Really minimal today. I ran through the next lesson on Logic, learning more about getting sound files into a “song project,” but didn’t really get anything done. The program is getting more and more complicated by the page. When I left off, I was supposed to be assimilating the methods by which you can assign key commands to all those endless menus and windows.

In other news, the vocal majors and jazz majors had their concert tonight. The vocal majors, led by David Reimschussel, were phenomenal. A smart, sophisticated program, perfectly performed. The jazz majors, led by David Springfield, are still learning, I think, except for one Chris Cassino, who was a marvel: tenor and soprano sax, and flute, and quite felicitous on all three. Add to that the fact that he’s tall, athletic, and quite good-looking, and you’ve got a total package. If he’s interested in a career in jazz at all, I imagine we’ll be adding his name to the Wikipedia article on famous GHP alums.

Before the concert, one of the double bass players came up to me and thanked me for the piece I wrote for them. Quite flattering, and he seemed to be genuinely pleased with the music. I want to try to get together with them and talk about their instruments, get a better idea of what sounds good on the instrument, what might be interesting to try, and what is clearly impossible.

After breathlessly knocking out “Dance” in one day, a view that ignores the thinking and the two days of false starts, I didn’t get anything committed to paper today.

I did get a poster for the All-Campus Chorus done for next weekend. Those have to go out today or tomorrow.

Otherwise, it was a quieter day. I have had a request for a piece for piano, saxophone, and trombone, of all things, and I’ve been mulling solutions over in my head. I haven’t come up with anything, or rather, I’ve mulled over different attacks on the problem and haven’t decided which one to take.

One idea I’ve had is to open with the piano just arpeggiating all over the place. Never one to to reinvent the wheel if I don’t have to, I popped over to the library to see if I could find a score to Rachmaninov’s 2nd Piano Concerto and just steal that passage (or at least see how it’s done.)

They didn’t have that score, but as I was wandering the M stacks, I passed through the section of books about specific instruments, and lo, there was A new history of the double bass, by Paul Brun. Had to have it.

It’s actually very wittily written. How can you not love a book whose author, after quoting Weber on the necessity of simplifying cello parts for the basses, footnotes it with “Weber apparently omitted to mention the useful little ruse of feigning a coughing fit so as to produce a diversion during a difficult passage!”? Or whose section headings include things like “An Instrument that does not inspire Trust” or “A Fisticuffs Lesson”? or has a recurring section heading called “The German Exception”?

At any rate, I know a little more about the instrument now than I did when I wrote my first piece for it. Yesterday. I’d know a lot more if I actually read the whole thing.

(FYI, I handed the piece over to Stephen, and good soul that he is, he immediately turned it over to the bassists. I haven’t heard any reviews yet.)

You will scarcely credit this, but I wrote “Dance for Double Bass Duo and Marimba” today.

I ditched the temple blocks; they just weren’t working. But I knew I wanted some kind of percussion going on that would provide the rhythmic fleetness that the basses just can’t do, poor things. Finally I fell back on my friend the marimba.

Now the challenge was to integrate, if not subordinate, the marimba, which if I didn’t deliberately hold back would take over the piece; it would become a marimba solo with growly accompaniment back there somewhere. This I did by keeping it (at least at first) in its lower registers and playing a rhythmic motif that is clearly accompanying the basses and not vice versa.

I don’t think I mentioned one of the piece’s salient points: it’s in 7/8 time. Tricky, but savage. The piece is marked “dangerously,” and that’s what I want the bass players to do, to push it towards violence.

Harmonically, it’s in the Phrygian mode: start on an E and play a scale using only white notes. Dangerous sounding, you see. It shifts about a bit, but it’s mostly pretty minimalist in nature. About halfway through, it breaks out into C major, and it’s this portion that probably will trivialize it. It’s too pretty, too much sunshine and hope in such a moody piece. Plus, happy music cannot be serious music, you know, not since the twelve-toners and the atonalists hijacked concert music 80 years ago.

Too bad. It’s perfectly serviceable gebrauchsmusik. Well, unless it can’t actually be played by bassists. I’ll spring it on Stephen tomorrow and find out.

Okay, add another project to the list: a piece for double bass duo and temple blocks.

It’s not going well. I’ll explain more perhaps tomorrow.

Okay, see, I told myself I wasn’t going to do this, I wasn’t going to play with Logic Express, I was just going to slog through the lessons in the book.

But I played.

Years and years ago, like ten or fifteen, I amused myself writing a couple of little new age-y pieces in a halfhearted attempt to come up with enough for an album. My model was Ray Lynch’s Celestial Breakfast, a perky little chart-topper from 1986. I thought, hey, I have a gift for cute melodies that stick in your head, and I can certainly noodle around with heavily-reverbed synthesizer sounds in a lazy, tonal idiom, so why not give it a shot?

My first effort is still one of my favorite pieces. It’s called “Stars on Snow,” and I decided that would be the title of the CD as well. (I even had an album cover designed at one point.)

Anyway, this was back on my little black Mac notebook, a PowerBook 190 I think it was, running OS 7.x. My sequencer of choice was EZ•Vision by Opcode, a wonderful and simple little program that I really miss some days.

Anyway, EZ•Vision stopped functioning when we hit Mac OS 8; Opcode went out of business, and that was a dead end. I had the good sense to export many of my pieces as MIDI files, so I could import them into my newer programs, like Finale or Intuem (which I bought because of its resemblance to EZ•Vision, at least in its earlier incarnations).

Last night, I imported the MIDI file of “Stars on Snow” into Logic Express and used my newfound prowess to assign some new age instruments to it, and then I was addicted. I changed the bass instrument four times. I explored different bell sounds for the upper voice. Where was that string pad I knew had to be lurking on at least one of the synths?

And then there was the tweaking: all those little “Channel Strip Settings” can actually smooth out a sound, add a reverb, drop it an octave. And before that, even, in the synth itself, you can spend hours making each and every instrument change. It was fun.

So add another project to the summer, along with Day in the Moonlight (which I promise I will continue to work on, Mike, you selfish bastard): the return of the Stars on Snow album.

It’s not finished yet, because I have a lot of tweaking of the original MIDI data to do, but I present to you the first track of Stars on Snow: “Stars on Snow.”

See, y’all thought I was kidding. Check this out:

…or how about this:

These are two of the synthesizers available to me inside Logic. Oddly enough, I know what the ADSR thingies are (see if you can even find them) from my days of playing with my Ensoniq keyboard: Attack, Decay, Sustain, and Release. I used them on the Ensoniq to modify and save my own string sounds, since until quite recently electronic musicians apparently thought string sections were for playing lush, quiet, slowly building “pads.” Trying to get one of their string sounds to play a quick run, or a sharply attacked chord, produced only sad little gulps and wheezes.

Of course, I don’t have to build all my instruments from scratch, and for my eventual purposes with this software, I doubt I’ll ever need even to modify them. I can just select one of the hundreds of voices/patches/instruments/whatever they’re calling them these days and go with it.

I’ve struggled through half another lesson in my Logic book, but at this point I’m not sure exactly what I’m learning. I seem to be looking at all the available windows for editing the “audio regions” and “MIDI regions” and all that stuff. I think the book is assuring me that we’ll dig in and learn exactly what they’re all for later in the book. I think.

Of course, even though learning this software is one of my goals this summer, I recognize that what I’m really doing is avoiding producing sucky music and lyrics for Day in the Moonlight. I hate this part of the process, even though I know it’s inevitable: you just have to produce the crap and get it over with.

But I hate producing crap. I hate it, hate it, hate it.

37 more days to go.

Before I start: Happy Birthday to two of my favorite people in the world: Grayson Lyles and… Nancy Willard. Is that strange or what? Even stranger, it was just last night that I learned Nancy shared a birthday with my son. As a birthday present to her, since I learned this on Wikipedia, I edited the “stub article” for A Visit to William Blake’s Inn. It is no longer a stub. Go check it out.

One of my creative goals for the summer, you will recall, was to learn the software program Logic Express, which I bought with my new MacBook Pro back in January. Today I started doing that.

You may also recall that I had opened it earlier in the spring, thinking it might have some solutions to the William Blake’s Inn sound issues, but closed it nearly immediately because it was not exactly an intuitive piece of software. It was my worst nightmare, a piece of software that you cannot use without reading the manual.

So I bought a manual: Logic Pro and Logic Express 7: professional music creation and audio production, by Martin Sitter. It’s very clear, and I forced myself today to sit down and start at the very beginning and go through step by step, not skipping anything.

And I nearly gave up again. It’s all jargon: “arrange window channel strip,” “object parameter box,” “transport panel,” “region paramenter box,” “audio region,” ” MIDI region,” “arrange area”… and that’s just in one window.

Still, I persevered. We learned how to select tools (but not what they’re for at the moment), controlling playback (although the 0 on my keypad does not make the song stop playing as the manuals suggests it should), and the myriad ways to move the Song Position Line (the playback cursor) from one point to the next.

I learned (in the tutorial song file) to change an instrument’s sound using plug-ins (although the one in the tutorial produced no discernible difference in the little pop piece they’d set up for me.) The idea that I could deliberately control the sound I wanted by knowing which of the controls in the Slow Panning Chorus setting of the Modulation Delay plug-in to move (quick, pick one: Feedback, Width (???), LFO 1, LFO 2, LFO Mix, Vol. Mod., Anti Pitch, Constant Mod., Flanger-Chorus, Stereo Phase, or Mix), that I could deliberately manipulate all those controls on one plug-in (out of maybe fifty?) and know what I was doing, is laughable.

And then I learned how to create a new track and assign an Audio Instrument to it. When I was instructed to select the EFM synthesizer, and a space age thing popped up,

, I freaked. I had to walk away from the computer.

But when I came back, the lesson continued with that little triangle button under the Bypass button at the top of this thing. Down popped a list of instruments. Fabu instruments for all kinds of space music, europop, trance music, rocking out, all that good stuff.

At that point the book had the good sense to say, “Go explore.” So I began to look through all the sounds in all the synths that are residing on my computer inside the software, and Lo, it is good. This is going to be fun. All my Garritan Personal Orchestra sounds are there, via our old friend Kontakt Player 2, plus all these other new sounds, easily mixable. So what if Finale can’t mix the old vocal sounds with the GPO orchestra? Logic Express can.

I ran out of time at this stage of the game. Tomorrow I will have to get back to work on Using Channel Strip Settings. Let’s see if I can remember any of what I read today.