After the NYPD Blue finale last night, I worked on Musedit to write a new song. I was not happy with the results. My computer concurred, and promptly crashed mid-song. I took this as a message from a diode.
In order to experiment as to what "works" on soundclick.com, in terms of getting onto the charts, I actually paid a very modest sum to have "banner ad" run for "Trinity Trail". I love writing ad copy. This morning the charts report that my songs, formerly sinking, are now rising. When I post the next two songs, I will have art, I will have advertising, I will have message board self-promotion, and I will have the sound of buzzing metal and of ball bearings in soda cans. How can I miss the top 10? I posted "Robot Breakfast" at ccmixter.org, where two folks kindly gave it 3 stars out of 5. I think it probably got docked a star or two due to its outre informality.
I will run an eBay ad for "Vibrating Electric Fields" when I first post the song. Ebay gives one more scope for satiric copy than any outlet, and now I'll be able to link to my soundclick page: "Hear 'Robot Breakfast', weep for joy, and buy!".
R. Martin, hip music pioneer who is "Him and the Drinks", in a show of kindness, provided me with a new icon, which is now my default icon. I had to truncate it a bit to get it to fit in 100 x 100 spaces. LiveJournal is so often a postage stamp when a full letter is required.
I have the two poems coming out on-line in the next week or two, so I am the watched kettle waiting for the whistle. Meanwhile, google.com seems to have improved their search parameters, to my detriment. For a while, if I wished to find an old post, I might enter the search term "Gurdonark" and "Channeled Being", and find the post in which it turned out that the the fellow named Raj in a bulletin board I frequented was actually 3,000 years old. But now, I can't use google as my personal index--so many searches that "should work" now don't. I suppose I'll have to get into the habit of using the "Memories" function to keep up with things I want to remember. Perhaps I'll do it in the silly way that the old "Friends" screenplays were done, with titles such as "The One in which Gurdonark hikes a Trail, sees three cormorants, and nobody commented".
There is something striking about the sound of a chorus of marimbas playing chords in unison via a MIDI program. I nearly have my software complete, except that I need to get the simple 4 track recording program which
the_outsider recommended, so that I can bend, fold and mutilate songs at ccmixter.org, and I need to get something simple to convert mp3 or .wav to MIDI so that I can import into musedit. If I can do a bit of hard work on that a week from Saturday, I'll have it conquered.I still have to work on how to connect a MIDI pickup to an electric football field.