After the harpsichord...

...comes the the string quarter playing Pachabel's canon. Well OK almost Pachabel's Canon - just the same chord sequence but as block chords rather than all the fabulous counterpoint. And almost a string quartet too - each sound is really an ensemble sound. This is all about having a chord sequence - and this is a pretty famous sequence. Also it very neatly moves into the next section, as the first melody I'm going to use there has the same (almost) chord sequence.

The drums prevail and the strings play the sequence one. Acoustic guitar and electric bass join and it's played again. Then twice at double sequence speed (each chord takes half as long). Increasingly the feel becomes bouncy and the strings are phased out. Over the whole thing is floated an electric guitar doing vague pentatonic noodling.

The guitar is worth talking about. I tend to use a lot of classic "crunchy" guitar sounds when soloing - I'm quite a fan of that distortion. However, I have been looking for a satisfying "clean" sound, something a little like the classic Santana sound would do me - compressed and sustained and clean. I think I have finally found it in this. Also I had an interesting moment. Sometimes when I want a line (often I can hear in my head what I want) but it seems too fast for me to play reliably, I play at half speed and double speed it up. Well this time I had such a line, and when I tried to double it up it just sounded...wrong. My trickery was unhelpful. So I tried several ways of playing it and eventually found one, and learned it and did it at normal speed. I did use a bizarre little technique though (never used this before but will again) - I was playing high up the neck, and to stop open strings ringing and getting in the way, I draped a jumper over the lower part of the neck to act as damping. Now I think I need to invent the damping capo - it would be really useful.

I have been having lots of problems with cubase in this project - something keeps causing to go into an "unstable state" and it invites me to save out under a different name. Anyway I seem to have finally taken all the individual ideas and aggregated them into one nice track.

Migration Pains

I'm afraid this is not a musical post, more of a process update

It was inevitable that the time would come when the beautiful and elegant computer I use to make music on needed to be put to rest. It has got noisier and clunkier and slower and more and more erratic (a bit like me really)

And so I have managed to get hold of a newer computer. After installing a new operating system (Windows 7) and some essential software, the migration of the music workstation stuff has started.

There are two major pieces of software, Cubase and the NI Komplete pack. I found the NI disks fairly easily, and their license software did a great job of transferring control. The cubase installation disk? Now where was it?

I haven't seen it since we moved. We moved about halfway through "Under A Binary Tree" I had to go box-diving. All our books and CDs and my wife's uni notes, and my records, and casettes, and some videos, and lots of other things are still all boxed up in the room that we are going to call the "library" - pretentious I know but we think it's funny, (and appropriate). In one of these boxes, maybe if I was lucky, I would find the Installer CD.

No I didn't

I did find it on the top of a wardrobe in a completely different room. Oh well.

Then all the files needed copying across (and something seems to have gone wrong with that but I'm not sure what). And now comes the laborious bit I am in the middle of... finding all the otehr instruments and effects plugins I have used.

I am in stage 1, reloading all the project files from the past couple of years (purple and other projects) to check what plug-ins I need. Laborious and tedious and too tempting to listen to everything. They all sound odd because the reverb I use on EVERYTHING is not installed, (and I need to find an installer, or resolve to use a different reverb. Stage 2 will be trying to source everything again, or equivalents. Thankfully I'm pretty sure I have all the softsynths and romplers I need, but I'm not sure about effects.

Stage 3, if I can face it is to do a proper inventory of what plug-ins I have - they have come from lots of diverse sources. In could do with a good list of what everything does, and maybe getting rid of poor ones.

So on I press. Heigh-ho