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Last update: March 2024
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I make music. These days, I make lots of music in all sorts of different genres. My latest release is a collection of instrumental tracks I recorded at home in December 2023 and January 2024. My new Geddy Lee signature Fender Jazz Bass features as prominently in the music as it does on the cover; as it's a J-bass, the album is called Jaywalking. As always, the new album is available for streaming and download at Bandcamp, where you can also explore my extensive discography of older material.
The last wrinkles have been ironed out of my solar PV installation and it's now doing what it's supposed to do: any surplus energy generated by the panels on the roof now gets diverted to the immersion heater to heat my hot water. When the water in the tank reaches the desired temperature the PV system switches to exporting surplus power to the grid. The idea is that this free energy will reduce the amount of energy I have to pay for when I use my gas boiler to top up the tank. For most of the year that—and cooking on my gas hob—is all that I use gas for.
At present, the only power that's going in to my storage battery is from the panels. I'm doing this to see if I can get through a month without consuming any electricity from the grid at all (or at least come very close to doing so). The weather earlier this week was distinctly grim and that meant my battery was pressed into service quite a bit; I didn't quite make it through the evening without if getting down to its reserve level (which I've set fairly conservatively) so I didn't quite manage self-sufficiency for a couple of days, although if I'd tapped into the reserve storage I'd set, I would have done. The weather outside is still dull and overcast today, but it must be brighter because as I type this at 10:30 am the panels are generating a kilowatt, which is much more than I'm consuming right now so the battery is being charged back up again.
I like this game.
I made another trip over to see Dan at Puretech yesterday. My trusty Juno-106 is now fully operational and back where it should be: on the keyboard stand in my studio. I spent a couple of hours playing with it yesterday afternoon and even programmed some new sounds on it. Dan said that replacing the control chips as well as the sound generator chips that he normally swaps out worked so well that he'll probably adopt that practice as standard when he gets one in for repair in the future. The work wasn't cheap, but I look on it as an investment, because synths of this vintage are now extremely desirable items. Mine, with a new patch backup battery fitted and in mint condition (I even have the cardboard box it came in from the factory) will be worth a couple of thousand quid should I ever decide to get rid of it. That's a lot more than I paid for it, back in the day. Sometimes, being a pack rat who never gets rid of anything turns out to be useful...
But I had to return the Juno-60 for further work, because it has not been happy since I got it home in January. When Dan plugged it in in his workshop, it did make noises (which was an improvement on when I'd last powered it up) but the sounds it was making were not the ones I'd programmed and it started doing some very strange things indeed (like oscillators switching on and off all by themselves). My heart sank when Dan uttered the words you never want to hear from a technician:
"Oh, that's very weird..."
By the end of the afternoon, he'd established that the Juno's CPUs seemed to be the problem. There are two: one on the CPU board, and one on panel board B, so he's ordered replacements for both of them. These have to come from Europe, so it'll be a while before I get the synth back, but at least there's only one gap left in my synth array this morning.
My grandmother used to say that an hour's sleep before midnight did you as much good as two hours' sleep afterwards, and now that FAWM is over I've been putting that saying to the test. I am beginning to think that she was right. I've been having some entertainingly weird and vivid dreams for the past few days. More importantly, though, it seems to have warded off my usual post-FAWM crash (unless you take the act of getting a good night's sleep itself as the crash; who knows?)
But it's nice to feel as if I've worked off any sleep deficit that I may have accumulated since Christmas. I do not miss the days when I was trying to function on less than five hours' sleep a night. I couldn't inflict that on myself these days.
Further playing with Ableton Live 12 has confirmed my fears that they still haven't fixed the snap-to-grid functionality when you're working in odd time signatures.
And Ableton's new Roar distortion plug-in has been somewhat eclipsed by the launch yesterday of iZotope's new version of my favourite fuzz box, Trash (which explains why, to my considerable bemusement, they withdrew Trash 2 from sale last year). I was able to upgrade from my previous version for just £29.40, which was about what I paid for Trash 2 several years ago. I was pleased to see that the new version's very extensive collection of presets includes all of the legacy presets that I know and love, like Honk Monkey and Acid Bite and the new sounds are satisfyingly filthy. I've already made good use of the updated interface's extensive tweaking potential, too; Trash looks a lot slicker and cleaner than its predecessor.
More music-making is on the cards today, I reckon.
I realised this morning that I hadn't checked the release page for Apache's Netbeans editor for a while. It looks like I missed out on version 20, but I'm now running version 21. Once again, I found myself unable to get the same look and feel that I used to have on earlier versions of the editor, even though Netbeans ostensibly imports settings from any previous installs that it finds; once again, I had to manually edit the jdkhome environment setting because the installer was too dumb to find my Java installation. And the "Fonts & Colors" tab in the Options dialog box still hasn't been combined with the "LAF" settings that are currently in a separate "Appearance" tab, a thing that makes me eyeroll hard as someone who used to work in the UI field, because both sets of options affect the program's UI in similar ways.
But despite my moaning, I still find myself using it because (1.) it's entirely free and (2.) I can't find anything else that does the same thing without spamming me with adverts or upgrade options that I'm never going to be interested in...
(Did you see what I did there? I was watching "Beyond The Lighted Stage" again last night after I got a copy on eBay to replace the one I have which has died of disc rot. What a lovely documentary that is; the extra of the three of them having dinner together is a delight, and one of my favourite things ever.)
Ableton Live 12 was released this week, and despite feeling somewhat burned out after the hectic bustle that was FAWM, I've been playing with it, off and on, ever since.
The interface still feels like it's stuck in the early 1990s. The number of different colours available to assign to individual tracks is still limited to 70 (which I presume is because these are the only colours that the original Mk 1 Ableton Push is capable of showing on its pads) and while they've made some tweaks to the UI it still feels old and clunky. I haven't used Live 12 for anything other than pieces in 4/4 so far, so I have yet to discover if Live 11's lack of accuracy when using "snap to grid" with odd time signatures has been fixed.
But I'm rather taken with the new Roar distortion plugin, and Robert Henke's Granulator III (which can be downloaded as a free add-on pack from the Ableton website) is tons of fun.
After waking up yesterday morning to an unexpected and unpredicted fall of snow (the Met Office only issued its yellow warning of snow after it was already falling here), today is bright and sunny and the snow has all gone. And as I type this, my roof is generating 5.3 kW of electricity. That's pretty good considering it's only March and even though it's noon the Sun is still relatively low in the sky. I wonder what I'll get out of the panels when the sun is high overhead at the height of summer? I'm looking forward to finding out.
And yes, I will try to stop banging on about the solar panels I've just had installed, but it's something that I've wanted to get done for many years now, and I'm chuffed to bits that it's finally happened.
But I need to rest, I think. I've been in quite a lot of pain for the past few days and sitting in a chair making music (or listening to the music that my fellow FAWMers have mad and leaving comments on them) has not done my health much good over the last month. This morning I had the lie-in I'd promised myself, and it felt good.
Once I feel a bit better, I plan on getting out and about a lot more. Now that we're getting more hours of sunlight every day, this feels like a good idea—although given the amount of rain we've had this winter and the quagmire-like state of my back garden, I think I'll probably be sticking to paved footpaths for the time being.
The "Add new song" button disappeared from the FAWM website at noon, and the madness that is February Album Writing Month is over for another year. Despite all the disruption of the past few weeks, I had a very productive month and my final tally of tracks stands at thirty. That's my fourth-highest tally since I first posted to the site back in 2010, although it was still a long way off the year I went crazy and wrote forty-two songs, back in 2022. I have just updated the spreadsheet I use to track my creative output (because of course I have one, doesn't everybody?) and was amused to see that my grand total currently stands at 1,337 tracks. That feels somehow fitting.
I worked hard at my craft this year. If you listen to any of the songs on my profile page (and you can do so until the site goes into hibernation on April 1st) I hope you'll agree with me. I have a lot of listening and commenting to do on other people's songs, so that will be my priority for the next week or so. And it'll be a very enjoyable thing to do, because judging by all the songs I've already listened to, a lot of other FAWMers have had a bumper year, too.
But this afternoon I'm beginning to think this year's traditional post-FAWM crash—and there always is one—is going to hit me particularly hard. It was hard to get out of bed this morning, although I managed to get up, have breakfast and write and record a final song for FAWM before the site stopped accepting submissions. I intend to take the first half of March at a much less frenetic pace than I set for the whole of February. Tomorrow, I'm going to have a proper lie-in.
As I type this, the sun is shining and my newly-installed solar panels are generating more than 3 kW of electricity. At noon, they were putting out more than 4 kW, and it's relatively cloudy outside. Most of this is going into my battery, which is currently sitting at 50% charged (I'd run it down over the last couple of days because the weather has been somewhat grim). But so far this week, I've imported just over 16 kWh of electricity from the grid; at this time of year that figure has usually been above fifty.
The real payoff will happen once I start exporting power to the grid...