The last week was taken up with upgrading Ubuntu on all of our house/work machines. Going from 18.04 LTS to 20.04 LTS ( and in one case a laptop that was hanging around on 16.04 LTS… ). In general there weren’t any major problems, though there was a bug in Libreoffice Writer that was very bad, so bad I’m surprised they released it, essentially embedded tab characters didn’t work any more, they didn’t indent, you couldn’t enter them, they had no effect, it appeared like they were stripped on file open, though they weren’t. Libreoffice patched this bug, but their patch releases don’t end up automatically upstream in Ubuntu so I had to install the patch manually. The other wonderful quirk is that their patch release doesn’t upgrade the packages installed by the distribution, they install next to it… this forces you to make a whole bunch of changes to launch the correct version. I was not impressed.
I’ve also been working on a music project, I am trying to create some videos with words, imagery and music that I’ve captured, created. This week I was working on themes and writing some of the words down that I’d like to also communicate with the music and the images. That process is helping me with editing and “composing". I put composing in quotes because I’m a very untrained composer with a limited grasp of music theory. What I have is some training in improvisation and a loose understanding of chord progressions, scales and structure. I have been building on that to come up with the structure of the piece and I’ve been recording different sections of it and I plan to work on editing/adjusting those down to a final product.
I’m using google apps presentation software to automatically display the images annotated with words and cues so that I can play and respond to them in real time. My goal is to get to a “draft” finished product so I can understand it’s limitations and then iterate. I’m also getting in a lot more practice and that is in itself a good thing. I tried a lot of different recording/DAW software and I finally ended up going back to Band in a Box 2011.5 (the last version I bought) because it provides some excellent automatic accompaniment bass, drums etc… in multiple styles, and actually has some really nice recording features and a decent notation editor. It runs on Windows, so I have it running on my laptop in a Windows 10 VM and amazingly it keeps up just fine and is able to see the MIDI and Audio devices mounted in Linux. The accompaniment helps me a lot to follow the structure I’ve set up and to stay roughly in time ( I need all the help I can get ).
The process I come up with is probably going to be quite unconventional, but I guess that will be part of what makes it my expression.