Yesterday I did a drone.
Today I went to the dentist who, inevitably, decided I have to come back next week for a filling. So that's another £100 plus. I sure miss my old NHS dentist.
It's hot in the studio So hot I go nude, you know My laptop fries eggs And nads, thighs and legs But beer, blessed beer a cool friend, never fear it's on hand giving succour Ain't Brexit a fucker?
My usual Friday afternoon, deep in novel writing when Pat starts asking if I've put the car seats in. Apparently she bought some, left them in the car and I'm failing by not going out in the stupid heat and farting around with them. Having a partner with absolutely zero interest in any music or words you write can be refreshing but just sometimes, even the most basic awareness would be lovely.
I see I started this blog some time ago but my enthusiasm for it petered out.
The thing with retirement is this: things which were once deemed pointless and a little bit sad are now your meat and veg, the very essence of your being. While things that once you found so jolly well vital to life, the universe and everything are now revealed as the ephemeral nonsense they always were.
Makes you think.
Today I spent some time alternating between my love and hate of the Octatrack, and struggling with the DSI Pro 2, attempting to understand its occasional lack of tightness in its synced delays and its abject refusal to pay attention to the Tunings.syx file I keep sending it. The tunings file should not be giving me a bad temper. Well-tempered it offers, followed by a long, mysterious list of numbers, all of which cause the synth to squeak like a politician upon challenged to produce a Brexit plan. Anyway, I have discovered that the Pro2's delays do sync well enough, mostly and that my earlier idea they struggled with integer BPMs was a red herring. But it is getting lost in a way that my other delays don't - and all I can say so far is that when I stop and start the Octatrack (the clock source), things recover. The delay on the Analog Four remains fine all the time though.
I spent some time programming new sounds and, as usual, hating the envelopes with their stupid linear decay. Yes, I could spend even more time, modulating the decay times with something to try and make them behave like normal envelopes, but in the end I revert to pads, solos and general weirdness and distortion, where snappy envelopes don't need to be involved.
I was going to use the MIDI sequencer on the Octatrack a bit more. Seemed promising at first, but of course Elektron's and DSI's ideas of what constitute a Bank Select MIDI CC are entirely at odds. Both appear to use a single value, either MSB or LSB, and so having the OT set up the right sounds for the sequence is going to depend on starting manually from the right place. Ah well. It's times like this I wonder why the hell I don't just stick to Cirklon, and to which I have no suitable answer.
The dentist hurt me, in almost every way he could. He failed to criticise my shorts, which was the only blessing of my 08:25 appointment. I now have tiny brushes to poke through my teeth since I'm such an abject failure at flossing. And since that was my second abject of the day, I'm going to go and perform the 'bagging dog shit' ritual, one which has been rather challenging of late given we're in one of Jasper's crop-spraying phases. I dearly hope it's a phase.
Let's see if I can finish with a photo
Sorry, that's all I got. I'm never much inspired by the beach.
It's hot in the studio So hot I go nude, you know My laptop fries eggs And nads, thighs and legs But beer, blessed beer a cool friend, never fear it's on hand giving succour Ain't Brexit a fucker?
My usual Friday afternoon, deep in novel writing when Pat starts asking if I've put the car seats in. Apparently she bought some, left them in the car and I'm failing by not going out in the stupid heat and farting around with them. Having a partner with absolutely zero interest in any music or words you write can be refreshing but just sometimes, even the most basic awareness would be lovely.
I see I started this blog some time ago but my enthusiasm for it petered out.
The thing with retirement is this: things which were once deemed pointless and a little bit sad are now your meat and veg, the very essence of your being. While things that once you found so jolly well vital to life, the universe and everything are now revealed as the ephemeral nonsense they always were.
Makes you think.
Today I spent some time alternating between my love and hate of the Octatrack, and struggling with the DSI Pro 2, attempting to understand its occasional lack of tightness in its synced delays and its abject refusal to pay attention to the Tunings.syx file I keep sending it. The tunings file should not be giving me a bad temper. Well-tempered it offers, followed by a long, mysterious list of numbers, all of which cause the synth to squeak like a politician upon challenged to produce a Brexit plan. Anyway, I have discovered that the Pro2's delays do sync well enough, mostly and that my earlier idea they struggled with integer BPMs was a red herring. But it is getting lost in a way that my other delays don't - and all I can say so far is that when I stop and start the Octatrack (the clock source), things recover. The delay on the Analog Four remains fine all the time though.
I spent some time programming new sounds and, as usual, hating the envelopes with their stupid linear decay. Yes, I could spend even more time, modulating the decay times with something to try and make them behave like normal envelopes, but in the end I revert to pads, solos and general weirdness and distortion, where snappy envelopes don't need to be involved.
I was going to use the MIDI sequencer on the Octatrack a bit more. Seemed promising at first, but of course Elektron's and DSI's ideas of what constitute a Bank Select MIDI CC are entirely at odds. Both appear to use a single value, either MSB or LSB, and so having the OT set up the right sounds for the sequence is going to depend on starting manually from the right place. Ah well. It's times like this I wonder why the hell I don't just stick to Cirklon, and to which I have no suitable answer.
The dentist hurt me, in almost every way he could. He failed to criticise my shorts, which was the only blessing of my 08:25 appointment. I now have tiny brushes to poke through my teeth since I'm such an abject failure at flossing. And since that was my second abject of the day, I'm going to go and perform the 'bagging dog shit' ritual, one which has been rather challenging of late given we're in one of Jasper's crop-spraying phases. I dearly hope it's a phase.
Let's see if I can finish with a photo
Sorry, that's all I got. I'm never much inspired by the beach.
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