One Creative Thing: Just a little bit every day

Thursday, 4 February 2010

Did some composing

Messed about with the Pianist app on the train – discovered you can record one line, then record another directly over the top, so you can do chords in 2 or 3 passes rather than trying to crush your fingers. Also had a look at ranges in the Whitman songs. If I move everything up or down a bit in every song, I can get them all to fit within my range at least, if that’s suitable (problem being a composer with a not-so-common voicetype – i’m a true contralto, bordering on female tenor) – but now they’ve all shifted away from the same basic related keys, it feels a bit haphazard and like it needs some glue to fill in the cracks *sigh* Might have to try another tactic.

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Wednesday, 3 February 2010

Bought some ink

I’ve been ‘drawing’ my own manuscript lines for little fragments of idea while working on the Whitman piece. I bought myself a manuscript nib a little while back and it works well – but I’m finding that drawing them in black ink means I have to make my noteheads fairly enormous if they’re to be seen easily – very unlike my usual anorexic noteheads, so I wove my way up to the Atlantis art shop which is just round the corner from my office and bought an assortment of coloured inks which I plan to experiment with: Burnt Orange in the Dr Ph. Martin’s Radiant Concentrated Water Colour (absolutely gorgeous – might have to get some more of these…), Red in the Dr Ph. Martin’s Bombay India Ink (a lovely rich red, feels very Erik Satie), and the Apple Green Winsor & Newton (a lovely colour, but felt a bit flat after the other two).

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Tuesday, 26 January 2010

Started reviving the Whitman songs

Following Twyla Tharp’s example, I made a folder for the Whitman songs, wrote out the texts I had chosen (that almost felt like setting them free from the notebook they were in!), read up a bit in Walt Whitman’s life and followed a random lead which had come to me while Reading the poems (Patricia Wrightson’s The Nargun and the Stars, a book I hated as a child, but on reading the section on Google books I found the descriptive writing at the start to be quite beautiful. Totally lost interest the moment she started in on the narrative though. Guess it’s still not for me). Then I downloaded Leaves of Grass, some Whitman essays, some essays by Emerson and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden onto my iPod for some related reading. I can feel ideas beginning to peep out already!

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Monday, 25 January 2010

Made a Greek mushroom pilaf

Experimenting with recipes from my new Greek cookbook and cooking kn the dark because the lights had blown. Felt adventurous and the results were tasty too.

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Friday, 15 January 2010

More knitting

but… ah ha! Not all the same knitting as before. I’m back to working on djeli’s scarf which is my first illusion knitting project and this evening I’ve finished the first pattern repeat. On the down side, it doesn’t look as effective as we’d hoped. On the plus side though, I managed to improve the less-than-clear chart so that it became much easier going. Djeli’s going to think about it overnight and see how he feels about the pattern so I guess tomorrow I’ll know if I’m continuing with this or starting from scratch.

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Friday, 15 January 2010

Tested out a new productivity technique

I’ve read a lot lately about a productivity technique called the pomodoro technique which I’ve been thinking could be useful as a way of organising myself into some more regular composition. So I gave it a go today while working from home and I have to say first impressions are quite positive. I’m definitely going to continue the experiment.

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Tuesday, 10 November 2009

Played around with GrooveMaker

On the iPod Touch. What a cool little programme – loads of fun. Would be even funner if one could load up one’s own loops, but maybe that will come in a later version. At any rate, it made the train trip home fly by.

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Friday, 4 September 2009

Assessed accounting software

Alas, yes. For many I suspect this wouldn’t count as creative activity, however it was all a learning experience, and quite aside from learning what I want in an accounting programme (multiple currency support, budgeting, loan tracking, import of bank statements and export of proper accountant reports), I learnt a lot about website design for software and the sorts of first impressions that totally put me off. Very valuable experience for the super-secret project, I suspect!

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Saturday, 29 August 2009

Learnt a little bit of Russian

OK, barely anything, but it was a start! Djeli and I have been considering getting one of the Rosetta Stone language courses (French, Italian, German or Greek, we’re not sure yet!) but it’s a big investment, so djeli ordered in their trial DVD which turned up in the post a couple of days ago. It gave the option to go through a demo first lesson in one of the languages on the disc, so I thought it best to pick one I knew nothing about, and preferably one which didn’t use a Latin alphabet, to really put the system through its paces. So that wiped out French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, and sort of only left Arabic or Russian, so I picked Russian. What I learnt is already ebbing away, but I can see how after a few lessons it would really start to stick. Now for djeli to test-drive it and see what he thinks.

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Thursday, 27 August 2009

Ran a sound test

… on a bunch of sound file formats. Interesting results… not least of which is that my ear obviously isn’t as finely tuned as I’d like to imagine :-) Really quite hard to spot differences between AIFF, Apple Lossless, 320kbps MP3 and AAC, so we’re sticking with MP3 because of the 500-odd albums we’ve already got in that format! The good news is that I discovered that the nasty blurriness I noticed the other day was due to iTunes having automatically switched on its equaliser. Grrrr. Switching it off has made an astronomical difference to the sound quality – huzzah!

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