As a prelude to CreativePact, which starts this coming September 1st, I'm posting a quick note to lay down the area I intend to explore this year.

CreativePact starts tomorrow! So I thought I'd post a photo of my current studio setup before we get underway. What we have here is:

Realising I had a wedding to go today, I actually started my CreativePact a couple of days ago, to make sure I got off on the right foot. Since the Akai S1100 sampler is the centrepiece of my project I started by doing some sampling.

So, for day 2 I have played around with some audio (though in this case, just sampling within the computer, not bussing it out to the S1100), having had an idea for an artistic theme for the project, which ties in with sampling: parallax.

Some sound for you today, a development of the looping Cinema Show material I created for day one. The loop has been slowed down (in a tape machine type way) and spatialised a bit with some reverb; the higher frequencies have been further processed with some soupy delay.

Today, I ended up dusting off my Max skills (which have lapsed considerably in the last 18 months) to start building a sample player patch I call Slide Sample Player. What this patch does is loop a given section of audio, and with each iteration move the start point slightly away from where it was before, thereby advancing the listener through the sample.

This CreativePact day I developed the Slide Sample Player a little more, actually morphing it into the Slide Sample Player Duo, as now it has two playheads effectively, performing the slide playback alternately. Another way to think of this effect is interleaving the playback of the file (rather than the bits in storage as is the case with an interleaved stereo file).

No audio clip today, though I have been editing. Non-contiguously.

Exhausted today, I didn't really achieve much. What I did do is go over some old recordings I made of me playing the Scrubbulator, using a couple of my own tracks (above is a clip of scrubbulation of my tune The Chaos Engine).

Today I came to the realisation that my originally conceived CreativePact project was not the right one, and so have changed tack to focus on the EP that I have been writing for my new studio project, Cerebral Sister. Let me explain my reasoning.

Having previously posted about my switch of CreativePact projects, I decided to continue on with the lyrics I posted a picture of yesterday. However, whilst they all flow in my head, if I try to actually perform them it comes out awfully. This leads me to a performative quandary, which I will try my best to explain.

Yesterday I posted about possible incompatibility between rapping and my style of vocal delivery. Well, today I decided to simulate a recording session by wiring myself up and performing the lyrics I wrote to the track in question.

So today I sat down with the five tunes of the EP and tried to plan out how vocals could be placed into them. Whilst I have done this successfully, I don't know how useful it will be in the end.

Out of nowhere, today I put together a track using a loop from one of my dad's songs, 'Tell Me, What Is True Love?' (from the album Rosemary Lane, which I have to recommend as it is one of his sweetest and most intimate records). I did this because I haven't used the studio for a few days, and my Studio One 2 demo is running out.

I finally feel like I made some progress on the lyrics for the Cerebral Sister, and all it took was a 4-hour train ride.

It seems to me that my ability to write lyrics is very much influenced by the amount of time I spend on public transport. Most of the lyrics for The Lost Zoyd's Death/Rebirth were written on my commute from New Cross when I worked at Bluewater. And over the last two days I have been on trains and buses, and have sketched out two solid ideas for the Cerebral Sister EP.

And it's a hat-trick! Three days and three lyrical ideas. Today's was for the track 'Bewilder', and I actually managed to write some properly nonsense lyrics. But first, how I came to this idea.

Took a break from the lyrics today, and instead created a loop, using a slice from The Divine Comedy's tune "Sunrise". I used Reaper for a bit of processing (as Reaper is the only DAW available on my travelling laptop), messing with MS processing in particular. The results are above.

Back to ze lyrics (coinciding with another mammoth day of train travel). This time I turned my attention to the tune 'Stab', which is the first near-completed tune to come from the Cerebral Sister project. It's my hope that Tom 'Tinfoiled' Riley will feature on this tune, but in the meantime I have decided to try and set what this tune is about.

So yes, yesterday I played a CreativePact joker and didn't do anything (it was an evening busy with paperwork), but today I have delved into one of the Cerebral Sister tunes to make one of the sections longer, in response to thoughts about lyrics.

More lyrics work today, following on from the extension of "Stab" yesterday. Been working on the subject of the tune, and I think I've got it – basically a tortured mountain analogy to introduce the guest rapper for the middle section.

Continued on with lyrics for "Stab", this time rewriting the part for the first section to fit in with the new theme I came up with yesterday. This time it takes the form of a "production checklist", which I go through out loud, but when I hit "Promotion and publicity" the shit hits the fan. This may be the first tune of mine with swearing in...

More public transport journeys, more work done on lyrics. Today, I filled in a couple of lines missing from the work I did yesterday on 'Stab'. I then tried to continue on with more words for that tune without success, mainly because I switched back to 'Bewilder', the track with nonsense lyrics to which I added even more nonsense lyrics. I think I will be calling this track 'Mirror Point'.

As I felt a bit like not doing lyrics today, I decided to work on extending my sample library instead, as any future releases from Cerebral Sister would likely require some base material to work from. In this vein, I went through a couple of episodes of the animated manga show 3x3 Eyes.

Another busy night has meant not much CreativePact action for me, so I went through another 3x3 Eyes episode for sampling purposes. I have found it requires more focus that with Ulysses 31, as the music is in stereo and better integrated into the sound stage, and so doesn't pop out as obviously. Despite this I managed to capture some promising material.

Another busy evening (following another missed day), but I have managed to squeeze in a bit of sampling, having continued where I left off with 3x3 Eyes. I've captured some useful material so far, and the episode I did today also had the full theme in the end credits sequence. Only the future will show its true creative potential however!

Returning to lyrics! I worked some more on 'Stab', filling in the first section before the hand-over to the guest rapper. I also managed to poke myself in the eye with my lyric book.

So yeah, it's obvious that the end of my CreativePact was a failure, having missed the last three days. I got overwhelmed with other things in my life which were more important, and since my project was a bit disjointed and incoherent I felt that CreativePact should be put aside.

So, it took a few more months to finish, but finally the EP Threshold – the completion of the music of this CreativePact project – has been released to the world. The 6-tracker is available as a download from Bandcamp.