Sidingsound

So, the August Bank Holiday has come and gone, and as we embark upon the final third of 2009, as if to mark the occasion, the British weather opened up with some pretty hefty showers this afternoon (and thankfully I was inside for most of them). Never mind: at least I got the grass cut yesterday when it was at least fairly quiet on the meteorological front…

Just a couple of items to report for today:

• Yesterday, Joy and I managed to get some work done on the Christmas CD project between us, as I’d hoped. During the day, Joy and Naomi took themselves off for a couple of hours, in which time I recorded some acoustic guitars and bass on “Joy To The World” (joining one existing electric dulcimer track, and accidentally wiping another ), and also played the same instruments to begin work on what I hope will be one of the centrepieces of the album (but don’t mind if I keep that under my proverbial hat a bit longer). Finally, to round off the afternoon, I fired up Logic and began another new track, “Silent Night”—recording some “voice” tracks to use later.
  Then, in the evening, Joy and I carried on working on this track—Joy recording the piano part into Logic, and me using the MIDI guitar to create organ, synth bass and a couple of vocoder parts (that’s why I needed the voice recordings I made earlier). I feel we have plenty more to do on these songs, but at this moment it feels as if we actually stand a chance of finishing this project in time for December… and then we can figure out what we’re going to do with it
• You may have noticed the Lifestream daily digest pages are publishing fine—I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to keep them, or perhaps move to a weekly version, so please feel free to comment on what you’d prefer. I’m also going to experiment with some code created by the Lifestream plugin’s author, which would add to a “single post” page on this blog, some entries from the Lifestream from around the time of the post. Exciting times…
• I am planning to return to last week’s post about the Nokia N900 (mainly, to answer some of the queries I myself posed), but I have to admit I am leaning away from considering the device as a phone upgrade to my venerable Nokia N95.
  It’s not that the N900 doesn’t look impressive—quite the reverse—but I’m mainly concerned that (a) T-Mobile UK is unlikely to stock it; (b) if they do, the cost of an upgrade is likely to be prohibitive and ongoing; (c) the N900 will not be a significant enough improvement for me over the N95 to justify ditching the latter; and (d) there just aren’t—and may never be—enough apps available for the N900 to do everything I’d like it to. Instead, I am thinking of keeping the N95 and looking for an “end-of-line” or refurbished older Linux “netbook” (such as an Asus Eee 701 or earlier Acer Aspire One), which would offer many of the same benefits (and others besides) for significantly less than the outlay for an N900. This all depends on many factors—finding such a machine, available funds, etc.—but for now I think the N900 is off the menu.

And no, I haven’t done any more work on the proposed “Music” page yet, but I will…

A quick note before I really start getting ready for work (what, it’s the 19th August? where is this year going?), to mention that I’ve been recording some new parts this week for one of the tracks for the prospective Christmas CD that Joy and I are working on when we have time.

The track in question (It Came Upon The Midnight Clear) was begun last month, with two electric dulcimer parts from me, and this week I’ve added two electric guitars and bass guitar, as well as two MIDI guitar parts in Logic (“Hammond organ” and “upright bass”).

It’s quite listenable at this stage, though I haven’t decided whether to keep the MIDI upright bass or the electric bass yet, and I’d like to find time for Joy to play piano on the track, so there’s a bit further to go yet. Still, that’s progress of a sort, eh?

I've been trying to get another post up here for the last week or so, but something always interrupted me, so here's a go at a quick e-mail post from my mobile phone.

Basically, we recently invested in an iMac, partly to retire our old PC which is getting rather long in the tooth, but also for producing music and some graphics (the latter mainly for Joy's music activities for children). I bought Logic Express to go with the machine, and have been experimenting with it to add an extra dimension to our music production.

Yesterday evening I finally got to try one of Logic's software synthesisers that I've been dying to have a go on: EVOC, a vocoder synth (which blends the synth signal with an audio input such as a voice). In a nutshell, I was recording some guitar synth parts for "When The Sun Goes Off To Sleep", a song for the "concept album" (which I'm still hoping to finish this year, honest!), and decided to add some 'vocoded' voice to the end. The song has been around for a few years (I wrote it as a lullaby for my daughter), and my original acoustic demo dates from late 2004, but I've wanted to re-record it to give the song a more ambient, dreamy air. In particular, I hoped Joy might sing a bit on it, as I had conceived a female vocal sound for the ending, but she felt a bit shy and backed out, so the idea was shelved until I thought of using Logic's vocoder (which might capture even better the effect I wanted).

So, last night I recorded the voice part for the vocoder to use, set up the MIDI guitar and played the melody on the vocoder. The results were just what I was looking for—an ethereal 'voice' (or 'voices', as I'd played a 'chordal' part into the vocoder), floating behind the lead vocal in the final verse. I also tried my original idea for the song ending: two lines from the Korean nursery rhyme which gave the song its chorus melody. This worked pretty well too, so I think you can expect to hear all this on the final version of the song, when I get around to putting out the album.

The moral of this story: vocoders are fun