Today I seem to be over the concussion. Or over the obvious concussion. I’m thinking clearly and the headaches have practically gone, so that’s great. Now to get over the general feeling of fragility. That’s on the list for tomorrow 🙂

The really exciting news of today is that I have written some notes. Real, live notes. I couldn’t sleep last night so after 2 hours of trying, I gave up and went to the piano and started working on the song for Charles (bass-baritone). In the end I wrote two versions in an hour. The first one was hideous; the second, merely embarrassing. But work is work, right? And even hideous notes are better than no notes at all. And there is a slim possibility that I may be able to do something that renders the second version ever so slightly less embarrassing. I’ll be taking a bit of a look at this again tomorrow.

I’ve been back at work on Sam’s slide guitar piece this evening. For some reason I’m finding this quite hard to work on for more than short bursts. I think it’s the aggression level. I hope it’s not a reaction to it being awful. I think I still quite like it but it IS scaring me a bit, especially now I’ve added in some bass and percussive sounds. I’ve used Logic’s timpani sound and mooshed it through the Bitcrusher filter and a couple of other things so it sounds a bit more RAAARGH and while, yes, the bass is helping a lot, I suspect the part itself is… erm… shit. I also think I’ve lost the balance I had before which left room for the slide guitar. Now I think it kind of works as a random scary standalone piece, but that kind of defeats the purpose. I had been hoping it was finished. Or very very nearly finished. But I think it’s not.

So what to do? The obvious step seems to be to re-record the distorted timpani. However I’m not sure just plonking down doodles will do it this time round. True, it’s more or less how this tape part has been constructed – given the concussion, it’s more to do with manipulating randomness than active composition – but I think this time round there does need to be more structure if it’s to be a slide guitar piece and not just a loud and gritty tape piece with a guitar here and there. Possibly I need to pull out the timp and instead work on the graphic score, see what I want to do with that, then see if I can doodle in some timpasaurus around where the slide guitar stuff will be. I think this may end up being a bit more satisfactory.

So that’s the plan for tomorrow.