Mid 2016 Sneak Peek: Better Late Than Never

I’m having One Of Those Days so I got around to smushing bits and pieces of some of my works in progress together. Read on if you want.

Today is cancelled.

This morning I got up bright and early to do work. Having gotten a lot done last night, I was feeling pretty good about things. However, when I fired up Cubase, it threw a few ‘wahh, you haven’t registered me, wahhhh’ screens at me (it’s a dirty liar) and I ended up having to reinstall its licensing software. Fair enough, I thought, given I’d recently upgraded to Windows 10 and a few programs went wonky in the changeover.

Once I got into the program proper I went on my merry way adding in instruments, ready to record. I was going to go through quickly and slap down a rough choral line for an entire song so I could tweak it and build from there. Cubase had other plans. Despite the fact that it knew my MIDI keyboard was connected and would happily play sounds for me if I asked it to, it took exception to the idea of actually recording. Like, it was up for jamming but drew the line at writing anything down. It’s like, not here for my ruuules, maaan.

A hair pulling hour and a half later I hadn’t managed to beat the stupid software into submission. I realised I probably wasn’t going to beat it into submission. So I started redownloading the Cubase 6 .iso in the hopes of nuking it from orbit and starting afresh. Six gigabytes and two hours later it’s still putt-putt-puttering along. Welcome to Internet, Australia. Population: Kangaroos. While I waited I figured I’d slap a couple of things I’d been working on together in case anyone would like to listen.

I want to make it abundantly clear that absolutely none of this is finished. Nor does it represent the amount of tracks I’ve got in the works. But it’s all at least listenable as a cheeky preview.

These clips are honestly a pretty good representation of the feel of the album so far. Lots of music boxes, lots of harpsichords, pianos for days. One part dark, one part playful. Of course, they don’t show off everything in store. You’ll just have to wait for that 😉

I can’t be sure when I’ll get this album out. If you’d asked me a little while ago I would’ve said August/September but I spent most of July sick in bed so that threw a wrench in plans.  I’m sort of aiming for late October at this point but I can’t promise anything. Either way, I can’t progress at all until I convince Cubase to stop being so childish.

Apart from Cubase throwing its juice box out of the crib, I also sprained my hip of all things last night. I don’t know how it happened. I just moved and everything hurt. Then everything continued to hurt whenever I moved as if reminding me to never ever move again. And apart from that I have a stomach ache and the filling I had put in my front tooth just last year seems set on systematically shattering itself to smithereens, so I’m going to have to get that fixed at some point. At a different dentist. The point of all this whinging is I need you all to sign my petition to get today cancelled so I can get enough signatures to send it to the White House or however that works.

TL;DR: boo hoo hoo, poor me, here have some tunes, bye