We Robot on Bandcamp

A day of We Robot promotion. Added the album and the single to Bandcamp and created a bonus mix of Hydroxy' exclusive to that platform. Have sent out a couple of promotional album copies to friends. The day has generally flown by, I feel I've hardly done a thing. All set for quarterly backups tomorrow. The day must be seized. Every day, hour, breath is precious, and fleeting.

I watched fragments of an interview with the wonderful Brian May. He's recently remastered his solo albums from the early 1990s. I remember downloading a digital copy of Starfleet Project in the 1990s and mailing him a royalty cheque.

On we march, forging a path in culture. We are specks of colour in the bucket of life, but each speck changes the hue of the whole.

Cycling, Scoring, AI and Celebrity

Sigh, difficult days! In the night I started a book about how to enjoy life; I may continue writing, as it was rather fun. Life feels like a struggle at the moment, but I must try my best every day.

By yesterday morning I thought I'd finished the Cycles remaster. I burned a CD master in the morning, ready to carefully proof-by-ear later (I prefer to do this on CD, still my preferred way to listen to music), then started work transcribing some of the Testing The Delicates sheet music.

There is a transcription schism with some of these. For 'Float Like Memories' performances I play scales and strokes in D-Major, switch to A-Major at one point and back to D again. I've noted approximate times in the lyrics for chord changes, and some basic melodies to play with. Each performance is different, but pretty similar too. For these transcriptions I usually transcribe the CD version note-by-note, which can create a few problems with these largely improvised tunes. Usually the problems arise from the loose timing. The chord changes rarely take place at the 'start of a bar' and sometimes there are odd numbers of notes in bars at timings that are virtually unscorable. Another option I thought, is to publish a score as I play them, with 'hints' and guides, like the D/A switch as above.

I managed 3 or 4 scores, but it was slow and unrewarding work. I need some sort of regular income and I'm starting to fear the oncoming year. Still, these scores are important, and I must do them all. I've made good progress in there mere two years since starting this grand plan, with almost half of my albums now fully scored.

Before bed, in the late dark, the best time for listening, I listened to Cycles with headphones... and disaster! Almost all of the piano parts had blips and ticks. Usually only one -tiny- tick in a 3-minute recording, but it was there. An annoying thing about this is that these are not audible when monitoring during recording... so after recording I must re-listen to an entire track. Today I've analysed each piano part (there are about 20 such recordings for the album) and re-recorded those needed, which was most of them. This time I used the P105 piano to playback the MIDI files, to reduce USB bandwidth. All recordings but one were fine; but even so, one still had a 'tick' and needed re-recording. This tedious, mind-numbing task has taken all day.

One upshot is that I've discovered (how could I miss it!?) that my PC has a USB-C connector in the back. These can be double the speed of a normal USB, so it should theoretically help with latency for this USB-C sound card. Come to think of it, I'm unsure if this is faster or merely an alternative shape. The one on the front IS faster, it advertises itself as so. I must hope.

It's nearly 3pm and Cycles is again ready for a master test. Last week was spent tediously working on the audiobook, a job that I thought would take 2 days, and so it is this week with Cycles. So it goes.

It's AI and Celebrity day, and my single (my first since Jabberwocky in 2021, but that was Fall in Green) is now out. I've only had two single releases as a solo artist: 'House Of Glass' and 'Masculinity Two', but both were later re-recorded and released by Marius Fate.

Later today, work surrounding the release will take place. The premiere of the video, release of the Flatspace We Robot Music Pack, and a special Flatspace sale. I have the option of attending a company meal on Oct 24th, the album release day. If I do then I will delay the premiere of the video to Saturday.

Cycles 2023 Continues

A full day yesterday remastering Cycles. Completed all of Shadows yesterday, a matter of re-recording the piano, changing the reverbs from old to new, and cutting the bass on various parts (particularly the vocals). Everything sounds much better and nicer, clearly better than the old versions. When listening without a side-by-side comparison with older versions, the changes are very slight, to the extent that almost nobody would notice any difference. Musically, these are note-for-note identical (apart from two near-silent off-key piano notes which have been removed). Most of the work on this remaster is/will be the admin, rather than the music work.

Cycles III, however, was my primary motivation for the remaster. It's a nice piano tune I've played live often that was somewhat drowned by orchestration in the original version. Today I've reworked the whole thing with a new piano part, and toned down much of the backing, removing or attenuating many strings to allow the basic melody to rise. Cycles I and VI sound like piano concerto movements, with quite a lot of orchestration, but III had perhaps too much competing with the backing, and that balance is restored in the new version.

The final step is mastering for volume, a secondary objective.

Cycles is one of my few albums on CD. I've sold a few over the years, so the question is what to do with those. The most efficient option is to keep the old artwork, and have new plain CDs made to replace the old ones, as I did with Burn Of God. It will mean that any liner notes regarding dates will be incorrect, but I can add on-disc printing to mark the distinction. A cheaper alternative would be to print none, but then I'd have to destroy the existing CDs, which is silly. I wonder how many I have..?

Cycles 2023

Day 1 of remastering my album Cycles & Shadows. My technology and skills have changed hugely since 2017, and the original album now sounds particularly boomy and smudgy. I can also record the piano in far better quality now, and boost the volume to a better and more even value.

Musically, there won't be any radical changes. I toyed with changing the synth instruments to sampled strings etc. but this album was unique is being a 'piano concerto for synth instruments'; and I'm replacing the album, this isn't something extra, so I must be careful not to destroy the special qualities present in the first version. The only track I'd like to change is Cycles III, which I've played live many times. It sounds much faster and has better flow live than on this album. Many of the Cycles tracks are (or were) better live, but I'll leave those be.

Today I've re-recorded the piano parts for Cycles 1,2,4,5,6, and remixed the core of those tracks. The results don't sound very different but certainly cleaner and more 'sparkly'.

The Shadows half will benefit most.

The Intangible Man Cover

Here, incidentally, is the Intangible Man cover, posed here to make it appear more... tangible. The credits have moved up a bit to make way for that lower-right corner.

Book Complete, Music Stand

A full Saturday yesterday. Spent the morning finalising The Intangible Man audio. Only when uploading did I see that the cover designs demand a blank space in the lower right corner for promotions. This template isn't stated anywhere in the written guidance, it's only there as a mask on the upload screen. Ah well, a quick adjustment (which, incidentally, does knock the design out of balance) and it was ready. All submitted. I must wait 10 days for approval. I'm still unsure of what to file.

Then, work on the light stands. I started by drilling the 6.5mm holes for the light stand legs, so all 4 are now complete apart from the little 'notch' things to hold them at the right angle. Then work on the music stand.

The mic thread adaptors arrived, so I fitted 1/4" bolts into the mic holders, then set up the stand to measure the width. 12mm holes were drilled into the wood, and the mic holders were fitted into a little bath of epoxy resin to hold them. A few hours later, I drilled the holes for the bolt collars (for the main sheet music plate) and painted it black before fitting those collars, this time using paraloid resin to hold them, which is much more polite as a glue than epoxy (though not strong enough to hold the mic holders, and it dries by evaporation, so not suitable for a cavity).

Here is the result:

You can see here how the top tier leans in to make a trapezium, which is part of the problem. The Reface, by chance, holds it because its base isn't flat but has an extruded middle.

Of downsides/possible improvements; I'm unsure of the strength of the epoxy, although there is really no alternative other than more tightly drilling a hole for a better mechanical grip. It may have been nice to make the mic clips removable, but the lengths of the screw threads make this difficult. They might be, even now, unscrewable. I didn't tighten them for this reason (of course, I still needed to orient them exactly, so couldn't fit the screws without the mic clamps).

So, all is done, and the music holder can be removed and attached as needed, which is a huge bonus. I don't want a big thing like that hanging around for once-in-a-blue-moon music performances.

The Intangible Man Audiobook Continues

Another long day working on The Intangible Man stories. All have been recorded satisfactorily now, but there's quite a lot of work in balancing and processing, checking the levels and examining each pause, click, fizzle, in the audio. Audio proofing takes a lot of time. This book is 2 hours 47 mins of audio, a long time to listen to even once.

I'm struck by the possibility that I could program something to process these... eliminate peaks then level out the volume correctly. Software optimised for audiobooks. Then add a second layer of sound effects, or a touch of reverb. This isn't that easy, however. This is a lot of audio to process... all of my audio processing so far has taken place in memory; 90 seconds at a time at most. And, of course, the audio tools I use do all of this anyway. The difference is, I could design a non-lossy system. Now, I have to take the raw recordings, balance, limit, gate, filter, then (perhaps) apply sounds or reverb. I can't keep a copy of each step along the way, 3 hours is too much audio, so it makes future editing difficult.

Perhaps we've become 'addicted to undo' though. Almost all craft-work until the digital era was one-way and there was no undo. It's rare that we want to go back and change something; it's a sort of insecurity to want to hold on to every stage... yet, sometimes this is useful, particularly when doing something for a first time. For the time being, I'm keeping a copy of the raw start, and the final end waves, as well as the final MP3. I'm unsure whether to keep the raw start OR the final edited ends... the former allows more tweaks if needed, though will need changing from the outset. Why keep a wav that's the same as the MP3? I could even forget the wav entirely and only retain the MP3, an ultimate casual attitude, though my professional-archive self doesn't like that idea.

At 6pm, I diverted to launch the first SFXEngine sale, and announce the release of the first DLC for it, the Analogue VCF.

I've spent all week on this book and it's still not finished. John mentioned The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death in the foreword, and the fact that that book was first published in 2015 (its first draft written in 2012; the second edition updated and published in 2021), and that these stories were published in 2020 might make people think that these stories were written later, when they were generally written earlier, most of them in 2011. This is why the writing is better in the novel.

Still, the quality of the language is one thing, it's the core ideas of these tales that's the important part. Each of these would make for a good television programme. Surreal, strange, and imaginative.

The Intangible Man Day 4

A long day working on The Intangible Man audio. I've had to re-record everything.

There are three stages to performing or rehearsing: First; tentative, slow steps as the material is read and learned. For newsreaders, public speakers, and myself when presenting on the radio for example, this is the only step. There are no chances for a second take here. Second; we know the material, so move more quickly, but, for me, usually too quickly, too eagerly because it's 'easy'. Several musicians fall into this too. I've heard bands who struggle with a song at first, but as they master it end up playing too quickly. This can also be audible in classical recitals, a sort of over-confidence. Third; full knowledge of the material, so we can move at any pace we choose.

My recordings of yesterday tended to be too fast. They felt fine, perfect, brilliant, on the day when read, but today, when listening back, they needed to be slower. An audiobook is not like a conversation. Each word should be audible and clear, so it should be spoken slower than normal. This improves clarity at the expense of (for me) some personality. This is the aesthetic balance.

So, today, I started to record everything again, and this time re-listened and edited each one after each one. This has pros and cons. The biggest pro is that it allows learning from a previous story for reading the next story, but the biggest con is inconsistency in sound, in volume levels and tone, due to the ultra-slight variations in recording volumes (vs. the playback between) and the distance of the mic. Less than a centimetre difference in mic-mouth difference can influence bass levels. A closer, quieter, voice has more intimacy and bass, but in this case consistency is more desirable.

Well, most of the stories are re-recorded. How ropey some seem now. My writing improved during writing them, and in the years since. I've found many errors of various minor sorts, so that's another side benefit to these readings.