Today was my friend Mitch’s funeral, so it goes without saying that I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about me and my creativity.
I wish I could write about him, but I can’t. Maybe later.
Category: Creativity
Creating something every day for 365 days
Further website work (Day 111/365)
Nothing (Day 110/365)
An oh-so-small thing (Day 109/365)
Small stuff (Day 108/365)
Because of social commitments in the evening, I was limited to two small things today.
One was the realization that the software I use to convert the .aiff file (Finale’s output) to .mp3 could probably add the reverb back in. It did, and now the Milky Way .mp3 file sounds a little more lush.
The other is sort of a continuation of something I started to do last spring when Lacuna was active. The New York Times constantly has theatre and dance reviews, of course, and often they have very exciting photos to go with them. Today I re-started my plan of clipping photos which have particularly interesting picturization or staging.
More Milky Way (Day 107/365)
I girded my loins and returned to Milky Way. I worked all night on smoothing out the lumps in mm. 61-75. It’s better, but I still have some polishing to do. The subito p at m.64 still sounds gulpy, but that might not be an issue with an actual orchestra.
There are other places where there are gaps in the sound, but I don’t know whether I want to add the missing instruments for those measures. Tutti can be boring.
I’ll keep listening and make some decisions.
And now you can listen too: turning off the reverb makes the thing bearable for my little laptop. It won’t sound as lush, of course, but all the notes are there. Here’s the mp3.
Back to the stars (Day 106/365)
I went back to work on Milky Way tonight. ::sigh::
I worked on the child’s exultant cry that he’ll “never part day from night!” and the recapitulation moment. ::sigh:: I used the SoftSynth instruments so that the computer wouldn’t bog down with hiccups and glitches, and it was sounding good in a sketched-out kind of way.
Then I switched over to the Garritan Personal Orchestra sounds. ::sigh:: Now it sounds like crap, all unbalanced and blaring.
One positive thing: I found that by turning off the “ambience” setting, i.e., reverb, there are a lot fewer hiccups.
It still sounds like crap. ::sigh::
Out of our minds (Day 105/365)
It’s a Monday, and that means Masterworks practice, so instead of even trying to forge another couple of measures out of Milky Way, I sat down to dig into Out of our minds: learning to be creative, by Sir Ken Robinson.
Nice long intro about the predicament we will find ourselves in if we keep de-valuing creativity in the educational process, and then the first chapter. Sir Ken has been involved in the field for a long, long time, consulting with huge firms and individual schools alike. This book is both a summation of the research and a call for action on the part of all involved: government, business, and education.
No composition (Day 104/365)
Even though I didn’t write a single note today, it was still a creative day.
The Masterworks Chorale sang a little Christmas program on the Court Square this afternoon, and after it was over, Ginny and I were chatting with friends. On the spur of the moment we decided we needed to get together for dinner, and we mapped out who was bringing what.
I did the shrimp and grits, from a recipe from Natalie Dupree’s Shrimp & Grits cookbook, as well as cornbread. It was fun getting all that ready for preparation and having it come together: ready at the same time, cooked well, and delicious.
It’s fun to cook for friends and have plenty of wine/champagne and good food. It’s fun to have friends who can share and talk and laugh and be together.
That’s my creativity for the day: creating a meal around which friends can be together.
UPDATE: The other users on the Finale forums do not give me much hope about improving my playback. Even if the new MacBook Pros have more memory, the piece of the puzzle that is problematic is the Kontakt Player. Kontakt is a gigantic sequencer; Kontakt Player is a little version that other programs (like Finale) use to suck up sounds like Garritan Personal Orchestra for their own use. It seems that Kontakt Player has not been updated to work correctly on the Mac’s new use of Intel chips. (Intel Native, we call it.) In other words, even though Finale works fine on the new computers, Kontakt does not and has to be run under Apple’s emulator program, called Rosetta. Still slow, and still not good enough.
In search of… (Day 103/365)
So today I went to the Apple Store at Lenox Mall. My plan was simple: find a MacBook Pro with at least 2GB of RAM, pop the Milky Way Finale file onto it, and then see if Finale could play it. I even made an appointment at the Genius Bar so that I wouldn’t have to flag down a passing teenager with a black t-shirt on.
Well, Genius is as genius does, and we all know about simple plans.
They didn’t have Finale loaded on any of the machines, and in fact they don’t sell it in the store at all. (They do sell one of MakeMusic’s entry level programs.) The Genius turned me over to a salesperson, who suggested that he see if they had a refurbished MacBook Pro that met my specifications, and then I could buy it and take it home to see if it worked.
If it didn’t work (and even if it did), I could return it, and since it was a refurbished model there would be no restocking fee.
Wouldn’t you know it, there was no such machine in the back room. So I was spared the indignity of having to buy a $3000 used machine to take home and try out.
The rest of the day I spent with Jobie doing the usual: shopping, seeing a movie, grabbing a burger at a gay sports bar. This was the first time I was ever in a gay bar where I felt out of place, so to speak: twenty televisions, all tuned to some football game, and a bar full of jocks screaming at them. The fact that some of the jocks were kissing each other wasn’t the problem.
We will now pause while Marc makes some egregious comment connecting the above paragraph and the title of this post.
Anyway, when I returned home, I went to Finale’s website and posted my problem on the user forum, which is what I should have done in the first place.