Solstice, Quantise To Group Mean, What You Could Have Won

A lovely morning yesterday at an outdoor gathering with poet friends at the Bridestones. The area is very small, little more than a few boulders in a very wooded area. There's little indication of its historical significance. The day was tainted by the sad absence of Deborah who remains ill.

I returned in the afternoon, but it was too hot work work. The album needs a new track I feel, between 'All Controlled' and 'More'. The latter ends in C-minor, more starts in A-minor. Both a a little too similar in audio mood (not in theme) to tie together, so a slower intermediate track is needed. I started with those chords and played something small on the piano. I then came up with some words that play on the themes of the album generally, and act as a prelude to the satire of 'More'.

What You Could Have Won

Here's what you could have won
Here's what you could have taken home
Here's what you'll never have

Here's what your life could have been like
If you'd done what you're supposed to do

I spent yesterday playing it on piano, the backing is simple.

Today has been a little frustrating. I started with adding (well, enhancing) a useful feature in Prometheus: quantise to group mean time. Most quantisation of notes do so to a fixed rhythm, the main tempo, well, ALL quantisation does this, except mine. The problem with this is that most of the time you don't want a fixed 'perfect' beat in any song ever. The strongest case is in electronic dance music, but perhaps even then the tempo could be slightly changed for dramatic effect.

Anyway, all rhythms since 1984 and the invention of the sequencer have been robotically fixed, compared to all prior music. My feature quantises notes not to the nearest beat but to the average of a bunch of notes. It has the effect of unifying nearby-notes (like chords, like the bass with the drum etc.) but not changing the (human) pace of the music. Here's an extreme example of averaging in action:

The lines are notes. The upper track is unquantised, the bottom one the averaged notes. You can set the width of the effect window. This is an extreme example, but even here it can be useful to simplify a MIDI track for example.

After this I discovered a bug in the MIDI import. At tick 129000 or so, the MIDI import stopped. It was because that multiplied with the wave frequency of 44100 caused an overflow. I needed to multiply it because it's not a normal import, it imports to the exact speed of the sequencer, so backwards calculates the final rendered song in samples, then works out where to place the note! The problem was fixed by using a long long, my first use of a 64-bit variable.

These things have taken all day. I must makde more progress.

How I miss my darling Deborah. One of my happier jobs of the day was going shopping for her on this much cooler day.

Brigid The Corn Dolly

A punishingly hoy day here, 30 degrees and the hottest of the year so far. I started by updating the music pages on my website with some new code, then making small changes to the Violet Night music, small things based on a first full listen yesterday. I may need to add another track, or at least work on the transition. By 12pm it was too hot to work on the computer.

At 1:30pm I started to pack for the solstice event tomorrow. Deb and I, and a few friends will perform a few things outdoors. We'll have no power, so no keyboards, but I'll bring a guitar, a battery powered amplifier, and a backing track for 'Sunchild'. After 2pm, in the blazing sun, I worked on the lawn on the Brigid the Corn Dolly, sponging it with yellow and orange-browns.

The paint dried in seconds. The card had curled due to the paint, so I wetted the back to curl it back, then added some grass, which has already started to dry out.

It's too hot to work much on the computer, still 26 in here. I'd like to work more on the album art, but am forced to pause.

Another Violet Night Cover

An appropriately sleepless and restless night leads to a day working on the cover art for Another Violet Night. I started with some photos, and chose one I liked...

Then started to work on designs based on this... working, changing, adding, subtracting... experimenting with text and placement...

Then I took some summer garden photos for the other booklet pages and the rear. I wanted to clash night and day, so lots of day images to be warped into the nocturnal. One result is a change to the top left when I added some inverted ivy there...

I've got lots of colour and texture combinations to play with already, the greys and oranges, the white/red/blue. This will make it easier to work on the booklet (and digital booklet!) pages. The ivy theme was applied to the CD rear too. I chose orange to contrast with the violet of the album's title, though there isn't much violet in the imagery itself, the purples emerge from the inverted greens.

I've made full CD artwork for all of my albums, often rather beautiful (if I say so myself), but only a tiny minority actually get made, primarily due of lack of sales and money, but also lack of my pushing them. My most popular CD, for example, is probably We Robot because I worked on selling and handing out copies at every opportunity. But I've got through lots of The Spiral Staircase and Cycles & Shadows too.

Another reason for not making many CDs is that since the explosion in my music began in 2020, my albums were temporary experiments. I knew it would be a learning process and that my vocals and production abilities would improve. The albums weren't good enough or ready enough to promote wildly. We Robot was the first I thought was good enough, hence the recent explosion in remasters as I revisit and fix-up my art-pop canon.

I'm not actually sure if the tracks (never mind durations) are finalised yet, but that can all be changed with ease. Onwards I charge.

Another Violet Night, and Remixing Radiation

A strange day. I'm making good progress on the album, very keen to get it complete, not worry about details or quality too much. The key thing is to stick to the original vision, there are no right or wrong songs; no writing is right or wrong, so that must be raced though BUT there can be a right and wrong mix and master, those are skills not arts. Overthinking can sometimes produce good results, but is often less efficient than moving on quickly and simply making something new in future, should a new idea or option present itself.

I must remember to push onwards and avoid being tied by the tar-trap of perfectionism. It something will do, it will do, but there are always exceptions and complexities to this rule! It seems that as I become more skilled, I want better and better results, but 'quality' is so subjective. I find at times that I can get better results by not trying to get better results.

Today I did a little more work on 'Daytime Teevee', paring back the complexity, and deciding to largely stick with what was there with the first version. Then, a similar change to the last track, 'Walls (And How To Hit Them)'; which now includes parentheses! I always imagined a megaphone-like voice speaking here, so today added that and discarded the other harmonies that were there. The album so far, with it's 12 tracks and 38 minutes, is complete, though I may add more if there needs to be more structural unity. This takes listening back - ah! This process, this proofing, is that very tar-trap!

The title will be 'Another Violet Night', which was my original title idea, no need to think more on it. I need to finish and move on quickly.

I also started work on a new EP, though I plan on moving to painting as soon as I can. This was inspired by the recent wars. Step 1 is a new version of the Radioactive theme, 'Radiation'. It sounds like a new mix, but actually it's a total re-creation, moving instrument by instrument, effect by effect to duplicate the Noise Station 1 sequence in Prometheus. It's amazing how the algorithms are theoretically the same, saw waves, filters and other code that is so similar, yet, the result is really different. There's no way I can duplicate the Noise Station original, though, of course, it sounds close. One of the hardest things to match was the high-pitched darting notes that zip up and down the frequency range. It's saw-saw-pulse combination fed though a flange, then peaking filter modulated by a sine wave, but even though the filter should be the same, the way it processes the parameters is very slightly different, so it sounded different.

The biggest problem with the Noise Station version is the overpowering bass, but it's not at all bad, it's one of my best sounding sequences from that era. I've turned the bass down by 25% and will include this version on the album too. The new version isn't intended to be identical, I've limited the bass, and changed that peaking sound a little, used more of a hollow-phaser type effect (with negative feedback on the flange), and added more stereo to the instruments. Overall, it sounds similar but cleaner, particularly with the fizzy high-frequencies which are a bit ear-jangling in their distortion.

I'll also include 'Written On Rice' here. This song is a bit sleepy and boring in pace, so I need to work on it. I can't and won't spend long. Onwards!

New Album Work

A day of work on the new album. It seems that the final tracks and order are complete, the titles now are as follows:

Violet Night
Another Dead Morning
Breakfast Of Delight
The Parents In The Walls
Daytime Teevee
How Lonely
The Tainted Pain
Smashing My House Of Cards
Fear Is Everywhere
All Controlled By Someone
More
Walls And How To Hit Them

Structurally, my plan was that the first 9 tracks form a group, and three groups of three, but this is much less apparent now, and today I added an extra minute-long intro to 'All Controlled By Someone' which plays on the imagery of that song, and some of the primary thema of the album; the music in 'Fear Is Everywhere'. 'More' can thematically link too, as it's about commercialism, and there are lots of classic television clips in here, so the structure spans the entire album, with 'Walls' as a scherzo-like epilogue.

Most of the day was spent balancing tracks (bless my 'relative, tuned spectrum analyser'! This Prometheus feature has transformed my music more than almost any other), adjusting, musing. A lot of work had gone into 'Daytime Teevee', which it proving troublesome to mix and get quite right. The darker and more complex tracks are my favourites, though all are rather short and disparate. At the moment, it's very much an art-pop album, almost in the style of Sparks, but with a unified theme and limited fun or joy; the mood is darker. More work and more musing is required.

All Controlled By Someone Solo

Sigh, another day flies past, tiny fragments of progress made in the art of muisc. Tiny fragments.

First, work on 'All Controlled By Someone', and some backing vocals. I tried up-tuning them to sound 'female' but the results were not very good, so recorded some simpler ones, which were then band-limited in a nice way. Then, some general balancing to the track.

In the afternoon, another regular batch of work on album distribution transfer, then work on the All Controlled solo. I decided to use the MODX, and recorded 3 or 4 solos in MIDI with different organs, all were adequate, but none quite right. Then, I recorded three solos with a flute-glockenspiel instrument, again fine, then some solos with upright piano, this time simple live recordings rather than MIDI. These were more relaxed and jazzy, they seemed to fit better; but none of the 12 or so solos seemed right. I then created a new instrument from a raw 'strings' sample, with instant fade in and out, and high pass filter to create a stark and synthetic sound. This sounded good, so I recorded a MIDI solo with this, then exported it.

The solo was recorded at 120 BPM but at the speed of the song is 140. Some programs complain about importing, I needed to simply change the tempo, not the actual speed of the music. Fortunately, Prometheus can import and ignore the actual recording tempo. I did this, then quantized the result, then recorded it as it played back though the MODX. At this stage it sounded fine, but I thought it might be better to bypass the synth entirely, so I loaded the MIDI notes into the song and recreated the MODX instrument in Prometheus, thus came full circle, and created a sequenced solo which is based on a live play; notably the timing was 'repaired' in the process.

This made me think of the Beethoven, as performer and composer, and the difference between the two. He would improvise lots of possible starts and directions, and notate those improvisations. I could have used my live recording and not cared about the notes, or the 'perfect' timing, but I notated the result like a composer rather than stuck with the recording like a performer. There was, here, limited advantage in expressive quality, as the instrument had no sensitivity to the keys. Still, I feel more a composer than performer at heart; at least in this case. Perhaps, at times, I feel more performer than composer. Today's experiences illustrates the border between the two.

Corn Dolly, Prometheus v3.70, Art

An artistic get together at Linda's; inspiring and delightful in every way. Like the old art group meetings, I felt pressure to bring some artwork to actually do. It's ironic that I didn't particularly feel like doing art, feeling pressure only because it was described as a drawing/painting day, yet in the end I was the only one who prepared or made any art.

Deb and I will be performing something in a casual way on the solstice, so Deb had the idea of making a 'life sized' corn dolly. In the end it was about 1M or 1.5M tall, and made from a cardboard core, with lots of cardboard strips glued to it to emulate hay. Today I painted it crudely, with cheap paint. I was reminded that a lot of art in medieval times was made for special one-off events, religious celebrations or parades, and so the art was primarily cheap rather than high quality. This is certainly the case here, though of course I did my best given the few hours of time and budget of zero. The dolly (christened Brigid) is intended for one day of use.

I aim to film the Solstice event, so the world can see Brigid then.

I managed a few little jobs. The filing of the remastered Finnegans Judgement EP is complete, and today I updated Prometheus again to fix a bug in the Noise Station 1 importer. I had an idea of releasing the Radioactive theme as part of a war-themed EP. I'd much prefer to remake the music in Prometheus than use Noise Station 1. Technically, the results should sound identical, but there have been years of updates and changes in Prometheus, and it has a less harsh, less tinny sound than Noise Station. I don't mind this, but the limiter and spectrum tools are hugely useful for mastering, and those don't exist in Noise Station.

When updating to v3.70, I added the option to view and change sample loops in either seconds or samples. Until now, all units were in samples, and the boxes were primarily for informational reasons, not really for hand editing.

The days are slow. Being around other artists for a rare time was nice, but reminded me that I'm as unknown and obscure in the art world as perhaps I ever have been, that compared to other full-time artists I barely ever sell paintings and can't seem to find anyone who will exhibit my art in any capacity. I must be doubly grateful for my friends and those who encourage me. I've been far less proactive in visual arts since 2020 when music became more of a passion. I am, I feel, better at painting than ever before, and better at music and every other creative discipline. I must remind myself of these things.

Onwards we roll our heavy rock.

Finnegans Judgement Finalised, All Controlled Electro-Jazz-Blues

Most of today was completing the Finnegans Judgement remaster, mostly the many filing and archiving processes. I have found tome to work on 'All Controlled by Someone'. The rhythm is somewhat like a bossa-nova, but I'd like to bend it more towards jazz and blues, and a song like the Zombies' 'Time of the Season'. That was jazz, with its organ and bass-led beat. My song started that way but I experimentally tried an analogue synth bass and organ, and it sounded better, perhaps because it was deliberately alien and unusual.