Improv

Wow! What a day! I’ve made a huge start on my first RPM Challenge piece: First thing this morning I pulled down the recordings from Iraklio and Brussels into Logic, so all those field recordings are now on my hard disk. I also spent about an hour messing around with ideas on my flute and recording them (note: this is a big deal for me – I NEVER improvise!). A slight setback when the very best take for ideas AND execution AND tone ended up being lost when my laptop suddenly shut down without warning, but I managed two takes which are halfway decent and I’m cobbling them together to create overlapping parts. This afternoon I started sticking it all together in Logic: After exploring some other field recordings I had lying around, I’ve decided to stick with just the Zurich and Brussels recordings and the two flute takes – the more stuff I try to work with, the slower I’m going to be and the point of this whole exercise is speed.

Anyway, I now have 4:28 of music!!! It’s not the greatest thing I’ve ever done. It’s a little morbid and ambly. But the point is that I’ve actually created nearly 4 1/2 minutes of music in a single day! Hoping I can finish it tonight or tomorrow (although I just remembered that I have to get the parts done for Carrion Comfort, so it won’t be tonight).

I published a blog post on perfectionism and what I’m hoping to get out of this challenge: it’s up on caitlinrowley.com if you want to read it. And – relating to that – over the course of the afternoon I identified a reason why it takes me so long to write stuff. I keep going back to listen to the whole thing from the beginning! I kept catching myself doing this, even when it wasn’t really necessary. I feel like what I’m writing is losing touch with what I’ve written before, so I go back and listen from the beginning – and of course, as the piece gets longer this takes longer each time, so now I’m trying to watch out for this and when I go to do it, I think: do I really need to do this? Or should I just press on a bit longer?

1am update: Parts are prepped and ready for a print-out proof tomorrow… just as soon as I nip out to the shops to buy some more black ink. Also got a bit caught up in the moment when I ought to have been heading for bed and finally fixed up the time signatures for Egg the Ninth – I KNEW 9/8 wasn’t right. But 6/8 wasn’t either – turns out it needed to be 6/8 interspersed with occasional 9/8 bars. FUN!

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

I must be mad

Today I think I’ve broken all procrastination records, but in the last 10 minutes I think I’ve surpassed myself – crazy exhausted from germ, battling to get Carrion Comfort off to the printers so it’ll get to London Contemporary Chamber Orchestra by their deadline, unable to focus… and I’ve just let myself be talked into signing up for the RPM Challenge – record an album (10 songs or 35 minutes of music) in a month. And a small month at that, being February. Never thought I’d be so happy to see a leap year.

But anyway, I’ve loved the Creative Pact challenges I’ve done the past couple of years, even if I kind of failed at 2011′s – they’re always great, and some of my Twitter friends are doing it too, so it’ll be fun. And who knows, either I’ll get a ton of stuff done and experiment like crazy, or I’ll become the procrastination queen of the world and somebody will give me a prize.

I’ll blog it here because, while it’s not a required part of the project, I keep track of myself better when blogging, and it’s good to take note of failures as well as successes.

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Bread and timpani

I’ve been battling with the percussion parts on Carrion Comfort for a good couple of months now. First I didn’t know what percussion was available, and then I had to face the fact that very few of the instruments on the list matched up with the soundworld I had in my head and I’ve been wrestling with this disconnect ever since. Finally I decided to just write for the sounds in my head (mostly timpani, which aren’t on the list) and then see if I can convert those to something similar which IS on the list. So now, after much procrastination since making that decision, I have a timpani part, and I think I’m pretty pleased with it. It’s shaping and drawing together the rest of the music in the way I imagined it would (or in Finale it is anyway ) but now there’s a big challenge: how will it work for three tom-toms (high, medium, low) instead of neatly tuned timpani? Will the smaller drums have the resonance I’m after? If not, what’s best to do. These are questions I need to answer in the coming week.

In the meantime, however, I was too late to go out to the bakery yesterday and so decided to take the plunge and use up some of the assorted bread flour which has been lurking in the cupboard for far too long. Also to try out the River Cottage Bread Handbook which I bought on a cranky-day a few months ago. Well, gentle reader, if I may say so, it was frickin’ fantastic. Absolutely and by a country mile the best bread I’ve ever cooked. I ended up using 1/3 wholegrain spelt flour, 1/3 normal strong white flour and 1/3 wholemeal strong flour and it’s turned out brilliantly. The recipe freaked me out a bit because unlike every other bread recipe I’ve ever seen, this one has no sugar in it – just flour, yeast, salt, water and a tiny bit of oil – but it rose perfectly, and the quantity was great too. The recipe made three medium-sized loaves, which is perfect for storing spares in the freezer and hopefully will get me through the next week. I can probably make time to bake bread once a week, at least while I’m freelance, but more often than that would be a stretch. Guess I should be glad that D’s really only eating white bread at the moment, although he did taste it when it was fresh out of the oven and pronounced it ‘orgasmic’, which I was rather pleased with.

My only criticism of it is that between the wholegrain spelt and the wholemeal flour, it’s REALLY fibre-packed. I’m glad the white flour was there because I think 70% wholemeal would have been too much. I’m going to test out an assortment of flours and combinations over the next few batches. Ideally I’d like to make a good mixed-wholegrain loaf. I love spotty bread. The other thing is that – probably due to the oven in this flat being rubbish – setting the oven temperature to 250C was a little high and the first loaf browned VERY quickly. I liked how the recipe gave 3 different temperatures to turn down to after the first 10 minutes, depending on how quickly it was browning, but I did dial it down a little for the next two, which made a big difference but they still turned out great.

And it worked well as Vegemite toast this morning, and even better as a slim cheese sandwich for lunch today. Mmmmm. Bread…

Today’s very own achievement was not so grand, but worthwhile. It’s been bugging me for ages that since I moved the featured piece on the caitlinrowley.com homepage into the central section and started using the SoundCloud widget, the blog post has been bumped way down the page and is almost guaranteed to be below the fold on all but the largest (or portrait-oriented) screens. It’s also been bugging me why I’m not getting new signups for that website’s email list, and I came to the conclusion that having the Twitter, etc. links in the same space was distracting, so I’ve moved the social media links to the bottom of the page, cleared them out of the email list box, changed the heading and intro line, and moved the blog post to the right column, under the (shortened) email box. So now at least headlines should be visible above the fold and I think the whole page looks more interesting and magaziney. Now to wait and see what happens with the stats…

Tagged with: baking, code, composition, experimenting, learning, music, self-promotion, tools | 1 comment

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

Feeling social

For quite some time now I’ve been gradually resigning myself to the thought that it might be sensible to add Facebook Like and Twitter ReTweet buttons to caitlinrowley.com – at least to the blog posts. From the feedback I get, quite a lot of people enjoy my posts, but not very many people are commenting on them, so it seems sensible – or at least an interesting experiment – to give them a mechanism whereby they can lodge their appreciation and easily share the article which hopefully might encourage some more people to start reading it too. So this evening, I’ve installed a WordPress plugin to do just that. I’m not 100% happy with this particular plugin, but it looks like it should do the job and it’ll be interesting to see what happens. I’m considering this as a first step and if it proves popular then I’ll reconsider the option of maybe building my own from scratch, which hopefully might do away with Facebook’s hideous iframe code (tables! ewww!)

It’s been a productive sort of a day, really. Apart from that I’ve also set up – finally! – score downloads on BandCamp, like I’ve been saying I’ll do for at least the last 6 months. There’s only Diabolus up there now, but it’s looking pretty good, I think. My only real reservation – and has been all the way along – is that BandCamp is so heavily geared towards downloading recordings that it’s not instantly obvious that this is a different way of doing a score download. You have to download the ‘album’ to get the score, which is actually a package containing the PDF score and an audio file of the MIDI rendition to give you an idea of what it sounds like. So I’m not entirely convinced it’ll take off, even though I hope it will – it’s just that I can’t think of a better way to do it. None of the existing score repositories seem to have much character or much community, whereas BandCamp has both. I guess if it doesn’t work then I’ll have to look at creating my own system, which I really really really don’t want to do. I mean, it’d be good to work with databases properly at last, but it’d be a lot of work, and if I then wanted to charge for something, then that’s a whole can of worms I really don’t want to face. Anyway, I’ve posted the link on Facebook and asked some people for their feedback on it – whether they like it or think it’ll be confusing. I shall cross fingers that somebody responds. Apparently 5 people have looked at it so far, but I’ve had no comments or actual downloads. Eek. If you want to take a peek, it’s at caitlinrowley.bandcamp.com.

And last, but most definitely not least, because it’s probably the most obviously creative thing I’ve done today, is that I’ve finally embarked upon the follow-up post to the one I wrote back in February about Diabolus, my solo violin piece. It’s far too long at the moment, so I need to do some serious editing before sleep, but it’s great to finally be really thinking about what I’ve learnt through to process. And also to see (although I’ve not really written about this) what lessons I’ve then applied in the piece I’m currently working on. It just feels fantastic to see some real continuity through these pieces – from what I learned in Durham to Diabolus to the orchestral piece. Just grand. I feel like I’m finally making some progress!

Tagged with: blogging, experimenting, ideas, learning, music, organisation, self-promotion, tools, web, writing | Add a comment

Yes, really

Well, I thought I was coming out of the cloud last time, but well, not so much. For a while there was getting a bit more done – and especially getting a bunch of listening done, but as time went on and the teeth were still problematic and the back seemed to actually get a bit worse, the cumulus descended and I got a bit lost. Feeling like I’m on the up just a little now though (or should that be down – the cloud goes up. Hum. Think my metaphor’s a bit mixed here!) and starting to be able to think properly. Last week my dentist put in the proper filling and said that the mini-crown is optional because the tooth still has its structural integrity (thank you, o marvellous Italian-South African root canal specialist!) and that if I want it we’ll look at doing it in 6 months. I think I probably will do it – it will provide more solidity and protection – but we’ll do the x-rays then to see if the root canal’s worked to clear the infection fully and then see what else should be done. And then about 2 days after that, the back started improving again. Can you say “psychosymptomatic”? My bite’s still a bit out, and bending down’s still pretty painful, but it feels good to at least have the start of some closure on the whole hideous episode.

So I’ve not been doing much lately. I have started a new knitting project to teach myself short-row bust darts, which is coming along well – the first actual garment (as opposed to accessories) I’ve knitted since I was about 13! Feels like a big step. I’m pleased with it so far but trying to maintain an experimental approach and accept that things may go wrong (I may have picked the wrong size – it’s hard to tell when you’re as big in front as I am what size you should be making to fit across the bust as well as on the shoulders – or the short-rows may go horribly wrong) and the whole thing may need to be unravelled, but for now it’s a nice gentle knit which is coming along well and is helping to restore some calm to my frazzled brain.

I’ve also been studying for the Life in the UK test which we’re taking next Friday. Gosh it’s dull. And I am absolutely no good at remembering either statistics or random dates or numbers (and why does it even matter that I should know how many constituencies there are??). Anyway, just going to revise and cram and do practice tests now ad nauseum for the next week.

Today I made crumpets.

And the great news is that this time they’ve actually come out properly crumpetty. Unlike the last two times when they lacked holes and ended up heavy and a bit blech. These are light and tasty. And the butter pools correctly. They have the Djelibeybi seal of approval. I also made them in the shape of space shuttles and Gromit.

Tagged with: baking, cooking, experimenting, health, knitting, listening, mentalhealth, study | Add a comment

Catching up

Yes, I know things have been a bit quiet round here, but it’s not like it’s been uneventful. There’s been the back-pain drama, there’s been the dental drama (round 2 of drilling and filling today so back on the painkillers again), there was a birthday, which resulted in lovely presents from lovely people, including: 1 proper real-live microphone, Nigel Slater’s fruit cookbook, a book on libretto-writing, one on poetry-writing, 2 seasons of Chuck. Plus of course the presents I bought myself: the iPad (which you know about and seems to become more useful and awesome with every passing day) and Logic Studio, which arrived on the birthday day but took us a couple of days to install due to my having dropped my laptop several months back, meaning that DVDs go into it but can’t really be relied on to come out again… Still working on how to get the software instruments that come with Logic up and running…

So there’s been a lot of playing about with toys. Mostly the ones I bought myself though as I need to get a cable for the mic, I’m finishing up other books before I start the libretto ones and my back has hurt too much to do much cooking (barring a culinary experiment which resulted in an apple-enhanced caramel cake which went down quite well).

So I’ll just slide over the missed days and focus on today. Obviously, I went to the dentist. He says that this should be the last of the deep drilling (thank heavens). Been pretty uncomfy though, but yay for painkillers! And also yay for spectacularly beautiful summer’s day even though it’s only spring! It was so lovely, I decided to walk home instead of catching the bus (which was taking too long and I was also getting bored), so I walked back through the sunshine and the intermittent smell of jasmine, listening to the birds going twit in the hedges and chatting with a friend in Australia via IM. Rather lovely, actually.

Once home I actually didn’t immediately have a nap, as I’d expected. Instead I did some work on my new piece. It’s been a little stuck lately but I managed to prod it forward a little and flesh out some of the earlier parts too.

Then there was tinkering about with Logic Studio. I’m really enjoying using this. Fascinating to discover that the interface basically hasn’t changed since I was using microLogic at uni – 15 years ago! so it’s mostly familiar, and the bits that are less familiar – the audio-editing side of things, isn’t that dissimilar from Pro Tools, so I seem to be picking things up pretty quickly. And I can’t begin to express how much easier and more comfortable it is to work in it, not needing to be tethered to a hardware box at all times. I don’t have to think twice about opening it up for a small sound-file-trimming job. And I’ve discovered some cool stuff – beat mapping to make a MIDI file sound more like it was played by a human than a robot to start with! I borrowed a book from the TVU library yesterday and started working my way through it this afternoon. Finding out some interesting snippets, but I’m hoping I can get away with just borrowing the book and not having to buy it. Would rather spend my birthday Amazon voucher on the Advanced volume

And then when the sun was setting, I got all inspired to grab the iPad and try a little bit of drawing. It’s not great, but it was fun to do and an interesting exercise, messing round with silhouettes and trying to get the sunset colours to blend a bit

Tagged with: art, composition, drawing, EDM, experimenting, learning, music, photography, play, study, tools, walking | Add a comment

Singing and cursing

Not in that order! I finally pulled out my convoluted setup for recording stuff into Pro Tools this afternoon. Because I don’t have a proper microphone, this entails plugging my mini mic into the MiniDisc player, finding an expendable MD disc to put in the player, hitting pause & record, plugging the MD player into the Mbox, then the Mbox into the computer, then starting up Pro Tools and hoping everything finds where it should be without any trouble. Which it didn’t. Of course. And it took much grumbling and muttering and rude things said before I worked out that I had the wrong cable, then waited for Djelibeybi to get home from the gym to pull down his Big Bag of Cables and fish out the right one. But I got there in the end! YAY! And I even worked out comping to do multiple takes, one after the other which can then be patched together, which actually made a big difference. Not so much with the patching as with just being able to keep on singing and so generally improve my confidence and let my voice warm up over three or four takes. Very handy.

The result of which is that I have a rough but usable recording of my Three Whitman Songs very nearly ready to go. And just as well – the opera workshop thingy I need it to apply for is due on Monday, which means I need to get the whole thing in the post tomorrow, or first thing Thursday at the very latest, given Thursday’s root canal extravaganza.

I also did Day 3 of my JavaScript course, which was pretty good. Looking forward to really playing round with some proper code tomorrow.

Tagged with: experimenting, learning, music, recording, tools | Add a comment

Another poorly day

Feeling quite a bit better than yesterday, but still a little woozy and wobbly, which has meant that I’ve not got to the Composer Workshop at TVU. Which is annoying. Because term’s been running for a month now – I only found out where and when last week, when I couldn’t go because I had to be in town at the time it ended, and now this week the world’s been too spinny for me to tackle it. Not to mention that I STILL haven’t got my student card. First real composition lesson is tomorrow though, so really looking forward to that and really hoping that I’ll be able to get some momentum going again very soon.

So today’s been another stay-at-home day. More productive than yesterday though, although not in directly creative ways, but it’s been good. I discovered how to get Google Analytics to ignore my own visits to my sites without needing to keep track of my IP address (I’m beginning to suspect, because we have 2 networks sort of chained together that my IP address may change depending on which end of the house I’m at, so that wasn’t working very well). And I downloaded and installed GIMP, which has done a far, far better job of my caitlinrowley.com favicon that the conglomeration of tools I used before. The conglomeration resulted in a 25Kb file – GIMP has given me one which looks better but only weighs something like 800bytes. Add that to the optimising and compressing work I did yesterday, and my whole homepage now weighs in at just over 40K, as it should do. Still got a bit more work to do, but overall I’m pretty pleased with the speed of it now, and really quite ecstatic at getting it to compress anything at all – something I couldn’t manage to get working at all while I was doing the W3C mobile web best practice course.

I’ve been thinking about my homepage too and thinking I need to make some changes to that – the work I did last week which saw it jump to second position for a search on my name (where it should be), has apparently been negated with the complete change in homepage content which occurs every week when I update the blog. So I’m thinking that instead I may need to drop in a brief para about me at the top of the page and just include a teaser paragraph for the article. Might also give a truer view of who’s reading what on the site if they need to click through to read the whole thing.

Music stuff? Not so much. Diabolus (the violin piece) is still near completion but I haven’t done anything on it in a couple of days. I was hoping to go inspiration-hunting at the Tate Modern after Wednesday’s lesson, but as I had to cancel the lesson, that didn’t happen, so I’m still no closer to knowing what I want to work on next.

But the continuing rest and recuperation with tiny bits of interspersed laundry and tidying are, I think, doing me good. Time for another episode of Buffy…

Tagged with: blogging, experimenting, health, learning, music, research, self-promotion, thinking, tools, web | Add a comment

Gathering thoughts

Didn’t get so much done today – sister-in-common-law and her small son arrived to stay for a couple of days, which is lovely and I’m really looking forward to spending some time with them tomorrow at the British Museum. Today though was mostly taken up with pondering the notes I took in my first composition-teaching lesson yesterday. I’ve been through them and made some extra notes and had a really good think about how to approach the whole thing and I think I’ve come up with a vague sort of plan that might work. It’s going to be a bit random but hopefully fill in some holes. Got to run it past my student now. Hope he likes it!

Did a bit more work on the violin piece too. It’s getting tighter and tighter. I’ve sped it up a tiny bit, which pulls the duration in and gives it a bit more sparkle. Still having a little trouble with the opening 2 bars though. The rest of it I’m pretty happy with, but the opening’s a bit dirge-like and isn’t really gelling with the rest of the piece. Thinking about maybe removing most of the chordal stuff to keep the rhythm cleaner, and possibly whacking it up an octave too.

Made a little Greek feast for dinner which went down very well – chicken souvlaki with garlicky bulgur wheat (loving that recipe), salad and tzatziki.

Tagged with: composition, cooking, experimenting, friends, learning, music, teaching | Add a comment