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 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.

April 21, 2025

So, a little update on the planned podcast. Unfortunately I don't think this is going to happen anymore, and I'm not that concerned about it because I was having second thoughts anyway. Today I had a little "meeting" with my proposed co-host. The difficulty preventing this podcast from happening has been that she wants to participate in a way that makes her voice unrecognizable, so that she could be anonymous and talk freely without risking any repercussions to her reputation, which is a concern given her circumstances. We thought this would be easily solved with new AI technology. However, most of the software claiming to do this is either vaporware, or costs more than our podcast's extremely minimal budget, or has some other dealbreaking flaw. Today we thought we'd found a solution but it overpromised and underdelivered so badly that we didn't even make it to the testing phase. So, the podcast is still indefinitely postponed until these new vocal transformation technologies are more available and more effective. I don't care that much, because I question whether there's any point in doing a podcast in the first place. I'm not convinced that it will catch on with enough people to improve my reach, nor that it will contain any information not better presented in writing.

I woke up today with a theological concern at the front of my mind, and after this meeting I spent today meditating on that concern until I'd worked it out to my satisfaction. By the time I knew it, most of the day was gone. So tomorrow I am resolving again to compose as soon as I wake up, with no useless meetings to distract me and hopefully no ideas occurring during sleep.

I'm not going to detail today's thought process in full here because it would take too long. However I'll mention one interesting thing.

What's struck me recently is that moksha/enlightenment contradicts the circular concept of time in a reincarnationist system, so that a linear concept of time is superimposed on it and in a sense overwrites it. Thus, the dharmic religions are not really representations of circular time, but circular time is a system that predates the introduction of moksha to those religions. It then occurred to me to think about why this was introduced. The reason is that pure circularity without relief seems a great burden given the nature of this world, full of disappointment and suffering of various sorts. The circularity seems a problem to be solved, and enlightenment is the solution that presents itself. But whenever enlightenment is presented as a permanent exit, as I said, it overwrites the circularity.

Before I go on I will note that I don't care about the history of religion. I only care about how it works out systematically, conceptually. I look at the history and at the writings of theologians for clues, but who believed what when and in what order just doesn't matter.

At any rate there is another alternative to give relief to the burden of circularity which does occur in the dharmic religions but more prominently in European paganism, or at least what remnants we have of it. This is the idea of interludes between lives. Example below from Virgil:

There are two ways I can see, once again speaking entirely on an abstract and conceptual level, two ways to have genuine circularity. One is a non-permanent form of enlightenment while living, and another is interludes between stressful lives. The widespread concept of "permanent enlightenment/exit/nirvana" is just not circular.

I don't have time to give a larger context for this reflection here but in a few years when I get around to revising my religion essay I will put it into a comprehensible form. Circular versus linear time is perhaps the most fundamental divide between religions, from which many other differences flow. It's not just a question for pointless maundering as it first appears to be.

April 20, 2025

Good day today, and finally feeling somewhat better, though not 100%.

When I woke up and listened to the "Emergency Call" all the way through including the newest sections I was very pleased. It's definitely going to be a good song. However, I realized that the orchestral accompaniment to the final lines would benefit from more weight and substance. So, I went back to the original outline to see if I could expand it. This takes longer than it sounds because the original was written with a harmonic progression that unfolds over a certain number of measures, and it's not necessarily possible to simply insert new measures without rewriting the overall progression. This isn't a particularly tough case but it will take me another day to perfect the new outline.

Below you can see the revision sketches (not yet finalized). This is not a normal outline format for me. In most cases I just use three staves for a song, while here I stuck a bunch of disconnected staves above the original outline. That's because this section is unusual: the vocal melody is insubstantial, but also unchangeable. So the section has to be written around the vocal part and its harmonization, but it's actually driven by the background counterpoints in the strings (which are playing a motive sung previously in the verse, while the bass is playing the "rescue me now" scale in direct and contrary motion). This sketch makes it look simple and dinky, but when it's finished and orchestrated it will sound rather big. The harmonies indicated by the figured bass will be filled in by other instruments not shown here.

Before my fifteen minutes are up a quick word on "process." I don't believe in "process." I believe in getting results. Some artists talk about how art is about process. I don't like Picasso much but he said a smart thing: "I don't seek, I find." The point is to write a good song. Sometimes you have to get there limping. If you've been reading this journal you'll see I've limped through the last few weeks, but I've done right what needs to be done right, and it's going to be good. If I were in top form and health and wrote a bad song, it would still be bad and I would have wasted my time. A good song is worth a lot, and a bad song is worth zero. "Process" doesn't change that. Eyes on the prize.

By the way, I've changed this journal so that older entries are only visible to subscribers (subscription is free). This is not to force people to subscribe, but to prevent AI from scraping this page.

April 19, 2025

Still not feeling great after finishing a two-day fast. Apparently that's just the way things are going to be now. I need to slot my writing into the times when my head is clearest.

I made a little plodding progress on the last verse. This is going much slower than it would if I were writing the same section as an instrumental in a symphony. Not just because my health and concentration are uneven. Everything hinges on getting the right feel for the song. It's very easy to write something pretty, but keeping the right vibe is much harder. If you're not vigilant it quickly slips away, and even if you are vigilant, you can miss the mark. And then your song is quietly junk, despite not having any obvious errors. Because I have more experience writing symphonies with the orchestra than songs I can easily tell when the vibe is being lost in a symphony. But in a song I have to step back and look constantly. Plus, for whatever reason songs seem to be much more sensitive in this respect.

I made several more tweaks to the AI-girlfriend section in "Ailom." Sometimes I really struggle to present an idea clearly. There are passages in my writing that have been rewritten a ridiculous number of times. A number of times you wouldn't even believe. I don't know why this section gave me trouble, but the number of rewrites is still modest in comparison to some others.

I also expanded a paragraph on careers and talents in DBL into a brief section because I think it's necessary to respond to the myth, which I heard everyone wrongly agreeing with today, that "men don't care if you're just a dumb waitress." I know this seems true to men when they say it but it's not entirely true if you think harder, at least when it comes to romance and mate selection. I want young women to have accurate information about this.

I've written DBL to last forever and say everything on the topic that needed saying. Obviously it won't last forever, but that's the aspiration. Maybe the next generation will care even if this one doesn't.

Due to the problems with my web server, which I think I've mentioned before, I am currently clicking the "update" button over and over to get this new section to take. It apparently can't handle the length of the page anymore.

Let me take a moment to address again an issue I mentioned a few weeks ago. Why do I not write an entertaining novel about X which surely people would like as I'm a good writer? Well, all my writing is published at a net loss for an audience of a few hundred people. Every effort to reach more people has failed. And my outreach efforts on feminine beauty were truly extravagant. The amount of time I wasted trying to be interesting on social media was ridiculous. So, I am not going to undertake any project on the theory that the public will like it and be entertained. Experience has proven over and over that this doesn't happen for me. Any project I undertake has to feel right to me because that's all I'm going to get for it. I have to feel like it's the right thing to commit my effort to. There is no other reward. And so casually entertaining projects, regardless of how well I might write them and how theoretically enjoyable they ought to be, are out, unless I really feel that that's exactly what I should be doing with my life. Which could happen, but for now I want to be doing music.

I need to shift my music writing into the earliest part of the day when I am usually feeling better. So my goal tomorrow is to get up early and immediately write for three hours before doing anything else.

April 18, 2025

Finished the first 24 hours of my fast. I haven't yet decided if I'm going to do 48 or 72 hours. I am still having stomach pains despite not eating today and it depends on whether I feel an improvement tomorrow or not. Journal entries are probably going to lack vim until this is over.

I largely rewrote the AI girlfriends section of "Ailom" (for the second time, I think) because when I went back and read it again I found it to be very poorly written. This happens to me often as I lose perspective when I'm writing, and especially so when inserting something into an otherwise complete essay as I did here–the shoehorning can easily be awkward. I cut the section down to a clearer and more terse form which I hope is an improvement in the larger context of the essay.

Also expanded the sample size of the data on sexual positions that I recently added to DBL as I thought I hadn't done quite enough to be confident in the results. Gathering this data was a rather unpleasant task and I hope someone appreciates the thoroughness someday. However, the results only changed slightly after increasing the sample size past 300. Just enough to make the graph not quite visually accurate, unfortunately. But I don't feel like redoing an almost correct pie chart right now so I just put the new numbers in and left the visual as is. Incidentally, I wouldn't be surprised if the original sample size of 200 gave a result closer to reality as I had to go back to 2018 to get enough "top popularity" videos in the sample and earlier videos (mix of animation and computer animation) were noticeably shorter and more primitive. But, you can't gather data on the basis of suspicions like this. In the end a few percent change in one direction or the other doesn't affect the meaning of the outcome anyway.

On a more positive note my lean and muscular orchestration of the last verses of "Emergency Call" still sounds pretty decent to me. I did some promising further work on this and I am optimistic for how it will come together, though disappointed I didn't get further today. Perhaps it was to be expected. I hope tomorrow I will have enough energy to make good headway. If I'm not feeling up to it I am just going to poke away at vocal programming until my fast is over.

April 17, 2025

Well. I had to throw out my orchestration of the last verse. Too pretty to support the weight of the closing lyrics. It was an arrangement that would have been perfectly pleasant in another context but was just the wrong answer here. It's true that the closing verses are going to be quieter than the middle ones but this wasn't the right way to do that. They have to retain more forcefulness. It's a song about driving in snow, not prancing in a meadow.

So, next I tried a string arrangement with some classically styled batteries. But, this didn't work either.

I was stumped and had to delete everything. I couldn't even think of a drum part that would hit the right mood.

After cutting everything back to the vocals I started reorchestrating with a dead simple but muscular piano rhythm. That, finally, was working. Then I brought in the double bass and did a lot of experimentation to find the right accompaniment pattern. I settled on one using a snap bass or whatever you call it. Lots of aggressive string sound. I had to resort to singing along with my orchestration to see if the mood was feeling right. Then I brought in some violas in the same way. Very spare. I kept writing a few measures over in different ways while singing the vocal part.

I think I am on track now. Not definitely on track, more like I found something that is hopefully a good trail. At a minimum it is a better prospect than where I was and I think these skeletal parts–two viola sections and double bass–are working. Potential issue is that I can't seem to fit very much in the drums. Will this orchestration have enough weight and energy to suit the closing verse? I hope so.

As I was hammering at these parts I began to doubt that my sketch, which I had tried to harmonize very carefully, really had the perfect harmonization for the lyrics. Possibly it lacks depth, or possibly it needs to stay simple and not get too cute here. I'm not sure, but I'm testing some alternatives in the piano sketch. If the orchestration had gone more smoothly I'd be less worried.

This is turning out to be a difficult section after a relatively easy bridge, and I need to bring more brainpower to it tomorrow. Unfortunately I have still not been feeling fantastic this whole week. I am planning to do a fast tomorrow in the hope that it will clean out my system and clear my head. At least one day and maybe two depending on how it goes.

April 16, 2025

Some progress today.

Regarding the reverb issue, I've settled on an unusual solution. The first half of the song will use the plate reverb, while the second half (from the vocal quartet bridge through the remaining verses to the end) will use the cathedral verb. This is a pretty unusual thing to do but the reasons are as follows. First, the plate is drier and has a good rock energy which is suitable to the second chorus in particular with electric guitar on it. Second, because the song narrates a call made from a car, it doesn't make any sense to create an impression of space. Cars are dead and small, so a spacy room feel (cathedral or otherwise) would contradict the words. A plate is effectively a reverb without a space, which solves this problem neatly. Third, the vocal quartet and more orchestral arrangement of the rest of the song sound much better with the cathedral verb, and the relatively dreamy nature of the quartet doesn't need to be "set in a car."

Swapping reverbs halfway through a song is pretty unorthodox and I've never done it before. I'm crossing my fingers that it will work. If not I will swap back into the plate for the later verses and keep the cathedral only for the bridge. Either way, it's impossible to use the plate throughout this piece as it presents the orchestra poorly.

Now, perhaps there is some other plate or other reverb of some kind that would tick all the boxes for all sections, but buying new products is something I avoid as much as possible and in most cases it doesn't solve anything and one is better off working more effectively with the tools at hand. (Provided those tools are good quality. Working with junk tools is a waste of time.) I've gone through all the other plates I currently have available and none of them cut it. Probably I will look into getting some new reverbs one day but I'm not going to drop everything in the middle of this song to do that.

I still need to touch up the vocal programming in the bridge, but to take a break from this I have moved on to orchestrating the later verses. What I've come up with there so far is promising. The conclusion is much softer in tone than the first verses which is again an unorthodox thing to do--the loudest chorus is in the middle of the song rather than at the end.

I am writing a bassoon counterpoint for the last chorus that I am a little nervous about. There is a risk it will lack edge and soften the song too much. It's impossible to envision the exact nature of a melodic counterpoint before writing it, so I'm going to write it first and then decide later if it's worth keeping or if I need a different strategy. The concluding sections are going to be sweeter and softer, but they still can't be wimpy. This is a difficult line to walk. However, if this counterpoint works, which I give about a 50% chance, the rest of the piece should go very smoothly and then it will be a programming marathon to seal the deal.

April 15, 2025

Today I added another brief new section to Dispelling Beauty Lies that I'd been planning for a long time called "be less boring." I also edited/rewrote some of the area surrounding the addition I made yesterday, which I found on rereading to need improvement, and replaced some of the images that were lacking. Is it entirely done now? Here's hoping.

This took most of the day so I didn't write any new music but I did review the options from yesterday. The two choices at hand are: cathedral reverb with automated levels, or, swap reverbs from plate to cathedral when the vocal quartet starts.

I am still torn. It's clear that the plate has much better energy in the rock sections and especially when the guitar is playing, but the cathedral verb has better atmosphere, and sounds better when the orchestra is playing. (By the way, this isn't a massive cathedral reverb, it's a very specific convolution impulse I've used for years and modified to have a shorter tail. You can hear the full impulse in "Winter Post." It's a very even verb. Almost all convolution reverbs have annoying lumps in them and I don't like them.)

Be that as it may, I suspect most listeners will respond better to the energy of the tight plate verb. However, the number of listeners I have is very small and I want to be sure I'm making a decision I'm happy with myself. As I wrote yesterday, the wrong kind of mix puts me in a bad mood. Besides which, this is most likely to be the artistically correct decision.

I did have time to go listen more closely to that Meiko Nakahara album that has been bothering me with its combination of good songwriting and a somehow irritating mix. What I noticed is that one of the songs I'd been listening to is mixed annoyingly in two ways. First, the accompaniment is much too quiet. The drums are too loud, the vocals are loud, but the instrumental accompaniment is barely there. Second problem is that the rhythm section has insufficient body. The result is a bright drum and vox sound that, if I recall, is characteristic of the late 80s in particular, but especially overdone here. I mentioned a week ago that the original mix of "Dress Down" also had way too much drums, but this time it's worse because of the almost missing accompaniment. At the time I suppose it sounded refreshing to have this drum and vox sound. But fad sounds always turn out to be bad sounds in the end, and this was no exception. Below is an especially clear example of the "drum and vox" mixing. 70s and even early 80s mixes were much better than this. Also: what a bad decision to use that thin synth bass!

A thick low end puts me in a better mood. You can always increase clarity by cutting sonic matter out of the lower mids, but I feel better when I hear fullness there and good body in the rhythm section (obviously the risk is too much mud).

At any rate, I don't want to make this kind of error in my own music. And so I'm going to listen one more time when I wake up tomorrow and see if the plate reverb isn't ultimately too thin and if the energy doesn't come at the cost of a "better feeling" mix.

I read a funny thing by one of the pro-AI moron crew today. Supposedly artists don't know why they make decisions. They can't explain themselves or reason about technique any better than AI art generators can. They're just repeating statistical patterns too. What a moron. I could write a dissertation about choosing between two reverb impulses. And that's true despite the fact that I can't explain everything I'm hearing and deciding in words. Other artists might be less articulate than me but that doesn't mean in any way that they're not making intelligent decisions. Some of these AI people ought to be drawn and quartered. Or quintered—don't forget the neck.