Should take me a few days to go through the proof with my red pen, not looking to make substantial changes this time (unless it cries out for them). Once I've done that, I'll submit a final proof so I can see the cover (this one still has earlier text layout). Interestingly, I dipped into 'Bogus Realities' yesterday and already I could see how my more ruthless editing style would have pruned it back much harder. As an exercise for the next one, I may try writing out the whole thing in narrative form first, as short as possible, no dialogue. That way I could have a much better idea of the structure and the weight of various parts. Just need to decide if the next one will finish off the tales of Herbal Jeff and Gilbert Wright or will be the time travelling old ladies one. Ho hum.
It's Monday and a good day. Doc says Pat had undiagnosed viral pneumonia which made us sigh with relief. I pretty much worked on proofing and editing the whole day, completing the task late afternoon. I think the proof I just request should be the last - I doubt I'll have the strength to read it again though. I mostly want to verify all the layout, the text spacing and cover before hitting the publish button and consigning the whole thing to the abyss of indifference. I'm strangely happy about the whole thing, even if I do keep thinking of plot points I might strengthen.
Been asked to look at some old Mutable modules, some of which I have, as a sort of belated review. Could it be good to turn the modular on again? Dunno. The idea isn't setting my pulse racing. Ah turns out they're 3rd party slimline things.
Carl is almost at the end of novel and got all the Brexit references, well I dunno if all of them - whether he got the 'two supposedly opposing leaders of the debate who want the same thing' angle but generally he did well.
Today my Elektron stuff wasn't delighting me. Trying to do ambient stuff with the Digitone and lots of annoying clicks plaguing me. Octatrack's '1st' conditional event also not working properly unless I set Master track length to INF. Something I'm missing there perhaps but it made me miss my regular sequencers and sound modules - has anyone ever done better knobby multitimbral synths with FX than Novation and Korg (I'm thinking KS-series and Radias)?? Played piano instead and was happy. Must nag Colin to make a new desktop slimline P3 with tons of storage. That's what the world needs.
I spent today (Wednesday) going through the Octatrack Arranger. Found it pretty straightforward, which makes me wonder why I struggled in the past. Apart from the slightly awkward way you slip in and out of it, and the need to make paper notes of the tracks, scenes, patterns you want to sequence, it's all quite do-able. I avoided all the complicated stuff about looping and changing the pattern start point and length because it wasn't necessary. I even started giving thought to song start and ends, plus making more sure about all the events that only happen on the first pass or that mustn't happen on the first pass. Would sure love to replace the Analog Four with a simple, good-souding multitimbral analogue module with path memories. That feels like the weakest link now.
OK, it's Thursday and I spent the morning mastering the last bits of the Arranger. I now present some observations that I've made:
There is only one tempo maintained. The sentence that says 'if there is no setting, the tempo is the main BPM' really means nothing. Any BPM that is set takes over and remains the main BPM even when you leave Arrange mode, regardless of what it was before. So it's sensible for me to keep using the Part name as a manual reminder of the correct tempo if you're switching between arrangements.
Remember to move the cursor away from a field that opens a menu in order to hit enter and play from that point. If you're doing lots of mutes, you can't simply move one step to the right but have to move left past mute, transpose and tempo. A simple UI fix would have made that sweeter.
Make sure tracks unmuted before you start or you'll be well confused.
Make good notes of your patterns before you start laying them out in an arrangement.
Within Arrange Edit, the changes you make to mutes don't take effect until the next time the row is engaged.
The manual's description of looping could be improved if it simply told you that when a loop row is reached, it branches back to the specified row (default 000) and does so as many times as you specify (default infinity).
Finally, in play mode, you can make temporary overrides to the currently selected scene but as it scrolls by, each new row begins as it should so you can start again. Cool feature.
Right, I'm going to have a chilled afternoon anyway. Bon Voyage campers!
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