Gordon's Progress

"(Next time I'll try plugging the iBook into the headphone socket of my amp instead - see how well that works - just this moment thought of that.)"

Are you thinking of reamping the signal or preamping the signal? To be more specific: are you planning to rerecord the track with the amp in the chain, or send the prerecorded track out to the amp and micing the amp?

"1. I'm concentrating so much on the pitch I'm forgetting about volume. The piece lacks expression. "
I agree, but your getting really good with the pitch hand. Bravo!

"2. In the second half I'm stopping the vibrato just before the end of a phrase, so the pitch goes a bit wonky."
I didn't really notice. I'll need to listen again.

"3. I rushed the very last note. It should have been a bit longer and faded out gradually. Actually I rushed the whole thing a bit."
I have to disagree with you here. I liked the quick ending. It leant a bit of immediacy to the piece. As if to say, "I'm finished, so there."

My only complaint is that this piece lacks the density that your other works have. It's a little naked. That could work, though, once it's put up against your other pieces in an album format. I would work on the expressiveness a bit and see if you can get the piece to say more.

Hope this helps.

Buddy:

I keep trying to slow it down, but my hands don't want to. In fact I think the song speeds up a bit as it goes along. Maybe I need a metronome.

Edweird:

With the amp in the chain. I was miking the amp previously.

Quick ending - that reminds me of The Rutles (http://www.rutles.org/) parody of [i]A Day In The Life[/i] where they replaced The Chord (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Day_in_the_Life#The_Chord) with a single triangle [i]ting[/i]. Genius.

It could work. Particularly if I slow the rest down to give more shock value to the sudden ending. Interesting idea.

Lacking in density - I don't know. Half of me would like to leave it completely stripped down - when I played it for Ninki V I was in the zone and it worked well (I think), but the other half says recorded work is a different thing to live work, and has a couple of ideas.

(1) Really fast tribal drums - like Bow Wow Wow. (video clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtyuBxbJwf8)) As Kev K said - "Percussion goes well with everything." (Kevin, I dare you to say that to an infant armed with a spoon and a bowl of porridge!)

(2) Very slow bass line - I've been working on Pamelia's [i]other[/i] signature sound, the slow attack, fast decay "tape played backwards" sound - that might work.

Maybe both drums and bass. Trouble is, the backwards sound is, just like the walking bass, fiendishly tricky to get just right - I can get close but I'm not there yet, and I have zero drum skills. Not that lack of skills has ever bothered me before, but I don't fancy spending the time finding a freeware drum synth and figuring out how to get what I want at the moment.

Or I could spend the morning messing around with drum loops in GarageBand.

Eddy, is this dense enough? http://tinyurl.com/yxu9au

(As before, as this is a draft, it will only be there for seven days or 99 downloads.)

Also, my new Electronic Bible T-Shirt arrived today. It could have been designed with me in mind... http://www.frappr.com/thereminworld/photo/3216347

The psychology of perception is a funny thing.

Having added a whole bunch of drums to In The Potting Shed I set to forming an opinion of it. This meant listening to it a lot and putting together a video to go with it, tapping into my response to it at a visual level rather than a verbal level. By the end of the process I really was not enjoying the music. It was sounding more and more out of tune, and I was developing Thunder Head - that headachy feeling that there's an electrical storm on the way, which either meant we were due for a major downpour, or I had touched some dark part of my psyche that I was just not comfortable with. Or the piece really was well out of tune.

Turns out it was none of the above. Today I had a migrainous headache for the best part of the day - it's one of the less fun parts of M.E. and probably precipitated by a nasty little virus that's been going round the family - so I was sickening for that, it seems.

This evening my headache cleared, and I ran the video again. Still sounded terrible. So time for desperate measures - I ran GarageBand's pitch enhancement algorithm over the theremin track and, bingo, it sounded a whole lot better. Then I played the original version for comparison, and it sounded exactly the same as the enhanced version!

so I have spent the evening switching back and forth between the two - no difference, playing one version in my left ear and one in the right at the same time - no difference, and playing both on top of each other - this changed the timbre a tadge, but no vast variations in tone.

Conclusion - my perception had been coloured by my downbeat state of health and persisted because of the negative opinion I had formed during that time. The little confidence boost of knowing I had done something to remove the perceived problem - i.e. applying pitch correction - even though it made little actual difference, was enough to wash away the negative feelings I had formed towards the piece.

In other news, I have finally got around to joining levnet. I can see why some people leave it with list fatigue - and the humour can be quite robust at times and opinions forthright. That doesn't bother me in the slightest. There is some industrial strength expertise on the list and they are filling in some of the details for things I have wondered about during the course of Gordon's Progress for me very nicely.

Here's the ultra-condensed version of one thread of particular interest to me. When you wave your hand around in the pitch field, it really is a [i]wave[/i] and, in a very primitive way, you are modulating the frequency of the theremin's output. FM Synthesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_modulation_synthesis) does all manner of interesting things to a waveform.

Ages ago, when I was developing the frothatrill, I wondered about the effects of a much higher speed whirly thing. Well now I am encouraged enough to find out. Hopefully I'll have something to report in the next few days. :-)

Here's another funny thing. Cute.

As I mentioned, I was rather unwell today, so my daughter, Laura, 5, made me a [i]Get Wet[/i] card. Bless.

[b]GordonC[/b]
[i]my daughter, Laura, 5, made me a Get Wet card.[/i]

ahhh...
(there's that damn [b]ghey[/b] inner bunny-wabbit again)

Wow. That track was wet. And there was an element of creepiness that wasn't present before, that I like. Can't wait to hear it with percussion.

On the headaches: are they sinus problems that you have regularly? If so, I just discovered the wonders and weirdness of the Neti Pot. I have had sinus problems for the last 6 years around the time the seasons change. No more. The weird part is getting over running warm salty water through one side of your nose and out the other.

Kids are awesome!

Gordon, I used to do a lot of recording on my old cassette four-track and it reakky is interesting how your mood affects your opinion of a piece. I have gone back to earlier recordings that I either loved or hated and sometimes they seem totally different at a later time.

One thing I would often do is put something away for a couple of days and listen to it at a later date. Sometimes when I first woke up or late at night.

It's amazing how the piece cna "change".

Edweird - I think you meant "can't wait to hear it with video" - in which case wait no longer - I've uploaded it to mySpace so you can see it with really horrid compression here (http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=1439965635) and to Veoh so you can see it with slightly less horrid compression or download it at full quality (if you install their software) here (http://www.veoh.com/videoDetails.html?v=e159164dQBwSWyK).

In the end I decided to use the lack of expression in the theremin track by slowly increasing the volume throughout the length of the piece, to match the building up drums. Also I have concluded that, with the drums, the speed is about right - it lends a sense of urgency.

I feel a little bit guilty about using readymade drum loops, but I think overlaying eleven of them (by the end of the piece) counts some way towards making them my own. :-)

(BTW - if you are currently working on a treatment of a picture I sent you - you know who you are - don't watch this, I don't want to influence what [i]you[/i] do with it!)

I listened to the other track (with drums) a little bit ago. The drum loop reminds me of a !!! song (They are on Touch and Go out of Chicago). I'll try to watch the video a little later when I get home.

Ha! I just Googled "!!!" - Hmm. Thank you for mentioning Touch and Go. Curious - their name comes from the film The Gods Must Be Crazy. I really enjoyed that movie.

I hadn't really thought about who it sounds like. The opening puts me in mind of an early Bowie song until the theremin kicks in. I'm sure he did a track that starts with a couple of bars of just drums pretty much like that. [edit] I was thinking of Five Years. Not much like it at all. [/edit] Once they start piling up I get Kodo. I saw them live once. Absolutely brilliant. If they ever come near you, you have to see them!

Oh and no, the analgesic headaches aren't a sinus thing, they're an M.E. thing. Bit of a damn nuisance but they seem to be my body's way of making sure I get plenty of rest when I need it. C'est la vie.