Creative Pact 2010

Wednesday, 1 February 2012

Small beginnings, major triumph and Matilda

Today’s is a portmanteau post. I will start with the major triumph which is that Carrion Comfort has, at long, long, long, long last, gone to the printers. Yup, it’s done. I have had to make a couple of compromises because of the amateur nature of the ensemble it’s destined for, but the original timpani part at least will go into the final post-(hopeful)-workshop score. I felt it would just confuse when sending the score to a group I know doesn’t have timpani.

And tonight we went to see Tim Minchin’s musical version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda. It was supposed to be D’s Christmas present, but he didn’t like it pretty much at all, while Djeli and I agreed that we can squish up our list of “Best Theatrical Performances Ever” to make room for another one. Amazing stuff, great voices, the kids in the cast were simply astonishing. It was funny and heartbreaking and the staging was superb. I could find nothing wrong with it all. Get a ticket. That’s all there is to be said. How could you miss a bunch of extraordinarily talented kids singing a song called “Revolting Children” and loving every minute of it?

Today has also, of course, been the first day of the RPM Challenge. Obviously most of my time has been taken up with getting Carrion Comfort out of the house, but I was able to spend some time thinking about RPM, I pulled out Egg the Ninth and tinkered around with the time signatures which need changing (I think it should be in a mix of 6/8 and 9/8, not just one or the other). I also came up with an idea for an improv piece – create a tape part using the field recordings of trams and some other street sounds in Zurich several years ago, then improvise a flute part over the top. I’ve got some ideas I’ve been thinking about for the various flute pieces I have to write in the next few months and I might use this as an opportunity to mess about with them and see what happens.

I can’t believe how excited I am about RPM now. It’s like getting rid of Carrion Comfort (which had become a bit of an albatross around my neck) has been such a relief, I just want to work on something that’s about as different as it can be – which is what RPM represents. I’ve started re-reading Michael Nyman’s Experimental Music too – just seemed like the right time to revisit this one. So many ideas floating around! Hope I can get down to some real work tomorrow!

Tagged with: completion, composition, events, ideas, music, theatre | Add a comment

Monday, 30 January 2012

Achievement and a New World Order

It’s been a big day today. Today I finally finished a task that’s been on my to-do list for about a decade: I have joined PRS for Music! Well, obviously when it went on my to-do list I was in Australia so the task then was actually “Join APRA” but it’s effectively the same thing. I filled out the form online yesterday and paid the fee over the internet, then this morning I printed it out, signed it and made a copy of my passport and then – yes – I PUT IT IN THE POST. YAY! There aren’t words for the triumph I feel over this. I did actually print out the forms about 5 years ago, but there was some confusion over whether I should join as just me or as my and Djeli’s limited company, and then there was confusion about what the status of the company was re: VAT and I just never got it all sorted out. But it is now. Which means I can start receiving a pittance for every performance! True, they won’t actually pay me till it hits £30, but still – prospect of payment! WOOOT!

The thing that set this amazing productivity off was that yesterday I went to the Barbican to a thingy organised by Sound and Music called “Counting In”. It was a panel session on composer careers and was extremely interesting and inspiring. So not only did I join PRS for Music today, but I have decided that a New World Order is in… order. Again. I know I keep doing this but one day it’s going to stick. One of the things really brought home to me yesterday is that I HAVE to get my health sorted out. Quite possibly this is even more important than actually writing music – I have so many ideas and so many things I want to do, but this permanent state of crippledom, criminally low energy, tendency to catch every bug going and my weight spiralling out of control making everything worse has to stop. It really does. My brain is sluggish and tired ALL the time and I never have enough energy, either physical or mental, to just get on and do the stuff I need to – stuff like laying out scores to send to potential performers, having a go at writing a piece in super-quick time for an imminent deadline, actually getting a blog post written for caitlinrowley.com every week as opposed to every now and then. Not to mention having the energy to travel and do fun stuff with Djelibeybi too.

As always, the heart of this New World Order has to be getting my eating right. If I’m not eating right, I don’t stand a chance, but I can’t go back on the deprivation diet as it was originally – that might have resulted in 14 kilos of weight loss in 6 months and huge energy gains, but it was unsustainable simply because it made me miserable, so I need to devote a little time this week to going through my nutritionist’s initial prescription and working out a more even balance. And I need to finish reading the book on stress eating so I can better understand what I’m doing. As a first step I’m going to try to not eat anything once dinner is done. Water is OK. Even a cup of tea is OK. But no actual food – it shouldn’t be necessary and mostly I eat then just because I’m too tired to do anything useful. So instead I should have some water and just head to bed.

So I’ll start small. And hopefully build on that to make a healthy, unstoppable me. Havi Brooks has a great weekly “Very Personal Ads” ritual on her blog, and I think that’s what this is for me this week:

WANTED: Willpower and strength to follow this through and mend my body so it can support all the things my mind wants to do.

Oh and I’ve finished the dynamics for Carrion Comfort and done a first draft for laying out the score. Can’t believe how much work has gone into this darned piece. So many instruments! So many dynamics! It kind of feels like I’ve overdone the dynamics and it should all be a lot simpler, but I’m not sure. I feel as if all the mezzo-fortes and mezzo-pianos are just imposters and should be deleted, but I’m certain I put them there for a reason – will review again later…

Tagged with: completion, composition, editing, gtd, health, ideas, mentalhealth, music | Add a comment

Friday, 30 December 2011

2012: the year of attainable goals?

Well, that’s what I’m hoping. I’m quite pleased with this year’s list. I think that pretty much everything on it actually is attainable over the course of the year, unlike last year’s which was much too ambitious. A lot of what’s on it is stuff that is already in progress, about to be in progress or has a firmish deadline at least, so much of it doesn’t have to be started from scratch but is more about tying up loose ends left over from 2011.

September looms large this year – I am determined to be healthier and more organised before I start my Masters to give me the best possible chance to do well at it – this involves getting a healthy balance between freelance work, composition and rest time really working so I can clear old projects, bring in some money but keep my mental & physical health intact. I am most emphatically planning to not injure myself in any way more serious than perhaps a papercut.

2012 is, most significantly, all about new beginnings and new directions. There’s a lot of change going to be happening – going back to uni, (hopefully) buying our first house & moving out of London, developing my freelance business to be (again, hopefully) able to at least cover my basic expenses.

So without further ado, here is The 2012 List.

Music

  • 3 performances in 2012 – one more than I set myself for 2011, getting ambitious here :-)
  • Complete all piece requests from 2011 before start of uni term in September – alto flute piece for Carla Rees (due spring), flute piece for Nicole Camacho, recorder quartet for Pink Noise, Pieces of Eight arrangement for Shana Norton
  • New score downloads implemented for caitlinrowley.com
  • Blog at least once a month on caitlinrowley.com January – check, February – check
  • Work out how, and apply for funding with Pink Noise to (hopefully) achieve first paid commission.
  • Keep up flute practice
  • Start a Masters degree!
  • Finish Carrion Comfort for LCCO deadline YESSSSSSS!
  • Write at least 1 piece for a call for scores & send it in
  • Take 2 pieces along to LCF WiP/WiT sessions for feedback
  • Schedule in (and DO) one listening session a week. Take notes to make sure I’m getting the most out of it
  • Get back to counterpoint/harmony study – schedule as part of weekly plan. NEED to make some progress on this before September.
  • Put at least 2 pieces up on SoundCloud in MIDI versions
  • Finish laying out 2×4 & send to Christopher D. Lewis

Home & Travel

  • Move out of London
  • Set up my own study before the summer
  • Try at least 5 recipes from “I Know How to Cook”: 6-Jan-2012: Coq au vin. Have also done the Venison-roast lamb but I can’t remember the date.
  • Try at least 3 recipes from new French baking cookbook: 6-Jan-2012: Galette des rois, incl. crème frangipane; 8-Jan-2012: Princesses (chocolate meringues) – not actually a success, but definitely tried. Will try again. 15-Jan-2012: Chaussons au pommes – YUM!
  • Travel: EuroDisney, Spain, Australia, weekend trip somewhere?
  • Work on creating a good, reliable multigrain loaf, in case of (suspected) bakery dearth in Gravesend: 13-Jan-2012: An excellent start – not fully multigrain because I was just using up leftover flour, but it worked really well. 19-Jan-2012: Tried the same recipe, this time with all wholemeal flour. Worked very well, in spite of forgetting about it a couple of times, leading to overly long rising times. Feeling quite confident about getting this recipe working well.

Health

  • Limit sugar & dairy intake.
  • Keep up with vitamin supplements to help keep food & energy on track.
  • Get back to the morning squirrel-walks once calf is better
  • Semi-regular massages to keep stress and tension headaches under control – no more waiting till the pain’s so bad I can’t function
  • Work my way up to being able to do a 4-mile walk without pain
  • Develop regular schedule so can have relaxation time in the evenings and proper weekends and reduce stress of neglecting one or the other. Key components: Freelance work, composing, listening, training, writing
  • Weight: *sigh* Shall we say 76kg by the start of the uni term? Surely that’s doable? *gives self a stern look and a threat to not injure any more parts*

Business

  • Schedule training to keep my skills current & keep me employable by others – do some every week. Key areas: JavaScript, design, marketing
  • Design business cards & get them made 8-Jan-2012: Order sent! And I just scraped in to get a 15% discount from MOO too!
  • Write beginner social media guide to sell on raspberryblue.com
  • Start blogging on Raspberry Blue (not going to make this any set schedule – minimum 3 posts in the year though)
  • Schedule talk at LCF Open House on some webby topic – social media as a tool for composition perhaps? Or maybe something on how to use the web to promote your composition?

Other stuff

  • New laptop. This year for sure. D to get old one.
  • Knit something that isn’t a scarf Send both parents’ birthday and Christmas presents ON TIME
  • Call parents once a month: January – done.

Tagged with: baking, completion, composition, cooking, creativity, dayjob, health, learning, massage, mentalhealth, music, organisation, relaxing, self-promotion, study, tools, travel, walking, web, writing | 3 comments

Thursday, 2 June 2011

Preview day!

Today I have sent the site preview to my client, negotiated a little, created my first 2 training videos and posted them to YouTube (think I’ll probably have to remake them due to screen furriness and general burbling – this video-making thing is hard! – it’s a usable start for this client at any rate, who doesn’t have time for me to train her one-to-one), did some fluting for only the second time since the root canal and took delivery of my very own copy of Structural Functions in Music (very excited about this). I am now repairing my disk permissions and – after a restart because Finale is choking on the sheer number of instruments in Carrion Comfort – am about to do some composition work for my lesson tomorrow.

Achievements? Tick :-)

And just because it totally made my day, here’s my friend Omar from the Durham Midwinter Composers Masterclass proposing to his girl.

Tagged with: completion, composition, dayjob, gtd, learning, music, programming, recording, teaching, tools, video, web | Add a comment

Wednesday, 18 May 2011

A busy day!

Super-productive today. As with a lot of my days recently, I’ve been largely focused on self-promotion stuff rather than strict creativity per se, but it does exercise my creative brain in that I have to think up new ways to do things.

The last few days I’ve been working on getting a proper mailing list established for caitlinrowley.com using MailChimp. I have to say, that I am absolutely delighted with MailChimp. Great-looking product, easy to use, very generous with their free account (2000 subscribers! 12,000 emails a month!) and the whole thing seems to be completely customisable, assuming you’re willing to put in a bit of coding work. I had some difficulties and emailed their tech support without much hope of anything coming of it (because tech supports in general are pretty useless for anything other than pre-scripted issues) and WOW WOW WOW! Not only did I get a reply within 2 hours, but the guy had actually read my email (SO rare) and had multiple solutions for me, even though it’s not an off-the-shelf problem. SO impressed. And when you set up a campaign they give you a PDF download to make your own papercraft chimp. Now that’s got to be a winner.

Anyway, so the list is set up now. Today I also posted a new blog post and have linked via the signup form to the score of the piece – it’s a temporary measure because getting it working properly is going to take a little time, but it’s better than the SoundCloud option I’ve been trying out which turned out to just be incredibly clunky and uncomfortable (and some regular internet users said they couldn’t even see the link to download. Fail).

So super-excited about all that. Hoping I should get some subscribers soon. It’ll be interesting to see if and how well it works…

Oh, and the on-again-off-again film project is on again. Got a call on Monday about that one. And I went to see a potential client about a website project yesterday… and came away with another film score project (and a website one) – woot!

Tagged with: blogging, code, completion, composition, dayjob, experimenting, learning, music, programming, publishing, self-promotion, tools, web | Add a comment

Monday, 18 April 2011

Coming out of the cloud

I feel like I’m coming out of a cloud a bit. Back’s still messed up and with the osteopath having told me I can’t go to Scotland for Easter, sounds like it’s still got a little way to go. But I’m gradually starting to get things done again and that feels pretty good. I’ve been getting a lot of listening done. Today a friend on Twitter recommended a couple of albums that were a little outside my usual comfort zone – Mono/Poly ‘Manifestations’ and Grouper’s ‘A I A’ – both of which I very much enjoyed.

I also tweaked and posted a blog post on caitlinrowley.com, The wrong teacher, or just the wrong time?. I’m glad I wrote this post. Not only does it seem to be getting a rapid and enthusiastic response, but I think it’s been important for me to realise just how far I’ve come since my first year studying composition, and to acknowledge that I was at fault at least in some measure. I doubt I could have known that back then – I was timid and ignorant and there was no internet to ask questions of even if I’d thought to do so – but I think it’s good to reconsider the situation and what I could have done to improve it. And maybe it’ll be helpful for other new students who feel they’re not doing so well as they hoped they would.

And finally I finished the iPad case! OK, not 100% – I still need to make a loop to hold the stylus securely, but the case itself is finished and ready to travel. YAY! SO glad to be done with the handsewing. Never again…

This isn’t the finished case (still need to take proper photos of it) but it shows pretty much how it’s ended up. I’m rather pleased with it :-)

Done up - trial

Tagged with: blogging, completion, health, knitting, listening, mentalhealth, music, tools | Add a comment

Monday, 7 March 2011

Whee!

Having a GREAT day today. Tired but happy – got a heap of things done. And worthwhile stuff too. While I’ve been enjoying the business-building stuff I’ve been focused on for the past couple of weeks, it’s been great to have a day that’s been predominantly about creating and promoting my music. Really refreshing.

Well, Monday is blog day on caitlinrowley.com, and as yesterday we had a friend over for lunch and then I totally zonked out because I was so exhausted after the week so I didn’t get my usual Sunday blog-writing moment and had to do it today. I wasn’t ready to write more about the violin piece (more on that in a second) partly because the piece wasn’t really ready, and partly because it’s a post I’m going to want to do a chunk of thinking and probably some analysing for, which is going to take more than just a morning. So I decided it was time to launch a new series of blog posts I’ve been thinking about for a couple of weeks. After reading an article about tools by Havi Brooks I’ve been thinking a bit about the tools I use for composing and I thought that in the context of trying to write more about my process, it might be interesting to also talk about the awesome stuff that constitutes the tools I use – not necessarily (or just) things like my computer, pencils and so on, but also the things that inspire me and the stuff that gets used while I’m working through my thoughts.

So I leapt in. I’ve started with Elaine Gould’s notation reference, Behind Bars, which I’m actually finding quite inspiring and exciting, in spite of the fact that it sounds dull. Every time I look something up in it, I stumble across something else that makes me go “ooh! maybe I could use that” so I spent about an hour just writing about that book this morning. And hey, presto: blog post. And I’ve already had a little positive feedback on it, so hopefully people will get something out of it.

I also continued on with The Great Backup Project – I installed a plugin both here and on caitlinrowley.com to back up both these blogs to our new S3 space, so if they accidentally get wiped, there’ll be a recent backup to restore rather than having to remember to do it by hand. I’ve had Time Machine running perfectly all day now – the only downside is that if I’m not at my desk then I’m not being backed up, but so long as I remember to return the laptop to the desk overnight, it’ll switch itself on and hopefully run a backup first thing. Not perfect, but a darn sight better than the nothing I’ve been relying on for too long. I’ll look into ways I might be able to access the new drive wirelessly sometime soon…

And the violin piece! I finally tweaked myself to a standstill, then gave myself a talking to, PDFed it up and sent it off to a couple of violin-playing friends from Durham. And got an answer within an hour from one of them saying she had “great fun” playing it and yes everything’s perfectly playable and indeed mostly very comfortable under the hand. She suggested a couple of open-string tweaks, which was great because, yes, that was the sound I had in mind, but I’d completely forgotten to put the symbols in, and one cautionary accidental, which is now in place. So I’m down to the final layout, choosing fonts and just the last publicationy bits and pieces – a brief note for the front, design a cover and it should be winging its way to New York by the end of the week. It actually has a title too: Diabolus. I didn’t want to do some reference to 1-minute/60-seconds whatever, and the whole thing is built on the interval of the tritone (the diabolus in musica) and by the end the time signature changes had become pretty dizzying, so I think this name will stick.

Tagged with: blogging, completion, composition, fonts, music, organisation, publishing, tools | Add a comment

Tuesday, 1 March 2011

Getting myself in a muddle & out of it again

Lately I’ve been trying to post a little earlier in the day to save the situation I’ve often ended up in, which is getting to 2am and suddenly realising I need to go to bed but not having posted so I either have to post when I just want to sleep (and back-date the post so it appears on the right day) or post several days in a blob later on (and back-date all the posts). But it’s getting me in a bit of a muddle because often I do some of my most creative stuff at night and given that this is a day-by-day blog, it feels sort of weird to be saying “yesterday I did this”. If you feel it’s weird too, please let me know in the comments!

But weird or not, I’m taking it on. And starting with…

Yesterday I ended up having a bit of an SEO binge. I explored a few tools, found a couple that might be useful and updated/added/corrected some stuff on caitlinrowley.com to improve its ranking on Google. It’s going to take a little while to seep into the system, of course, but I’m confident I can improve it. What I’m aiming for is to make caitlinrowley.com the top-ranking site on Google for a search on my name. At moment minim-media.com is, which is fine because that was my principal site but now that I’m thinking of closing that one down, I’d like to have caitlinrowley.com up there before I do. It was lots of fun and felt like a big achievement when it was done. Now I just need to make myself not check my stats more than once a day to see what’s going on because there’s no point – Google Analytics only updates once a day. There’s no new data there. No, really…

Today I was stuck at home waiting for someone from DHL to come and take our poorly Roomba away to be fixed again. I’ve been feeling like everything’s a little fragmented in terms of the business development stuff, and lacking a little in direction, so I ended up spending about 3 hours going through various bits and pieces, thinking thoughts and working through worksheets and planning plans, all of which was great, and my ideas have taken another step along the path towards the business being whatever it turns out to be (I blogged about this over at Minimania, so I won’t repeat it here. Is it possible to be a blog-writing addict?), but rather exhausting.

Eventually the Roombaman came and took our digital pet away, whereupon I bolted out to the post office and stood in line for half an hour to send some stuff to Australia. The walk and the wait were great, actually. Really cleared away some cobwebs and made some stuff fall into place. And what I realised was that Raspberry Blue was heading towards the exact same problem that Minim Music & New Media has/had, which is that it didn’t have a clear focus. Splitting the site between the web dev/SEO stuff and the music publishing stuff is detrimental to the development of the business. Not because I can’t do both – I most emphatically can and still think I will – but because the presence of the music stuff undermines my authority as someone who lives and breathes the web. Most people, I suspect, really only have one clear obsessive focus so I think potential clients may find it hard to put their trust in someone who is obviously doing two (apparently) unrelated things at once. So I’ve trimmed out the music stuff and instantly the site feels stronger and more authoritative. I feel less confused about it too and more confident about the prospect of sending people to it. I think the music stuff might need to have a separate site. Whether it needs its own domain name is another point, but I think I’ll focus on the web thing first because that’s what’s going to contribute most to my possibly not needing a dayjob again. Copying is unlikely to develop into anything more than pocket money, I feel.

So big, big thoughts drifting about and more plans being made and I feel like things are coming together enough to tentatively say that the Raspberry Blue site will be live before I have my root canal done on the 24th of March. I think it’s well doable. Let’s hope I’m right…

Oh, and I’ve listened through to the violin piece with the changes I made yesterday and yes, I think it’s essentially finished. I have, however, in the course of tweaking it towards its final form, done a lot of octave switches and added in some extra double-stops, so I need to do a careful check to make sure the double and triple stops actually are really playable and that I don’t have to tweak them back in some way. Also need to work out how to make Finale play back some of the minutiae of the notation so I can produce a relatively real-sounding MIDI version without needing to approach ProTools. PT, frankly, has me a bit scared after having apparently caused the collapse of my backup drive, and I don’t have any drives any more that don’t have stuff on them already! Seriously contemplating switching to Logic.

Tagged with: blogging, completion, composition, copying, dayjob, ideas, music, organisation, play, publishing, research, thinking, tools, web, writing | Add a comment

Monday, 28 February 2011

Oh dear Essex

Well, I didn’t make it to Essex. In waiting for the hot water to come back on this morning so I could be clean for Essex, I got rather engrossed in some other stuff and by the time I came to there wasn’t really enough time to get there. *sigh*

But on the flip side, useful stuff has been achieved. I think the violin piece *gasp!* may be finished. But it’s been so antsy recently that I’ll have to let it lie overnight, I think, and work out tomorrow whether it’s really done. So many of the recent tweaks have been so minute that it barely seems worthwhile, and I still don’t think the first couple of bars are as good as the rest, but I’m beginning to feel that I need to move on to something else. I feel like I’m treading water from a compositional standpoint. Waiting for the violin piece to work out its niggles, waiting for TVU to get back to me to tell me when my next lesson is, waiting for someone to get back to me on a potentially very exciting project, waiting to hear about the progress of another project that’s stalled. I kind of feel like I’m stuck in a dead end. But I’ve decided enough’s enough. Task of the day was to see what composition opps are available and see if anything appeals. I think I don’t really want to write for strings because the last two pieces I’ve done have been a string quintet and a solo violin piece, and there’s the Yorkshire Late Starters Strings competition coming up later in the year, which I’m planning to write for (string orchestra). So what I’ve ended up with is:

  • New York Virtuoso Singers Choral Composition Competition for choral scores (due 8 April)
  • 3rd International Chamber Music Composition Contest in Seinäjoki, Finland for 7-instrument ensemble (end of March – this would be a huge challenge, I suspect, but could be really interesting)
  • Left Coast Chamber Ensemble 2011 Composition Contest (due 13 April – really like the sound of this one – 1-7 instruments, including voice and can use tape too)
  • A French composition contest for percussion ensembles (due end of March, but the entry fee is a whopping €50 per score. I think that might put it out of the running, which is a real shame)
  • Counterpoint International Competition 2011 has a deadline that’s only two weeks away – eek! – but possibly I could rework something? But I think I really would like to create something new at the moment. Not entirely out of the running, but I think it’s on the edge
  • University of Aberdeen Music Prize – Call For Scores for trumpet and string quartet – now that’s a bit different, eh? Not due till the end of May, so tons of time
  • and finally, the Delta Omicron French Horn competition for French horn and piano, due at the end of March

So there’s loads of options out there. Now I just have to choose which one to play with…

Tagged with: completion, composition, ideas, music, organisation, thinking | Add a comment

Sunday, 13 February 2011

pre-Valentine’s Day

Well, today was noteworthy. Today was the first time in all our 14 years together that Djelibeybi actually a) remembered Valentine’s Day (albeit it’s on a Monday this year) and b) did something about it. Normally he just doesn’t remember it’s happening until the day, when I give him a present or make him a special dinner and he says “sorry” if I’m lucky. Last year he went off to a film shoot at 7am and I didn’t see him till midnight, without so much as a “love you” as he left. That one did not go down so well. But this year he really did very well indeed – he thought up something to do (go to Crouch End, peruse the shops and have lunch at the fabulous Monkey Nuts), booked the restaurant (!!!!) AND actually (eventually) remembered that we had something planned (although there were a lot of “what are we doing on Sunday again?” moments). And it was nice. It didn’t really start out too well – a little minor squabbling and grumpiness on both sides of the fence, but lunch sorted us out (I had the chicken schnitzel BLT topless burger [no bun, but on a bed of little gem lettuce instead] – fantastic) and then we had a lovely walk to Turnpike Lane (lovely in the sense of enjoyable and companionable sauntering and chatting, not lovely in the sense of scenic beauty. Hornsey doesn’t really do scenic beauty, I think) where we ventured into Sainsbury’s and ventured out again with the DVDs of the new Star Trek movie & Iron Man plus snacks, before heading home to a lovely quiet evening on the couch. It may not be everyone’s idea of romance, but it was actually really nice. And it meant a lot to me that he even thought of it.

And of course, in spite of it being pre-Valentine’s Day, I still did some work – namely deciding on and uploading the last file to go on SoundCloud, which is to be my warbly rendition of the Satie Chanson arrangement. Not great singing, but I think it provides an interesting foil to the other pieces that are on there – catharsis would be too much like the beginning of Deconstruct, I don’t have time to sort out the string quartet version of Pieces of Eight (it needs a lot of work to get the pizzicati in and separation between the movements – might need to pull it into Pro Tools ultimately to get it all working right), likewise a lot of the piano pieces, which end up sounding a bit mechanical from Finale but can be made a bit more human in Pro Tools with the simple drawing of a wobbly line for the attack of each note, I don’t really want one from the vault yet even though Nightride is basically ready to go (might put that up later in the week), so with the Satie song all ready for uploading, it’s the logical choice. So I think everything’s in place now, although I won’t announce it now (when most people are sleeping) but will wait till the morning…

Tagged with: completion, conversation, events, friends, music, publishing, relaxing, self-promotion, social life, tools, walking, web | Add a comment