Today's post

I never know what I'm going to write when I start these things. I get a cup of tea and just start typing.

I'll start with improvisation. Every morning, before I brush my teeth or even have a glass of water, before I'm really awake, I start up the digital recorder and start playing the keyboard, for between five and 45 minutes. Whatever happens is what happens. I try to have some chordal integrity, some melody, and that's it. I'd like to have more mental stuff going on when I improvise, but for now that's it. If I think too much I kill everything creative. It's like fishing - sometimes you don't catch anything, and sometimes you reel in a big fish.

Next - RazorLame.I load the mp3 into RazorLame and convert to WAV. It's really reliable, and it's free.

Then, Adobe Audition. I compress the WAV file (the Classical setting) and run eq on it, save it, and it's done. Back to RazorLame, where I convert it back to mp3, and it's ready for long-term storage and listening.

Today I installed the Amazing Midi program on one of my XP machines. I converted a bunch of the files back to WAV using RazorLame, and used Amazing Midi to convert them to midi sequences. I listened to some of them. They've been quantized, which means that all of the rhythmic grace has been taken out of them. But, the ideas can still be extracted with a music notation program, and developed.

What I haven't done yet is to install Keykit, and use it to run a Markov chain analysis on the midi files. That's next.

And, after that, I need to get ahold of a copy of Sibelius. That's my music notation program of choice. I could load midi sequences, Keykit Markov chains, or hook a keyboard up to the computer to improvise directly and develop any of these into compositions.

I just need to devote a corner of my house to this, and the requisite time. And break out that Samuel Adler orchestration book and start reading it again.

I really want to compose again. I 52 for Chris'sakes. I'm tired of putting this off. I've got no shortage of ideas.