Macc Art Lounge, Live Music Preparation

A delivery of art to the Macc Art Lounge in the day. Met the artist Laura Grace and had a catch up with the wonderful artist and arts champion Ché. A delightful morning all round, and I'm excited about exhibiting there again. There have been a few changes to the look and feel of the place that have made a big difference to the look.

The afternoon was spent largely on Snow Business admin. Deb saw the lyric video. There are a few things I'd like to do to improve it even more.

After that, preparation work on my two live performances of this month. These are complex songs. I'll need to work out how much to play live and how much to use backing tracks for. I'll be using my first generation Zoom H4 for audio playback, which has pros and cons compared to the cheap 'Allreli' player I'd used before. Neither device is designed to be easy to use as a playback device. The Zoom instantly flows into the next track, and the controls are fiddly and this makes accidental presses possible. I plan on using the MODX audio input to mix the result, but that too has pros and cons. The main problem is that each MODX sound has different settings and volumes for this input. The audio input is supposed to be part of sound play and generation, not plain mixing. Perhaps external mixing would be better.

'Robot' uses three live parts for different parts of the song, and 'Christmas Smells' two. Of the other From The Mic Stand tracks, two are instrumental, and I'll probably play 'Silicon Carbon Genesis' as a piano and voice track in the manner of Kate Bush or Elton John. I must work out the best options for 'Do You Know Where Your Heart Is?' and 'AI and Celebrity'. The former is particularly highly sequenced and has few vocals too... yet it's a good track and an explosive start to the evening. Perhaps it would work best as a 'mostly instrumental' track in the style of Jean-Michel Jarre.

These live performances are now my key focus for the month.

Library Winter Party, Prometheus v3.23, Lyric Video

Had a talk with Nigel Stonier last night; he was speaking with Deb and expressed interest in the album project. He has a track ready and I'd be honoured to have him on the album. He is still very much recovering physically from the Words & Music Festival.

The day began with first receiving Mick Masser's song, then designing a poster for the live music event to be held in Crewe Library. The event is a veritable mish-mash. It was originally the launch of Deborah's new poetry book, but music performances from the Christmas album were added, then an open mic poetry section to draw more of a crowd, and provide an alternative outlet for any musicians who might be unable to perform their songs.

We (as Fall in Green) have performed for the past two winters there, so this is, sort of and in a very loose way, this year's Christmas event, though much more of a group event, which pleases me. These shows are a lot of work.

Then, admin work on the album, filling in Mr Stonier with details, then some Prometheus programming, now to a final v3.23. I decided to add an 'analysis only' option which scans the song but doesn't save it out. This is useful to track the spectrum of a track without saving out its massive wav file. Now I can render 'WAV' (the plain song), 'Stats' (song and statistics file, the classic 'Stats' option), or 'Analyse' which is just the statistics file.

After that, I worked on a lyric video for Christmas Smells. It's a bundle of joy, The whole video bounces and rocks to the music in a manner very like my ancient dream did to the song 'I Love You for Your Money' - the dream song that got me started with song writing 20 years-or-so ago.

One thing I wanted in the video was the next line to be there, waiting to move into place at the right time. As a singer, I want to be ready for the next line, and I remember well the wonderful bouncing ball in the old Ghostbusters game on the Commodore 64 - this was so good! And it too showed the next line. A ball would have been a lot of work, but lining up the next line wasn't too hard, and I made the words dance left and right to the music like see-saws.

The solos are blue-sky flights into snowflakes. I could have perhaps added more snow. It's quite hard to select and process very large numbers of tracks. Even here there are 80 tracks of snowflakes (and so 80 flakes at any one time). They are relatively easy to control but hard to select and view all 80. I wonder if I can somehow 'fold' them together?

The video took about 4 hours, not bad for its complexity, though the amount of work, mental calculation, and typing I had to do made me think that 95% of people simply couldn't do it. Argus might perhaps be just too complex for public use. Then again, Yamaha made the MODX public, and its interface seems to have been designed by paranoid ants.

Tomorrow I'm dropping off paintings to the Macc Art Lounge in Macclesfield, my first foray in visual art in a while. I love painting, but it's almost impossible to make progress as a visual artist, and I'm very socially isolated from the visual arts. I've probably not spoken to another visual artist since I was last in the Macc Lounge two years ago (no - wait! There was David Jewkes, ah and my brilliant but doomed first mural design).

I must urgently practise my live music performances. This was a key monthly goal and I've not done a thing on it.

Onwards to glory we charge.

Contact Admin, Sky Robes Sheet Music, Information and Death

A very busy day, I've spent at least 2 hours updating my contacts list, trying to add an image to each one. Faces are much easier to remember than names, and I always try to add a photo of a contact to each one. Even a wrong face can be better than no face, it still makes it easier to remember, but the research of trying to find a correct face can take a long time, and I have many hundreds of contacts.

This process made me aware of many things. Firstly, people who aren't online at all have a sort of non-existence. When working online its easy to think that it is everything, the world, yet many friends and contacts have zero online presence. A related truth is how quickly data fades, how I could barely find any references at all to my first art club Art Support, its 50 members, starting from at least 2007 (and probably years before), which continues, yet I've struggled to find any information about them, or any of the members I know and knew. This alerted me to the third fact of how poor Google now is as a search engine. Several results has very few results at all, which is surprising when the internet is, I presume, bigger than ever before. Many results were tainted by my contact themselves, I think... existing friends, my website(!) appearing in results. It just felt wrong, broken.

After this basic work, I started to notate the 'Sky Robes of Celeste' piano music, getting it note perfect for the new music. This reminded me of Beethoven. How one writes a piece, performs it, and in performing adds more, so the original is updated. This almost certainly happened then, so originals are 'lost', and acts of performance result in new music automatically, as well as a lot of paperwork. I was reminded that Beethoven kept all of his notes, diaries, every record from his life despite moving house more than 100 times. This seemingly innocuous fact was crucial to his fame and success; there is so very much work in art, that that work is the necessary record keeping. The message from today is that a person exists only so much as the records which mention or reference him or her.

All death, even physical death, is information death. Storing and recording information is life. As I've sad before, this is life's principle purpose - though the word 'purpose' implies a driving force. Life has no driving force, it merely exists or dies. That which is stored well is hardy against death.

After the sheet music, I analysed some music and other waves to determine a possible ideal EQ balance. The results were surprisingly unintuitive, though much closer to pink noise than white.

In the afternoon, I prepared paintings for my next Macc Art Lounge exhibition. I'm uncertain when it starts, or other details, like what I must bring, but I expect my paintings will appear this weekend. I updated my website to put art exhibitions and live events on on page. These were separated before because exhibitions tend to span days and events or performances are one-off, but both are relatively few, so it's perhaps better to put them all on one page. I've called the list of previous performances 'Events' - but up-and-coming events are also called 'Events'. In English future and past events are labelled with the same word. 'Events Listings' websites tend to list up-and-coming events, rather than an archive of shows of the past. I wonder what the best terms could be.

After that, I made preparations to send out the Christmas Smells single. I need some radio contacts or others that may promote the music and the album.

Then, back to the contacts list. Most of this day has been filing, storing, recording, preparing.

Sky Robes, Prometheus v3.23 and EQ

Slept badly and awoke late, my mood strange and sad, perhaps due to the end of projects.

I started the day by updating Prometheus again, to v3.23, this time by making my spectral EQ-Tracker use RMS values rather than peak values. Peak values are easier to calculate, my reasoning was that the mix of peaks of different frequencies would give a good measure of the overall feeling and balance of a track. The problem is that one loud transient (a crash or boom) will set those peaks, rendering all of the rest of the song irrelevant. So I updated it to use RMS (average) values.

This wasn't too difficult, the program already calculates them to return the overall level. Doing this on a large sample can lead to inaccuracies due to the huge numbers involved (adding tiny numbers to a floating-point variable 10,000,000 times or more), so I divide the calculation into smaller sub-groups and average those groups at the end, and I use 64-bit double precision.

This meant creating a new 'standard' as an audio target for matching the levels, and thus loading in lots of existing songs and viewing the relative levels. The results were, actually, almost the same as when using peak values, but not quite. There's a definite arch shape: low, high, highest, high, low; whereas the peak traces were more low-flat-flat-flat-low.

Of course, the important thing is how it sounds. I reasoned that a mix of an infinite number of musical tracks would produce pink noise, and that music engineers would prefer white noise. If this hypothesis is correct then all EQ balancing is ultimately a matter of tuning pink noise to white; removing bass and adding higher frequencies. This seems to match my experience.

After that I started work on the Sky Robes of Celeste production. I started with the piano and added a few strings with minimal filtering. The whispery vocals clashed a little with the piano and the somewhat hissy strings, but it sounds good enough. I started the music by painting a scene, starting with a live recording taken from the Locus Sonus world microphone array, this one in Dar es Salaam at 4pm today. This forms the gap between day and night, the living and the dead, of this poetry about ancestors and graves.

Christmas Smells Single, Sky Robes Vocal Recording

Another full day, most of the day spent preparing for the Christmas Smells single release. Submitting this and the lyrics to the relevant distributors, registering the song in many places, adding it to my website, archiving the album content and details, finalising the artwork, and finally creating the Spotify Canvases. Christmas Smells simply uses the cover but with moving snowflakes and yes! - a dancing nose!

Christmas Is To Go uses the same snow but falling into a foggy darkness:

In the morning, Deborah came to record the vocals for Sky Robes of Celeste. My next task is to work on this.

I updated Prometheus too, though only neating variable names rather than any actual changes. The spectrum analyser uses peak levels to check each band, but perhaps RMS (average) value ma be more useful. At the moment, one momentary blast of white noise anywhere will convince the analysis that the whole song is perfect. Still, the analyser wasn't intended to be perfect, simply a tool. My changes to today make the future RMS feature a little easier.

Christmas Is To Go Recording

A full day yesterday of recording Christmas Is To Go. When I wrote it, the mood was, in my head, something like Bowie's 'Always Crashing in the Same Car'. In the end it came out quite different.

I've spent quite a lot of time programming yesterday and today as a result of this song. Yesterday because the 90 B.P.M. MIDI import failed; I rounded it down so that an integer value of 666667 divided into 60,000,000 (which is the 'correct' value for 90 beats) rounded to 89. This threw out the timing.

I like the irregular timing of live instrumentation, and I use the piano and the main driver of rhythm and mood for the whole song. Rather than try to fix everything to a regular tempo (no metronomes here!), my tempi are often wildly irregular, and I tie everything to that feeling instead. To do this, I can use the MIDI notes as a guide track, so that the chord changes and time of the notes are not guesswork but exact. In this case, everything was failing, so a little upgrade made the timing round to the nearest beat rather than always down.

I spent today upgrading the EQ tracer. I programmed it a few weeks back, and it makes it easier to monitor the EQ. I had neglected to actually test it, however, and did so today on pure sine-wave 'standard candles'. These tests led to a change of how the relative balance from source to target are calculated.

Both changes are a result of Christmas Is To Go, an innocuous B-Side to a single that I didn't need to make; but this exactly indicates the value of it. These are long term corrections, improvements to my main music tool and way of working. It's been a busy two days working on the song, but worth it for this improvement.

Those benefits aside, it's rather good song in itself. The melody climbs in an odd way, and it's this which appealed to me as I wrote it (in my head the chorus also climbed A to B to C; that may have been just too atonal, but for whatever reason, when I played it, I automatically played the more conventional A-minor, C-Major, E-minor, A-minor).

I played all of the piano in one go, so part of the composition was spontaneous. I've no time to notate it all just yet.

Here, by the way, is the cover to the single:

My idea of using a nose-shaped Christmas tree worked better than expected.

Christmas Is To Go

Most of the day flown on admin work, but also creating cover art for the Christmas Smells single. I have the crazy idea of recording a B-Side with these words. Crazy because I have about 24-hours to do it.

Christmas Is To Go

On every corner
of every street,
for every avaricious child
there is no chance of snow.
Christmas is to go.

At every meeting
of those elite,
for every candle-scented clown
there is no chance of snow.
Christmas is to go.

Snow Business Cover Finalised Sky Robes Piano

More album work today. Finalised the cover and have received tracks from almost all of the artists. It's amazing how they vary in style and ways of working. I'm trying to balance the relative volumes to set them all about the same. Most are fine, but one is notably quieter and one notably louder than the others.

I've also recorded the piano parts for Sky Robes of Celeste, at last, after playing it for most of yesterday. I took the keyboard down and set it up on a separate stand, with piano stool, all at the best height. This helped a lot; my previous best takes were played while standing up, but the strain on my left leg was considerable (I need the right for the sustain pedal, so most of my weight while playing is on my left leg). I also listened to a rehearsal from the 2019 premiere of the track, to note the structure and pacing. There was a solo in the mid section so I've added one here too, improvised while recording, no time to compose one.

Overall this, take 12, was ideal; or at least sounds it, I can't really tell until Deb adds her words. 12 short takes yes, but spread over 12 hours or so... this time matters. If I make anything look or sound easy, it isn't. It's hard hard hard. I told myself this as I put back the keyboard and re-plugged everything in after setting everything in a new place just for this recording. There can be no short-cuts.

My custom-made music stand fell off during moving and broke into pieces! So much for Titebond. It seems that the glue barely penetrated the shiny MDF surface. I will screw it this time. When anything has problems, is imperfect, action must be taken to fix it, improve it. Again, no short-cuts.

At 3pm, the final cover was revealed:

The last change of green writing did make a difference. I've also started a design for the cover of the single release of Christmas Smells. I don't have much time for that.

This evening we're off to Macclesfield. October was a very busy month. November will be busy too, hopefully not as busy. I'll (probably) spend about 6 days in Macclesfield this month, mostly sitting in the Macc Art Lounge.