Gue news

So of course it didn't last.

Saturday was also two performances of the kid's show. Under two hours drive out, over three back, making about a ten hour day. Walked into the woods on the way back to collect some sticks for a lyre bow.

Mixed on an unfamiliar board (Behringer X32, not actually that different in concept than the Yamaha LS9 I spent so many years on). The real problem was having no sound check. Not the first time I've had to deal with this, though. I was able to fire up the board long enough to play a sample of the backing track and thus set my rough master level and gain staging.

Took the spare body pack up to the booth and that gave me a ballpark trim and fader setting. So then I roughed in the rest of the mix levels based entirely on dressing room chatter. The first minute of the show was of course a mad scramble as I trimmed up everything to where it actually needed to be but having that ballpark and making sure I'd gain-staged to where the signals would be a useable level (not on the verge of clipping, not at the bottom of the fader travel either), really helps.

Sunday walked around the lake. Had a slight cough but didn't think much of it.

Woke up early on Monday, walked to work, carved out the sound box on my Shetland Gue during break and almost put in a full day. But was starting to really hack and wheeze. Crawled home, threw the HEPA filter on turbo mode, and collapsed on the futon. 

Bronchial cold. Didn't kill my energy so bad, but really took the inspiration out of doing anything when every time I got my blood moving I'd go into a paroxysm of coughing. Of course Tuesday was another performance so I suffered through that then crawled back into bed.

Today, I'm taking off work completely. 

So up he rose to run once more

Finally over the 'flu and in the middle of that excess of vigor that comes sometimes. So did something I've been dreaming of for a while. Literally. I have this recurring dream where I wake up well before dawn and decide to go out for a run.

It went better than I'd feared. My endurance is shit right now. Could only run a block or two before I had to drop to a walk. But after a few rounds of that I caught a glimpse of the "zone." My heart finally answered the engine-room telegraph, the bounce came into my stride, etc. I erred on the side of cautious for this first time out, of course. And I'll have to see how my legs feel two days from now. But I'm aiming to do it again. (Plus now that the rain is over, resume walking to work on alternate days).

Started building a Shetland Gue. Made the mock-up above to check dimensions. This may look crude, but it is capturing bridge placement, scale length, "action" height, string access, foot shape. I built it to be comfortable held between the legs (seated), and close to vertical, with the supporting hand on the near pillar and the bow at right angles to the string. (I've noticed in videos, though, that many players hold it far off vertical and often bow cross-wise to the strings.)

There's an intentional modification to the traditional design on this one; I opened up the access hole to allow fingering up to the first octave (I also spaced the strings to allow placing the hand between the strings...some players do this to finger the drone string in addition to the melody string).

I did more research on tonewoods, including what woods are native to Scotland, but since this is more an experiment than a fancy instrument I went with white pine once more. I'm pushing the capabilities of that wood, though; taking the back and sides down to around 1/4" (the soundboard is once again 3/16" basswood, but I'm going to experiment with a bass brace on it).

Did most of the power tool work yesterday and probably should have glued and clamped the body then, but I felt like smoothing out the chamber a little more first. But then, the horsehair (for strings) doesn't arrive until next Friday so there's plenty of time to finish the rest.

Uncharted Worlds is done. Good enough. Cut the violin part, played with the mixdown. Really, it should have been an octave down. That's a danger of working from a MIDI file. By the time I'd compared with the original recording, my instrumentation was set.

Lessons learned. I'd really like to have another piece recorded by Tuesday but I can't think of anything that's close enough. Terminator is still struggling -- I want to try the Shetland Gue on that one and see if it solves any of the problems I'm having. At least the trumpet has come along to the point where I should be able to do that part of the Hellboy cover cleanly. Latest exercise has been rolling up and down the partials as fast as I can, top to bottom and back again.

But I have two performances today, I might want to go into the shop Sunday and put a couple more hours on the timeclock, and I might be walking to work Monday...

Likely to be bitten by a Gue

I'm working on the final mixdown of Uncharted Worlds. Re-recorded the fiddle part on the steel-string JP2, using a capo for the very first time ever. (Usually I retune, but this was played way up near the 12th fret).

The violin part is not working and I may abandon it. Here's the thing; you do home composing with MIDI instruments, you tend to write for strings as if they were a synthesizer pad. So long sustained notes. Which is not exactly easy on a single violin. Certainly not at my level, where each direction change is quite audible. (It's the violin equivalent of running out of breath on a long note).

Also I suspect that it may not be possible to have a part there. The piece as written has a lot of suspect harmonies already. You don't notice because these are fast arpeggios; a maze of twisty little passages, all similar. So all those out-of-chord tones come across as passing tones. Put one of the notes in a long sustained violin passage, though, and you start to notice the bass and the soprano recorder part are in disagreement and there are minor seconds everywhere.

Still, it is something I'd like to try to conquer. If not for this piece, for another. So I'm spending practice sessions just playing single notes over and over, trying for smooth starts and silent bow changes. And, of course, work on my vibrato some more. (Recent experiment demonstrates that hand vibrato might be superior on the chin-cello. Those heavy strings and consequent heavy bow pressure are not as compatible with proper arm vibrato).

And then there's another alternative. Above is a Shetland Gue; this picture being a museum replica by Charlie Bynum. It probably came to the islands North of Scotland with the Vikings, and is strongly related to the Finnish Jouhikko, as well as the Estonian Talharpa, and is a representative of a wide-spread family of bowed lyres (among which belongs the Cretan Lira, which looks rather more violin-like but shares the lack of a fingerboard with the strings being stopped by a light touch on the side).

Unlike the similar-looking plucked lyre of which examples were found in Trondheim and in the Sutton Hoo ship burial, there exist only period descriptions of the Gue. It appears to have had two horsehair strings tuned a fourth (or fifth) apart.

So, yeah. I've ordered the proper black Mongolian horse hair, and a peg hole reamer which just showed up today, but otherwise intend for my first attempt to do a simple pine body.

One thing I won't do right away is put the final mix up on YouTube. I'm not going to get as elaborate with the video but between weather and time and all I'd really rather be recording the next piece in the list rather than traipsing around the woods with a camera.

Were there time enough, and worlds

Rough mix of Uncharted Worlds is done.

Good thing to have done at this point. Recording can be very informative of all the places your skills are lacking. Too informative. Since I'm mixing down in Reaper I have tools at hand that show me just exactly how far off pitch I am, and how far away from the beat I strayed. All those irregularities are mercilessly graphed out in full color right there on the display of the DAW.

Yeah, so much for "simple" string parts. Those long legato lines are murder. I need to spend a lot of practice time just working on clean bowing, silent direction changes, clean starts, etc. And vibrato. My vibrato also needs lots of work.

Related to that, I'm used to practicing. Which means, stopping to find my pitches, stopping for breath, stopping and going back when I drop a note. Can't do that while tape is rolling. One of the unhappy discoveries on this one was while I was rolling the recorder (soprano and tenor) parts in I discovered they were so long I couldn't actually do them on a single breath as I'd been "rehearsing." Because like I said, in rehearsals I stopped when and where I needed to.

Another thing about recording is that it can make it difficult to hear your own instrument. Especially on a project like this, where I'm not memorizing each part over endless practice sessions, I'm dependent on having the temp track playing in my headphones so I can get the notes right. And of course you are listening to the metronome and trying to stay on it. With all that, you tend to miss a lot of errors of intonation and articulation.




Another discovery. It is good to start recording parts early instead of trying to get the MIDI mock-up perfect. I mentioned recorders above; turns out the tenor part was too low for my Low D penny whistle (which is what I'd planned in the mockup.) Fortunately I had that new tenor recorder, never used before, and I think recorders actually work better.

I mentioned earlier that col legno was how I intended to approach one fast, extremely high (C7) part. Well...on the mic, the strike of the wood was overpowering that A string (I was way up in fifth position on it). So went to bowing instead. Which doesn't, really, blend. Similarly, I had a steel-string acoustic guitar in the mock-up but the new tenor ukulele (currently tuned to guitar top four) has a robust enough sound it worked great.




So, yeah. The two pieces on the top of the table right now, I'm going to experiment with the actual instruments earlier in the process. Perhaps unfortunately, they are not "Bardic covers." Instead I'm looking at electric guitar, trumpet, sax...and more violin. And bass, which I did use for the Galaxy Map song...but it was a really, really easy (and not terribly idiomatic) part.

no title

Second performance down. I'll be glad when this show is over. Not that I dislike the show, but I'm still struggling with a bad cold, there's still a big mess from the building fire, and the heavy seasonal rains are upon us (at least things have temporarily slowed down at work -- but every day I take off is a day I don't get paid for).

But I wouldn't be me if I wasn't also writing a novel and trying to record a song.

Finally got through my epic theme-and-concept session and am back to writing text. Daunting, though. Basically the third part is about discovering what it means to be Greek, and Athenian. Of which I am neither. Nor is my protagonist, so yes, there's the specter of Mighty Whitey here. (And yeah it may be an oldie but might be worth name-dropping Never on Sunday which has a visiting Classics prof lecturing the locals on how they are letting the side down with their modern Greek ways).

So, yeah, at least I can Commander Data it (the running gag in Star Trek, the Next Generation was that the android would read five hundred books on the subject, only to -- of course -- continue to miss the point.) Which is why I'm reading about more recent Greek history now, Greece under Ottoman and Venetian rule, and eventually some Captain Michalis and other literature.

The songing is going slowly. I started documenting the process of developing a cover but realized the piece I was taking screen shots for was one I wanted to try a different approach on  (instead of MIDI mockups, I want to try recording stand-in tracks on the actual instruments I mean to record with).

And it turns out I was in the wrong octaves on Uncharted Worlds. It's a basic problem with MIDI; there's little agreement on whether to use C3 or C4 as Middle C. Worse, some instruments are essentially transposing; that is, the bass in a software synthesizer might play an octave or three below where it is notated. So I did a spot-by-spot check on voicing against the OST (Original Sound Track recording) and adjusted. Played that back and didn't like it. So now I'm up in the air about what ranges I'll actually be using. And I've become sensitized to elements of the original arrangement that I now am struggling to try to include in my cover.

After a much-needed nap I recorded the bass part as warm-up, then tried a new shot at the Mini-Hoo part. Turns out the next part is almost playable on the new uke so I'm strongly tempted to keep practicing until I can actually do it cleanly enough to record. Otherwise, it is dropping to 75% tempo and recording at that...which is probably going to be necessary for the much faster "B" section.

In a totally different direction, messed around with a cover of the titles to Otherworld, an obscure and short-lived television series of the 1980's. Different instrumentation challenges on this one so was fun to play around with for a bit.

Too many notes

Really thought I would be able to start recording parts for Uncharted Worlds today. First track is easy on the Mini-Hoo (even though I have to play it down a fourth because I can't tune the strings that high). After practicing it for a while at faster and faster tempos I decided to split the next track (guitar for this one -- the new ukulele would make it easier but I like the sound of the Yamaha steel string here). Of course there's a B part in this track which I'm still working on.

The bass and "bell" should be easy enough. The next track, though, turned out to be pitched above what I had available; it is above the fifteenth and last fret on my Soprano uke. The pitches are reachable on the violin A string, but pizz is too soft up there. Well, turns out col legno battuto does the trick (if your musical Italian is lacking, that means strike the string with the back of the bow).

And then there's another part I haven't even figured out what instrument to assign it to. So...between all that, and stringing up the new uke, and lingering head cold, and upstairs tenants practicing their Ceili (well, that's what it sounds like), nothing got recorded.

(Yeah, so it is sold as a tenor and shipped with nylon strings. Turns out to be a 17" scale length, which is correct for tenor, but the pack of Aquila Nylgut I got -- tenor, low G -- started snapping when I tried to bring them to pitch. I compromised by moving the highest string back one and putting the nylon back on, but that wasn't wonderful. So put the Aquilas back on and tuned to guitar top four, like my Vorson electric uke. The low G is a little unhappy all the way down at D but it is a wire-wound and can deal. And it was worth it...it is a lot louder now and has a wonderful tone.)

And I spent the weekend charting circles around the large thematic issues I identified in the novel. This is stuff the outline allowed me to skate around, as that was primarily concerned with story beats. So far in five thousand words of Socratic whatever I've managed only two lines in bold face.

I've been trying to determine what it is about a adventure archaeologist story that is attractive. I've identified possible elements but haven't quite defined them; if, say, large constructed but abandoned spaces (aka "tombs" in the parlance of Tomb Raider) are an element, can urban archaeology apply? It can have all the physical difficulties and dangers of traversal, the loneliness, markings of a previous culture to decipher, etc.

The main thing I figured out is that for various reasons (contract with the reader, the concept of the Big Early Concession), I have to be implicit that at least one entity that acts like Homer's Athena is active and can do things that are as yet unexplained. And this doesn't actually change the plot at all. I already had Penny's thoughts wandering in this direction while she's struggling to keep afloat in the Adriatic, and a specific late incident where people refer to a rousing speech she doesn't remember actually giving.

And, yes, what Athena actually is, how many of them there may be, what cultures they may be invested in (or not), is still up for grabs. In fact, I have a strong feeling that though I want to explore more of that mystery in a later book, actually nailing them down to specifics would end up being a disappointment. (In large part, because when a writer tries to do in the wizard by explaining that it was really all holograms and nanotechnology, they've really just replaced an unexplained with an inadequately explained. You might as well say, "it was all done with mirrors" for all that you've actually brought it back to the rational world.)

Unresearching

I'm still struggling with a lingering cold (sinus headache, frequent coughing) that makes it difficult to concentrate on creative work. So I sit around read. Which is the last thing I need at the moment.

Ideas are easy to come by. Nailing them down and making them work and getting them on paper is hard. I sometimes think writing is easier when you know less. Or as Sam Starfall put it, his lies come easier when he doesn't know what's impossible. The argument here is that of the perfect being the enemy of the good; better to create something, anything, than to wait forever for a perfection that will never come.

So doing more research just leads to more ideas, more directions to explore, more things you might want to fold into the mix. What I really need to do at the moment is un-research.

Speaking of which.

I'm focusing this week on Uncharted Worlds (the Galaxy Map song). I thought it would be simple. The voicing and arrangement mostly is. But the parts turn out to be more challenging.

The first motif sounds wonderful on the Mini-Hoo. Except that I can't play it at pitch. A lyre isn't fretted, and when I tried to tune the strings up to the proper pitches I snapped the top string. So...I've tuned it a fourth below, will record it that way and pitch-shift it in Reaper.

The next part in line sounds really wonderful on my Yamaha 3/4 folk guitar. But I can't play that one at tempo. At this point I'm feeling like I'll play it the fastest that still has grace and expression and...fix it in Reaper.

Might as well give up pretending I could do the thing in concert (as in, play all the parts as written). Which is fine. Instead of carefully trimming a one-bar xylophone until it is at the exact right pitch, I'll just use close enough and tune it digitally. Thing is, the part I'm struggling with isn't even the fastest part. There's a 32nd-note sequence that I could realistically only play on the keyboard.

And, yeah, a nice harpsichord patch would work well acoustically. It sort of breaks the "bardic instrument" thing but I've already introduced chin-cello to the picture. And for this piece, steel-string guitar (acceptable) and electric bass (less so). Maybe I can record it in two takes, playing half the notes each time.

Sigh. And the kid's show (which ended up doing four dress rehearsals -- six hours each in an unheated building. Did I mention I have a cold now?) is apparently not going to pay me until closing night. Including reimbursing me for the new set of speakers I went out of pocket for. Between show and sick my work hours have suffered so my short-term finances are not happy. Which means despite this being one of the pieces I wanted the Baroque-elele for, this is probably a bad time to drop the cash on that.

And of course I looked at harps again. Remember what I said above about research being easier than concentrating on actually getting stuff done? So...doing the Goddess Harp as a laser harp is a cute idea but amber laser diodes are...pricey. Really pricey. Besides, my whole quest on acoustic instruments has been because of the inflection they provide. There might be a way of getting more data out of a laser harp so notes sounded different depending on how you air-plucked them, but...

So back to trying to figure out how to do it acoustically. Really acoustically. Now, it has the general shape of a lyre but there's two sticking points; there's no visible tuning pegs, and the trick of a lyre is that the strings run over a bridge which presses on a soundboard (as opposed to a true harp, where the strings are actually anchored in the soundboard).

Oh, yeah, and I looked at some harp-builder's sites and there's some real interesting math. Here's the thing; your basic "Celtic" harp ends up putting about 900 lbs tension on the frame. You've actually got to engineer the things to take that sort of stress (my Sutton Hoo style lyre, I'd originally tied to the endpin with a doubled length of leather lacing. That snapped and good when I tuned up to pitch).