thought for the day

"When you own a hammer factory, you never actually pound any nails."

I'm starting to concentrate on making music with the tools I've developed. I have to thank Forrest and meriko, mostly, for the gentle nudgings to quit wanking with the code and actually apply it.

It's hard. We'll say for sake of argument that I'm working on an album. I know something about the overall shape of it. I have at least some basic idea of what three of the tracks sound like. I'm trying to get one of them nailed down and finished. It's probably track 2. Its working title is "Coast To Coast". (R'Lyeh turns out to be in the Pacific after all, so now the drive is westwards, but that's not important.)

I spent a day building structures in Mulch, getting sounds I liked, getting sounds that fit the feeling I was trying to create. Then I spent another day stripping it down to the essentials (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: "You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away." This is applicable both to programming (hence the XP principle of Refactor Mercilessly) and to art. Then I started imposing some song-scale structure onto what was basically a loop. There are two problems with that structure at the moment: one, it's too homogenous (part 1: A B A C. part 2: D E D F. part 3: G H G I. etc. — once I put a structure on one of the parts I found myself copying analogous structure onto the others.); two, the transitions between parts are awkward. A live drummer would intuitively put a little fill on the end of a part to mark the transition; my drum parts switch drastically but the change goes unremarked.

The homogenous structure, I know I just need to rework. I have this tendency in my art to be meticulous for the first small fraction of a project, then lose focus and try and rush through the middle bit. I have to stop and go back and be careful through the middle. I can do this.

The transitions, I think I have a plan for, now. I'm just gonna cover the transitions with some unusual noise. (Okay, a lot of the song consists of unusual noise, so that's not as incongruous or sloppy as it might sound.) I had a candidate noise in mind, one I kept accidentally producing by saving the song-in-progress while it was playing. That was the sound of buffer underrun, when Audiomulch wasn't producing fresh sample data fast enough for the sound hardware, so the hardware kept playing the same 100-millisecond portion of the song over and over. It's a bit like a muffled machine-gun or jackhammer noise. It's used in more than one industrial track (though I can't think of any at the moment). I can't do the noise on demand in Mulch, and can't do it on the hard-disk-recorded version at all. I could write a plugin to do it. Really easily. But I was trying to use the tools I already have. I thought about various combinations of Mulch contraptions I could wire together to make an approximation to buffer underrun noise, but wasn't really inspired to experiement with it. So I just dropped it for a day, played some Grand Theft Auto, did some laundry. Tonight, while chatting with Forrest, I realized that I have more tools than just Audiomulch; I have a bass guitar. It doesn't make buffer underrun noise, but if I put it through some distortion and whomp on it, I bet I can get a noise which will fill the niche. And without writing any more code. Unfortunately I probably won't have a chance to try it for a few days...

The buffer underrun simulator does go into the pile of plugin ideas, though.