It seems as if all I did on Friday and Saturday is swim, recover from swimming and work on a new song. That's not totally accurate as on Friday I also worked for about 2 hours programming and yesterday evening the musical group had a rehearsal.
Swimming both days went well although on both occasions there was someone swimming a violent crawl in the lane next to me, causing many waves. I tried not to let this bother me. I increased my distance on both days by 10%, i.e. 22 lengths. It seems that I could add another two lengths next week without any problem.
But recovery took a long time: I didn't really return to full functionality before 1 pm yesterday after having finished swimming at 8:30 am. That's slightly worrying.
A few weeks ago I laid down a chord sequence and started making a demo of a new song. On Friday I completed what might be termed 'the first pass', adding link sections and a bridge. On Saturday I began developing a complete arrangement of the demo in Reason; this involved choosing instruments as well as adding instrumental lines. What was initially the accompaniment for the third verse became the first verse and the first verse became the third. I added a coda that was based on part of the bridge, and when walking the dog, I realised that I could probably add the tune of 'Killarney boys of pleasure'1 over the chord loop. This actually worked well, including a daring C# over a G chord. I imagine that there's still work to be done on the arrangement before I'm satisfied, but at least it's at the stage where I could add words if I had any.
Talking of words, on Friday some lines popped into my head from nowhere.
These aren't metrically regular (although the second three lines match the
first three lines, but that's because I already had them) so I'm not sure at
the moment what I'll do with them. More poetic than my usual language
Were we two peas in a pod
Or leaves blown together from a random wind?
You and I
Were we a coherent tune
Or scattered notes played on an old violin?
At the band rehearsal, I was very interested to see how my new octave pedal would function. It showed exactly the same problems2 as the previous one! This led me to hypothesise that the pedal and its predecessor are fine - there's some other pedal that is causing interference. I'm going to check the pedal on its own (not as part of the signal chain on the pedal board), and assuming that the pedal works in this situation, I'll place it at the end of the signal chain instead of the beginning. Then I'll check the pedal as part of the pedal board.
If that wasn't enough of a bad surprise, when I came home and went to bed, the CPAP machine wasn't working - it seemed to be blowing air but it wasn't clearing my exhalations. I saw that there was a red warning light lit on the machine. With no other reasonable option at hand, I had to spend the night without a machine. My wife woke up at some stage and said that I was snoring loudly. I did not sleep well. I'll go and get my spare machine (which I take when I go on holiday) from our garden shed so at least tonight I should sleep much better. I'll look for the phone number of the service department.
[Edit: of course, five minutes after having written and published the blog, I went to check the CPAP machine in daylight, and it worked perfectly, so I've no idea of what happened last night.]
Internal links
[1] 73
[2] 1945
| Title | Tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| 95 | 1971 was when the music came together | Habonim, King Crimson, Van der Graaf Generator, Tom Wolfe, Yes, 1971, Dave Evans, Music festivals, Jack Kerouac | |
| 264 | Alarm clock mp3 player | Clock radio | |
| 879 | Vinyl log 19 - 20 July | Van der Graaf Generator, Vinyl log, 1972 | |
| 1053 | Back to the beginning | DBA | |
| 1244 | More on Movie Maker | Home movies | |
| 1644 | The end of the country as we knew it is fast approaching | Israel | |
| 1791 | M.Res. | DBA |
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