobs are pending, perhaps the most urgent is completing my Christmas song for the second Electric Sprout album. 12 artists are now confirmed and two songs, 'One Star' by Paul Parish, and 'Solstice Carol' by John Miller, complete and ready for mastering! Mike Drew of The Forrest Dick Band have also sent a few possible tracks, though more may come. My big hope is that Andy Stubbs will manage to complete his song, which sounds brilliant even in the fragment I've heard.

As it has a deadline, this must be my first priority. Perhaps, concurrently, I can work on the two shelving projects. I'm tempted to start that woodwork today, but it is too damp due to rainy Amy, today's named storm.

Two painting competitions report this month, and I've been informed of a new Nantwich Museum Open Art Competition, which is now open for entries on their website. There is a theme of 'heritage', one of those hugely boring words like 'community'. Such a theme is perfect as it will inspire something exciting and daring, and we're blessed to have a few months to develop and pain something new, even if the judging is by a 1500-pixel jpg (sigh, what would Vermeer, what would Leonardo da Vinci do when faced with the degradation of something visceral and ultra-delicate like an oil painting being judged by a coarse digital photograph?). I can but hope for the sympathy of the judges.

Backup Duties, Substack Migration Continues, Computers and Cells

Backup Duties, Substack Migration Continues, Computers and Cells

Woke early, after a worrysome and sleepless night, worried about my darling Deborah and her insomnia and work stress. How I wish I could help.

Today was a full day. October the 1st, so a quarterly back-up day. Another task was disabling Bytten, the game review website I founded with Andrew Williams. We found fellow gamers and reviewed a game a week for 10 years, from 2003 to 2013, and today the site was switched off pending the lapse of the domain. I must, at some point, publish the reviews as a book, partly because nobody does. So many websites and web-magazines form a transient culture. I am critically aware of this point.

Backups took the first few hours, then a call from Galleria Balmain; I needed to write some new information about myself and about the paintings on sale there. This took the next few hours.

Then, the long job of the Substack migration of this blog. Yesterday I managed 60 pages, each page 25 posts, so hand-tagged 1500 posts, each opened, clicked edit, saw which tags were needed from the Blogger blog, then added them. I really needed to be a web-machine to do this, with 25 tabs open at once, and the Ctrl-Tab shortcut to dart the next tab after memorising the tags for each post.

Today, at 7pm, I approached the end, the last of the 3,032 posts; but then I noticed another anomaly. I had already discovered that any blog post with the same title was overwritten, forcing me to hand copy-and-paste about 149 posts, but today discovered that posts with multiple images were auto-deleting images. Not only when editing and submitting changes, but the very act of clicking 'Edit' and viewing the post makes the images vanish before your eyes!

I suspect this is due to formatting differences between the HTML of Blogger and Substack, and I hope that it only applies to a limited number of posts, perhaps ones where images appear after another in a row, without text between. This should be a minority of posts. But, sigh, this will mean again traversing the 3,032 posts one by one, comparing them with the original on Blogger and perhaps re-uploading the images.

There is much to do this month, so much. Of key priority is promotion of the Christmas album, as well as work on my song. Lots of other music work too. Well, I can do but one job at a time.

I must focus more upon making good art, seeing and presenting connections; this is the essence of art, and science. Already I can see that there is a connection between the Substack migration and cellular activity. Both are about replication and error correction. If I do this digital task well, my cells will act in a similar fashion and extend my youth. It seems clear to me that this is the case, that exacting computer work and filing trains many subsets of the body to behave in similar, exacting ways.