Journal

This journal is going to be a daily account of my creative process. It's intended to be accurate, not interesting. If you decide to read it you will see how a writer and composer actually thinks and works.

In the past artists have typically avoided discussing their working methods in any detail, or concealed them, or even lied about them to create an aura of mystery; and all this because their real methods were and are, as you'll see, actually tedious and uninteresting. It's largely nose- to-the-grindstone stuff. Just working hard day after day to realize your vision.

There are a few reasons I've decided to do this, but the main one is that AI has made it necessary to take the mask off. The public now wants to know whether the art they're consuming and the influencers they're following are real people and not chatbots or AI artists, and being open about actual day-to-day labors will help to clear this up.

Another problem is that the delusional ideas so many entertain about who artists are and how they work have enabled bad actors to foment artist hate, convincing the public that artists and writers in general are "getting away with it" by having fun and easy jobs and are therefore underserving of pay, basic legal protections, or even respect. I've provided considerable value to the public but I'm completely broke, so this kind of nonsense really pisses me off. Artists are generally driven people who work hard but live a precarious existence dependent on a fickle public; the work isn't easy, and it's often not fun either. They're not getting away with anything. Once in a very rare while they do win fame and fortune, but they deserve their chance at fame and fortune at least as much as anyone else, and certainly more than the people who bash them.

So read on if you will, but don't expect fun and games. I'm not trying to entertain you here.

April 29, 2025 - "Emergency Call, Ontario"

Going to start titling journal entries by the project I'm working on as otherwise I'll never be able to find anything if for some reason I want to refer back here.

Today I did some minor revisions to the coda of "Emergency Call" as well as most of the programming. Now all the main parts of the song are written except a few rough spots in the retransition. And, it's time to think about orchestration.

I'm a bit stumped about how I want to orchestrate this. It already sounds fine with mostly just strings and a few horn touches. But I think it would benefit from more. And I am a bit concerned I have overused the "infinite strings pass" one gets with digital instruments and perhaps it would have been more interesting if I'd written divisis and supported with woods instead.

At any rate, I have not yet come up with the right approach for orchestrating the second half of the piece. I added a glock part to the last verse but that's it. Tomorrow is going to be devoted to figuring this out.

Not much else to say as most of today was taken up by programming. Which is still not quite done, otherwise I'd include an excerpt today. Going to try to do a little more before I'm too tired.

April 28, 2025

Since I lost my place in "Emergency Call" due to the detour writing my "101 Ways To Be Prettier" page, when I resumed this morning I figured I would start fresh by writing the coda instead of finishing up the retransition, which is mostly done but still needs a little polishing.

The coda is already sketched out as a recap of the bridge, but in a new arrangement with the vocal counterpoints removed and thick strings accompanying the melody instead--the melody being taken up now by the piano. My original plan was to reuse the original harmonies, but I was wondering whether this wasn't a bit lazy and perhaps I should reharmonize or at least do something more interesting with it. So, I wrote a new harmonization where the bassline plays the original bridge counterpoint in augmentation.

This new harmonization sounded very nice and certainly more interesting than the original; the new bassline was definitely compelling. But, when I tested it in the context of the whole piece I thought it had the wrong vibe. The coda was intended to be delicate, at least at the start, but the new harmonization and bassline brought the orchestra into too strong relief and made it too dramatic. Consequently, I reverted to the original concept, and to spice it up I instead used the counterpoint in augmentation in the violins rather than in the cellos and basses. You can see both versions below, the lower one being the one I'm actually using and the top one being the overly dramatic version I've thrown out.

This decided, I got to work writing the actual parts, which are intended to be simple, though likely the final version will be less simple than the way it stands now. You can see the strings and piano of the coda below. The string harmonization is written in five parts and the piano is a separate part playing the bridge theme. All things being equal I like to write strings in five parts unless I need a sixth for very complicated harmonies or extensive counterpoints. I think it sounds a little better than four-part writing.

Over on the right you can see, miraculously, the double bar. What a relief for a song I've been working on so long. I do want to keep this simple and not too busy but I will likely add more detail tomorrow. Also I plan to do some actual orchestrating for some of this, but I haven't yet given much thought as to how exactly.

Very straightforward section, but in the context of the song I think it will hit hard.

I also made some tweaks to my mix, the most important of which is an increase in the amount of tape distortion. I had been too afraid of this earlier but listening back today I realized that harsh highs irritate me so much that tape distortion is far preferable and I don't care if the high end sounds a bit dull by consequence. The older records with duller highs sound better anyway.

In other news, I made some revisions to the new paragraphs I added to DBL yesterday. It's really impossible for me to write anything without it needing to be revised the next day and probably the next too.

Finally, I received a substantial donation from one of my readers, for which I'm very grateful. This puts my website in the black for the first time in its four years of existence, previous donations having never exceeded server costs.

Today was a good start to actually getting somewhere with music and I hope tomorrow my health and concentration will hold up and I'll be able to make some real progress. With luck I should be able to finish the writing and orchestration of the coda and then have only tweaking and programming ahead of me.

April 27, 2025

A reader wrote me today with a good suggestion for improving the new article. She suggested I turn the checklist into a quiz with ranking bands. It was already a bit quiz-like but she thought I should make it more quiz-like. Well, this didn't sound like a fantastic idea to me at first but after I thought about it for a few minutes I decided it was. People like to fill out silly online quizzes while they're wasting time at work and making it more like those silly online quizzes could only help when the piece was intended as outreach in the first place. Personally I'm not very keen on game-like scoring, but everything is gamified today, as I mentioned in the previous entry, so playing that up makes sense. So, I went back and reformatted it slightly and then vibe-coded a ranking system complete with green and red (and purple) scores.

The vibe-coding experience has been interesting. I only know the most rudimentary CSS and html that I had to learn to format my webpage, but I was able to use AI to write javascript so the "game" rating system would work and be properly color coded. This would have taken me days or longer if I'd had to learn how to write javascript from scratch and I probably wouldn't have done it, but with AI it only took a few hours.

After that I went back to read the new additions to DBL I'd written recently and found a mistake. Since I don't have an editor, this kind of thing happens more often than I'd like. It's difficult to catch every little error on your own when you write, as your mind begins to ignore details, or rather autofill them with what should have been the correct word/punctuation, so you overlook errors even after many repeated readings.

While I was correcting that mistake and making a few tweaks I realized I'd omitted something elsewhere in the article, and ended up writing a few new paragraphs. Which, hopefully, don't contain more errors.

By the time I was done with all this most of the day had gotten away from me. I sat down to work on "Emergency Call" and began poking away at the programming for the new section, including the tempos. Trying to do too many things at once is obviously slowing me down. However, I already see people sharing the new page with the "quiz," and although it hasn't gone viral and I don't expect it to, I think this was a good use of time.

I want to leave you with an interesting observation. I was thinking about singers yesterday, and "Be My Baby," which certainly has one of the best female vocal timbres I've heard, came to mind, so I pulled it up. It's a song everyone's heard a hundred times. But since I had the volume turned up and was listening intently I noticed something I'd never noticed in those previous hundred times: some very cool triplets in the drums near the very end of the fade out. I suspect I didn't notice or at least remember this in part because it gets cut off by the next song when it's on the radio. It's a great detail. And a wonderful example of how every detail counts. Listen "past" the end if you want to hear it...

I'm going to try to get a little more music written before I get too tired. I don't think there will be any surprise interruptions tomorrow.

April 26, 2025

Today I revised the new page based on reader feedback and added a few paragraphs to DBL. Then I called the fam and went for a hike. As I am still not up to full health I had to do a shorter walk than I normally do, but it was still enough to give my eyes some rest. When I got home I made a few more revisions but the headache started coming back. At any rate, I think it will be fine tomorrow and I will be able to return to my regularly scheduled program.

So far reader feedback to the new "101 ways" page seems to be very positive. I hope this will finally make it easier for people to bring my core beauty ideas to a wider audience. The checklist feature that I vibe-coded on a whim seems to be drawing interest as well. Everyone has a gamer mindset these days, including girls, so getting a beauty "score" in an inoffensive format is a good hook.

To rest my eyes I listened to a little music. I suspect it would still be hard/impossible to imitate the most musically sophisticated singers with synthesized vocals. Or rather, it's something you could sort of do if you spent forever on it, but it would never be quite as good. Check out the vocals on the repeating chorus that closes the song. Clearly a case where the singer makes the song. With synthesized vocals one can achieve a clear and even expressive delivery, but control over this level of detail is a different story. That said, few pop songs require these kind of effects.

I'll throw you another bone while I'm at it...

April 25, 2025

Eeek. Quite a headache. But I successfully pumped out a 6,000 word piece in just two days at very good quality. It's called 101 ways to something or other. I'm so tired I don't want to type out the name. I did a two-day death march because I really didn't want this to drag out.

Now, why did I do it at all when I said I wasn't writing any new nonfiction? It's not really new. It's an alternate presentation of the ideas in DBL. That's why I was able to work so fast. I also reused the images, which saved a lot of time. But I'd been trying to think for ages about how I could present DBL in a different and more palatable way without rewriting the entire thing in an illogical order. A reader wrote to me with an idea that I should give more direct, actionable advice because girls were getting bewildered by the theory of beauty and not connecting the dots on how to apply it. At first this idea didn't help me because I came to the problem that's stopped me in the past when I thought about writing an abbreviated summary. The meat is really in the details. An abbreviated summary sounds stupid because it leaves out all these details and the skeleton is rather insubstantial. But the solution I finally came up with was to do a list almost of trivialities (the details in isolation) and stack it up like a word-of-the-day calendar, in tiny bits with the most palatable first. And the highly simplified result really is, I hope, a much more palatable introduction. Will it work and open the door to more people? I don't really know, but the chance is high enough I think the two-day death march was justified.

To conclude this new page I vibe-coded a checklist. I've never vibe-coded before and it was an interesting experience. But not one that I want to write about in any detail. I also fixed that off chart in DBL, rewrote the "how to introduce this article to sensitive women" paragraph, and corrected a repeated image.

I really do have a massive headache from staring at the screen for too many consecutive hours to finish the new page today and I'm keeping my eyes mostly closed as I'm typing this.

Need some good rest, then back to music.

April 24, 2025

Trying to pump out a new project in a marathon session and I'm exhausted with a bad headache. Wrote 5,000 words today which is nearly a record for me. Not done though. Will explain tomorrow.

April 23, 2025

Pretty solid day today. Had good focus finally, although I didn't hit as many hours as I'd like to. Clear mind in the morning. In the afternoon it was foggy again, so I'm not 100% back to health, but getting there.

I made some improvements to the latest outline and arrived at a final version that's much cleaner than the previous, with a more comprehensible long line.

The difficulty in getting this right was that both the vocal melody (and its continuation in the orchestra) and the string melody needed to independently constitute comprehensible 10-measure lines, and they also had to work together, and, obviously, share a harmony. In most counterpoint it's easier to build things around a single long line, but in this case there were really two. Hard to explain what I mean here and I don't have time to show a lot of examples so you'll have to take my word for it.

So, then I set to expanding this outline into a full arrangement. The outline is an outline, it doesn't include all the parts. Below you can see the string and vocal staves of the full score. It corresponds to the outline just given above. Marked in red are the parts I'm still working on. These may stay as is, but I wanted to have more interesting melodies here. Considering this is six-part counterpoint it isn't necessarily possible to make all the supporting parts as interesting as one would like. However, you don't entirely know what's possible till you try, and I'm going to give these another effort tomorrow.

In the lowest box I find the tritone questionable, which is interesting, as this is hardly "prima pratica" writing.

An issue I have noticed already is that the reverb from the vocal quartet section, which I discussed at length a while back, is again too much for this passage due to the thickness of counterpoint. Consequently I am going to automate the reverb down a few db for this passage.

The way I've been forced to constantly change the reverb for this piece is very weird, as normally I far prefer to "set it and forget it." But it's been forced by the hybrid nature of this song, combining rock, acapella, and orchestral elements. I am praying that it all sounds coherent and not eclectic when complete. I don't want these reverb shifts to be perceptible. If they create a problem when I listen to the full piece I will cut them back to the extent possible.

Certainly combining all these elements is an experiment, and so one can't know quite what the result will be. I haven't heard it done before. You think you've heard it done before but usually there is just a violin section playing in a rock song to create the illusion of an orchestra and nothing like real symphonic writing. Most experiments fail, but I hope this one will succeed.

Finally, I have reread my "Ailom gets married" story about the cyborg problem and I think it is quite evocative and it would be a shame to bury it. So, I am including it in "Ailom," but as a second appendix rather than part of the body as I'd originally intended. Nevertheless, I haven't had time to work out the cyborg problem in logical terms. I have been spending my time for thinking on global trade balances, a topic far outside my expertise but important for understanding the world right now. Besides which I have promised myself many times not to put more effort into nonfiction writing as my last few essays, each of high quality in my own opinion, have brought nearly zero new readership. I may add a few explanatory paragraphs here anyway if the spirit takes me...

All in all a reasonably productive day. Hoping to be back at full energy soon and kick it up another notch. I also need to catch up on exercise, as I've done very little since I became sick a few weeks ago. But, can't rush that.

April 22, 2025

So, had my groceries stolen today. But, I'm not going to talk about that. When you're lying in the gutter you should look at the stars, eh?

Unfortunately my outline of the new accompaniment for the last verse of "Emergency Call," on reinspection, sucked. Not that it made no sense at all. The concept was right. But the realization was extremely mediocre in the middle measures. A major vibe breaker was a dominant seventh chord, which made sense in the progression but rarely fits my music, and this was not one of those rare cases. So, I set to rewriting it today.

Below you can see the current version, which is overall much better but I have still been struggling with the two measures marked in red. I came up with the latest solution just a few minutes ago, which is an imitation in contrary motion, after struggling for quite some time with the more straightforward alternatives, one of which is okay but still not really good good. I'm tired now and won't be able to tell till the morning whether this apparently promising solution actually sounds good in context.

Not really a spectacular day, but things are plodding forward in the right direction at the unimpressive pace that's been the norm for me this month.

I also added two new charts to DBL today to clarify an issue about implants I was discussing with a reader who's planning an augmentation. I posted a link to one of these charts, which got around 400 clicks out of ~1000 views; amusingly I also posted an excerpt from my article on religion which only got 1 click from a not remarkably lower number of views. So, 400:1 ratio, hm.