The Joy Of...

OK, I've seen a number of Bob Ross's Joy of Painting episodes and what struck me suddenly this morning was how many parallels there are with people who make Berlin School music. You start with a palette already set out for you and you copy well-established techniques in order to produce something very much like something else but which, as long as you followed the directions, will end up looking just fine. Fine as in to another person who hasn't yet invested much effort or thought into their art. Gosh, such revelations. 

Today, will I make a happy little sequence, a happy little lead line, a miserable little mellotron obvious chordy thing, a happy little VCS3 wibble? 

It's Monday morning, in case you didn't guess. Yesterday was wonderful - started with baby sparrows being fed (they're like the models for Angry Birds but with the cuteness dialled up to 11). Then I killed a main character in my novel - and how it happened just poured out of my (increasingly unreliable) fingers. I may have overdone the pathos a tad but today's read through should quickly put any of that right. Even better, I have the following (closing) chapters quite firmly in my mind. It's quite exciting to be at this stage, already anticipating the second draft and maybe working a bit harder than usual to get it right. Yesterday evening we had another visit from the hedgehog. 

BTW my point about the Joy of Painting isn't that starting this way is a bad thing, far from it. However, if after 10 or 20 years you're still turning out happy little trees and happy little clouds, someone should probably shoot you in the head. 

After yesterday's running around for hours looking for the Rode screw thing (and not finding it), I did the P3 voice over thing for Pete, or version 1 anyway. I probably talked too much - but with no visuals it's not obvious. Maybe needed a script. 

Today I started setting up the modular to do things, roping in the Beatstep Pro and Keystep as sources along with the Pressure Points and Doepfer ribbon. Made some progress using a lot of my favourite modules. Will work it a bit more until I have something closer to ideal then I'll move the modules closer together so minimise cable mess. 

Today I made the following:

1) Keystep playing Tonestar - a basic monosynth patch through delay and distortion. Simple but something to play.

2) Bloom playing Rings and Pluck. Here it's clocked from the Marbles module so I can trigger bursts of cascading patterns or flip to internal sync and get sequenced stuff. 

3) Ribbon & Pressure Points playing DPO. Using Doepfer EG and the AJH filter. Pretty effective for weird performances but I maybe overdid it by roping in the resonator jobby. 

4) BSP playing Waldorf NW1, FM drum thing and the Erica Picodrum. Some effects on them but these may be least effective collection. More thought required. Maybe this should be more drone-oriented and missing the Orgon. 

Today I made version 2 of the modular setup, still a bit of work to do but learned from yesterday. Did a bit more of Pete's podcast. Put another Binar CDR up - the only one outstanding (I think) is Ambient Space Monkeys. To my knowledge nobody has asked for this anyway. 

Friday tomorrow :)