First, Happy New Year. I hope everything this year will be better for everyone than last year.
Second, thank you, everyone who has read my posts (and listened to my music) and shared and recommended them (especially Dee Dee). I’m always happy to see a new subscriber.
I apologize for not having been as involved at responding to comments as I have been in other venues in years past (which I now refer to as the shadowless days of used-to-be).
A good part of that is due to treading water, so to speak, while waiting for upcoming appointments related to effects of a TBI and hoping that they will open a way to employment in something closer to one of my fields than Home Depot or Walmart.
After many, MANY hours per week for over 6 years in grad school, 4 years as a post-doc, and usually somewhere between 40-60 per week, 7 days a week, any time between 3AM to midnight, always up against the accrual limit for vacation, and over 707 accrued hours of sick time while working in DNA sequencing and genotyping, when I was fired after almost 28 years at that school for refusing the viral mRNA products, which I will start referring to as VINOs, vaccines in name only (another post shortly to follow)—after all that, I decided, “No, I will not bother with unemployment insurance because that single episode learning experience with state bureaucrats before was enough, I will, instead, just use up my remaining TIAA/Cref, have the vacations I’d never had, and spend my time writing, working on my music, and taking pictures.”
That was fine as far as it went, but I’ve started to miss having a job that I was extremely good at and a small group of co-workers that were very pleasant to be around.
I can’t say the same for HR who either were unresponsive to legitimate concerns (such as medical malpractice (2017 onward), extensive violations of overtime law and attempts to suborn timecard fraud in order to conceal the overtime violations (2010 onwards), violations of ADA regulations (late 2015 onwards)) or hyperactive in trying to impose an involuntary “health surveillance program” (ie, get shot up with viral mRNA products to protect other employees from my state of GOOD health (viz, 707 hours of accrued sick time) who were continuing to endanger my health (as well as others of their kind) by repeatedly getting infected with C19 after having been shot up repeatedly with viral mRNA products), even after the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s decision that such was unconstitutional, with the exception of certain occupations, none of which applied to me.
So, on account of all that, none of which any attorneys so far have been interested in, the last couple of years have been increasingly less pleasant—though November 5 was a good shot in the arm.
Anyway, over the next six weeks we shall see what happens. I still press toward finishing my long form writing projects, most within the last 10% and each around 200,000 words.
So this particular piece with the weird name (because of my manner of cataloging files) began with two notes of an atmospheric patch on a sample-based sound engine called SoundPaint.
Almost every note over many octaves is different. I lucked out by hitting F above middle C and then middle C and thought, well, that’s a really nice sounding interval, huge, percussive, complex, evolving. I decided to do something with it.
Two problems,
1. I was stuck with those two because all the other notes were different and what can you play with two notes? The first 4 notes of Beethoven’s 5th. And there’s One Note Samba by Antonio Carlos Jobim, but that’s just part of the melody.
2. Although they were on the keys of F and C, the actual notes were F# and B.
So I used those two notes without easily being able to modulate and I worked everything around them. But I also found other notes in that same patch that worked well for other things.
But since the atmospheric patches were so huge and complex sounding, for the primary melody, I needed something that would really cut through. So I combined a Chinese erhu bowed instrument with two fairly strident synth voices and also used a marimba to add a slight percussive tone to the initial sound of the note.
So what most people say is “bagpipes,” which I hadn’t really thought of.
But I guess having to use notes of that F# of long duration sounded like a drone which probably unconsciously reminded me of that, leading to some of the articulation used and that’s why people say bagpipe.
I just wanted something that sounded big and dark and with a lot of space and was a bit mysterious.
I still haven’t used SoundPaint for the original purpose, which was to use the sax and horn samples in a couple of previous pieces. So I guess that’s next.
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