Yesterday. Half the morning, I battled with re-installing soft-editing software on a laptop. Some manuals are less than ‘customer orientated’. (A well-written manual must be conceived from the learner’s perspective.) Good-old YouTube tutorials saved my bacon. Thereafter, I completed re-routing the major sound system in readiness for the 1-2 May outing. Back in 2009, I had a ‘vision’, on the boundaries of waking and sleep, of playing an electric guitar somewhere in the Arts Centre. The image and audition were fleeting; I couldn’t hear what I was playing, beyond the presence of a background drone, over which solo parts were introduced and looped. Today, I set about bringing this ‘vision’ to pass, by designing a double-looper network, which will permit drones and solos to be looped, stacked, and erased independently of one another:
In the afternoon, I constructed it. My pedalboard arrays are modular units (clusters of effectors) each with their own independent, buffered boards. These units can be combined to create a larger network. My principle for construction is to: begin as simply as possible; end as simply as possible:
In the background, I continued to migrate ‘The Talking Bible’ records to digital files. There’s not shortcut to the task; it has to be completed in real time. In the evening, I made trial of the pedalboard array. There’s always going to be some noise (the so-called ‘signal to noise ratio’ phenomenon) in a system built from so many units of mismatched capacitance and resistance. But just how far can one go to exclude it? The quest began.
Today. 8.15 am: A sent my responses to incoming emails and returned to the studio to review yesterday’s work and continue digitising records. A revelation: the (for me) unacceptable ‘hum’ in the background to the array was caused by a bridged power supply, shared by the two loopers. Once each looper was given an independent DC source, the ‘hum’ was history (‘humtory’).
The composition for which the array is required – ‘New Songs‘ – was conceived in 2014. I’d not had an opportunity to realise it further since. My ambition was to develop a part determined/part improvisatory structure for the suite. The music would be mediated by reasonably sparse and straightforward technology, such that its performance could be easily accommodated in either a gallery space or church. The four pieces that make up the suite are derived from those Psalms that refer to both stringed instruments, as the medium of performance, and the nature or mood of the music produced thereon. These two stipulations constrained my options, as follows:
Loud Noise (Ps. 33.3): ‘Sing unto him a new song; play skilfully with a loud noise’.
Dark Saying (Ps. 49.4): ‘I will incline my ear to a parable: I will open my dark saying upon the harp’.
Solemn Sound (Ps. 92.3): ‘Upon an instrument of ten strings, and upon a psaltery; upon the harp with a solemn sound’.
Joyful Noise (Ps. 98.5-6): ‘ Sing unto the Lord with the harp; with the harp, and the voice of a psalm. With trumpets and sound of cornets make a joyful noise before the Lord, the King’.
2.00 pm: Following lunch, I caught up with learning the ins and outs of equipment that I’d purchased during the last six months. One ought to be conversant the tools of the trade at a deep level. But this takes time. And one learns best through usage. Further digital recordings were processed, sections extracted and looped, and files allocated to folders. Administering the conversions and their offspring is a task unto itself. They needed to logically labelled and intuitively accessible.
By the close of the afternoon, I’d reached the end of 2 Corinthians.
7.00 pm: I attended one of the Holy Week services, at St Anne’s, Penparcau. Above my head, a crucifix and a projector confronted one another in a stand-off. My metaphorical turn of mind went into overdrive:
Sometimes the traditional and the contemporary can’t be reconciled. They set up a dissonance that is, at one and the same time, intriguing and uncomfortable.