Prometheus Updates Continue, A.I. And Celebrity

More updates to Prometheus today, added a new 'Random Pan II' effect which uses a 'Shell' component. The sum of the left/right channels are multiplied by a factor as the sound moves from the centre. Typically this is +3dB or +6dB in many panning units. I can specify this (or set it negative) for various effects. I took the opportunity to update many plugins, changing default units, no time for special effects.

The work was to supplement 'A.I. and Celebrity'. I changed the melody slightly, from an initial EEFG-CC to GGABb-CC, which made it sound darker all round. I changed the bass slightly to add more of rock (tango-like) rhythm and this basic feeling was used with an oscillator-synchronisation instrument, on the initial verse, which now has almost a Gary Numan feeling. Tiny changes; but sounds a lot better than yesterday, ready for more layers. I'll add guitars and perhaps orchestral instruments to a grand chorus. The words have changed a little too.

At 1:30 Deb and I went to visit John, a pleasant social distraction. Despite taking a tablet, and the cool weather, my hayfever is now making my eyes itch and burn furiously.

Tomorrow I must work on SFXEngine promotion and Steam and IndieSFX sale admin.

A.I. And Celebrity, Prometheus v3.11

A slow and unsatisfying day. I wrote the melody for 'A.I. And Celebrity', an odd song musically. I started with some descending and ascending chords, then added more melody than my initial sketches, trying to add more, making it the best I can. Musically, it reminded me of the Kate Bush piano songs from the Phoenix years, melodic in an odd and surrealistic way. I'm not entirely sure if  I like it; so, if not, I need to identify why and keep working. I spent hours sequencing the basic melody with a simple bass, choosing an electronic saw-wave bass for a change.

Frustrated by the interminable progress and insecurity over the music, I went out to get some fittings for my art-light design, using the opportunity to take a walk. When I got back, I did some programming; two little changes to Prometheus. One stopped the keyboard being active when the program was in the background. This has been a long term problem, dating right back to the first version in 2002 (it also affects SFXEngine and Argus), and has at last been fixed thanks to a simple WM_ACTIVATEAPP check, all down to help from Rod my SFXEngine tester.

Then, more work on the song. I added some 'chorus' to the bass and doubled the beat, and it now sounds like the intro to Kim Wilde's Kids in America. I'm unsure what I want from the song regarding production; electronic, naturalistic, surrealistic...

Overall, the day has felt slow, tired, lacklustre; but then I always feel that. I must remember that I only need to move one tiny step forwards each day. I seem to work constantly for nothing except fatigue, perhaps even slipping backwards, who can say? I must, at least, keep working every day. The rock needs to roll.

Mothmoon

As somewhat sad and tired day. I added the acoustic guitar parts to Fake Plastic Lies and recorded some rock-organ. The washing machine has broken down, our milk was stolen by out affluent neighbours (not for the first time), my father is having great trouble finding anyone who is able to endorse his identity for his passport application.

My computer had trouble today too, which was and is a cause of anxity. The sound during playback (in any software) started to crackle, then slowed down (and lowered in pitch) with increasing crackle, before collapsing entirely in a distorted hiss then silence; the whole collapse taking place during playback over 30-secs or so. A Windows restart seem to fix the problem. Today is the first cool day after two weeks of 25-degree temperatures. Such climate changes have a worrying potential for hardware errors. My hope is that the problem was caused by a loose USB cable. The connection on the Studio 26c is typically very badly designed, as delicate as a house of playing cards, a very slight breath-brush will loosen it. I wish USB cables on 'professional' level equipment were screwed-in or fixed very firmly.

Most of the music on this computer emotion album is complete, but most of the year is gone too, and it feels like an empty year despite my constant work. I've spent at least a full-time month of work on SFXEngine; this is good and needed doing. We have a few interesting performance opportunities, good; but everything is very spartan. Why am I working on this music at all? I must do so, at least, to improve upon something consciously, and do something better than before; do my best.

I've written a new song, or some new words, for a part sketched as 'Entering the Machine': 'Mothmoon'. I still need to write the music for 'AI and Celebrity', work on the production for Where Is Love (and finalise the composition), and all of part 3... should I paint? What to do, and why?

Here are the words to Mothmoon:

Mothmoon

I'm tired, in the day
but can't sleep.
I lie awake all night
and can't sleep.

Perhaps it's time to retire,
to retreat
from this wood-soaked
smoke into light
electronic;

switch off emotions,
transcend the meat,
shed the moth-skin
for a moon
electronic.

My Baby's Non Binary, Fake Plastic Lies

Back to music with a charge, but progress is slow even when working non-stop.

More production work yesterday on My Baby's Non Binary, which is just about finished and is an excellent song (if I say so myself). I added some final vocoder harmony vocals today. Have also started work on 'Fake Plastic Lies', which is an old-style rock song, complete with bouncy Latin-rhythms like many classic rock songs have. Most of yesterday and much of today was crafting the sequenced parts, the bass, drums, hi-hats, cowbells and other parts 'sing' along to the main melody. This is extremely exacting and time consuming but makes all of the difference to the fundamental drive and sonority of the song.

Also today I recorded a ukulele string by string and note by note. This can now, if I wanted, be added to Someone Else's A.I. using sequencing, albeit meticulously and very slowly and inefficiently. It does, though, sound very like a live player thanks to some of the intelligence in Prometheus. Still, playing live would be easiest, so I'll hold off on this track until later. All it takes is a bit of practice.

Also made today, a new track. A one-minute filler called 'Joy From A Machine Code Perspective', which will follow the end of We Are The Damaged (which I completed yesterday) and run into Robot. Damages is as good as I had hoped, but it was hugely hard work with many blind alleys and work made and discarded. Nothing worthwhile is easy.

Just now I've recorded a few acoustic guitar sounds for Fake Plastic Lies. I'll not play these strums in one go, the inaccuracy of the timing would annoy me. It's a hard switch between C-Maj to D-Maj to G-Mag at 150 beats a minute so I've recorded a few strums and chords and will magic them all together.

People and Places, SFXEngine, Argus

A couple of busy and hot days. Set out early to see my father's exhibition at Nantwich Museum:

Some of the paintings I can't recall seeing before. A few were (are!) regularly hanging on our walls, but some are stored in the garage, or under beds and various other hidden places. The dates tended to state 1980s, though I think many are from the 1990s, at around the time of my father's Art A-Level studies at South Cheshire College.

After that, we had a tea break in the bookshop and met John and his mother there, always a nice encounter.

At home I worked furiously on both Argus and SFXEngine. I've been updating both to use the same Options system, the same start-up and shut-down order and way of working, and the same text processing system. This was a lot of work. Both started the same, but Argus drifted away, using strings primarily to make it easier to program, but that made it harder to change external text. The way it started/ended was better than SFXEngine, so this meant a lot of changes to SFXEngine too. One change, for example, was detecting an [ENDTEXT] bracket in the text file because until yesterday, the end was considered any use of a square bracket, '[', which may cause problems in future.

The process was/is extremely stressful, taking up many hours of exacting work with little to show for it except software which hopefully works just as before.

John asked me what I do all day. I wondered what too. I seem to work non-stop all day and achieve little, but no! I do manage to create things, bit by crawling bit.

Still, there was some good performance news: Fall in Green is now set to appear in this year's Nantwich Words & Music Festival in October. More on this later as I'm not sure how much I can say and when.

As well as preparing for the SFXEngine release, I'm busy at home helping my parents today. Mum wants a spare part for the washing machine but it seems that they are out of stock everywhere except in one German stockist (it's a Miele machine), and dad wants to apply for a passport. When he can prove his identity, my brother (and then myself) can apply for an Irish Passport to which we are entitled. As E.U. Citizens we would be granted far more travel rights than mere British ones. Though I was born here and have always lived here, I've never felt British or at home here. I like the idea of living in Ireland - or indeed anywhere else.

Congleton Solstice Show

Another busy day. Up at 7am for the Midsummer Frolic in Congleton:

Our performances went to plan, but the sing/play-along songs I'd not rehearsed didn't go as well as I'd like. I'm unused to playing chords, accompaniment, or playing with anyone generally. Many of the songs were sight-read on-the-fly from lyrics with chords. Perhaps I'd have done better playing by ear, or choosing melodies rather than chords. The Urban Spaceman sounded best, mainly due to practising this yesterday; this was a melodic lead rather than chords. The sad news is that Mike is now retiring, well, sad for us, and perhaps this merely means more time to devote to creative acts. His contribution to local culture, and to Fall in Green's humble origins, is huge. It was lovely to catch up with him and John after the show.

We returned home at 3pm or so, and I've spent the rest of the day finalising the changes to Argus. It's one of those frustrating series of changes, with tons of work, huge potential for accidental errors, with very little visible result. I've changed all of the program text to be accessed externally, and added a most-recent-files list to the file opening. Ultimately, changes (improvements!) here can spread across SFXEngine and Prometheus. There are a few differences between all three which I could seek to unify.

I'll file this tomorrow, then visit my father's exhibition in Nantwich Museum.

Solstice Preparations, Fence Sawing, Argus Text

Another exhausting day. Started by recording the vocals for My Baby's Non-Binary, and We Are The Damaged (or whatever it will be called), then lots of physical work sawing up six old fences into small pieces for throwing away. I found this remarkably tiring, but the heat and allergies of the season are probably contributing factors.

Then work on Argus, updating the system to accept text from a file rather than it being hard-coded. This involves changes to just about every icon, text-box, and label, although the code can be taken from Prometheus and SFXEngine, which both use that system. One of the joyous aspects of Argus is that it didn't! It became a real pain to use an external text file for a program that only I use and that will only ever be in English - but, alas, in preparation for a future Steam release (which may one day be multi-lingual), and the need for unity between these shared programs means that it's better to do this tedious and exacting work at some point.

My 4pm I had a raging headache and couldn't go on any longer, but most of the text conversion work is now complete.

Just in time for rehearsal of four songs that I was sent this afternoon. These will be performed tomorrow morning, so not much time to look at them. I'd like to do a better job than I can manage. This evening I must pack the equipment for a 7am start tomorrow.

I feel like Batman during the first act of Knightfall.

On we crawl.

FIG Rehearsal, Easel Head, Fences, and an SFXEngine Update

A super-busy day today. I was due, at 13:30 for a Fall in Green rehearsal for the Midsummer event in Congleton Library on Wednesday, so my main jobs of the morning were to print the sheet music, prepare the synth programs and the script, and perhaps practice, but upon checking my email I had a report about SFXEngine from my brilliant tester Rodrigo; a few (minor) bugs and some suggestions for changes.

One of the changes was to add some way to arrange the Modulator List, and this feature is already in Prometheus, and flagged off in SFXEngine, so that was relatively easy to add, plus a "Recently Opened" option in the menu (I've never made anything like that before) and a great suggestion to stop the update problems when the manual was open. I also took the opportunity to add the code for 'Genus Decals', so that's all set for a first update (this feature won't be active on launch day because it changes the look of the screenshots and video too much). I also added the option to automatically detect an ".spj" and ".spg" file extension (for sound project, sound program) when opening, so now a double click on a project OR file in Windows will (should!) open it.

All of this took all morning, and every change creates work elsewhere. The manual needed updating too, as now all of the Modulator List screenshots are out of date.

At the same time, I had to work on the house fences, which mum has been working hard on for the last week. Several needed moving, and later, a new block of wood making to fit to an edge, but this needed screwing in, as well as some carving for the shape.

It was soon 12:30 and time to eat. Then I had to prepare the Fall in Green show. The rehearsal went well, and lasted until 15:30 or so. Then it was a matter of carrying down the amps, and other things for the performance. This is quite a small one, but still requires two amps, mic and keyboard stand, synth, some CDs for possible sale, props, two music stands and the sheet music itself. Plus costumes and signs.

Then the knob and inserts for the easel head arrived, so before finalising the SFXEngine manual, much less preparing the builds, I decided to drill out the main holder and assemble it. All went reasonably well and the new bolts worked brilliantly. Here is the head so far:

The only flaw is that overtightening the main friction knob will pull out the hex nut you can see in the first image. I can add a piece of wood there to both hold it and improve the aesthetics. I can now design alterative surface holders at whim. Overall this saves about two minutes of work each morning as I find and clamp the right piece of wood for the back of my painting surface, but it is perhaps more than that, as that wood can sometimes slip. This head should be better (caveat: it is untested).

After that, fixing up the fence and fitting it outside, then dashing back to the computer to compile new version of SFXEngine (now v1.27), and uploading to Steam.

A manically busy day then, and one that remains too hot and too filled with grass pollen for my comfort. Every summer makes my head, eyes, ears and throat feel swollen. I normally hide inside in the dark with windows closed, but I couldn't do this today. Onwards we march.