midi chimes are go

I HAVE THE MIDIS! I’ve actually had them for a while, but I just recorded a bunch of MIDI chimes for the Chapter 22/23 set part of the Free Court of Seattle soundtrack.

Bendy Keyboard is Not Actually Bendy

The MIDI part worked fine. I’ve actually played with it a little before; I used it (and this loverly Roland) for sound effects before, but this is the first time it’s ending up in music.

It’s also the first time I’ve tried to use Garage Band for much of anything since, idk, 2009? And damn, a girl could learn to hate that thing. DO NOT SILENTLY RESAMPLE AND RETEMPO MY RECORDINGS, GARAGE BAND, I WILL END YOU. But it did. Like, twice.

Also, I rageflip over the lack of any pictures of someone rageflipping a MIDI keyboard.

And that’s why it took like four goes to get a proper export of the sound. Still, I got it.

inb4 Why Garage Band?: Existing instruments that I could edit to sound right. I need some instrument libraries for my DAW, f’srs.

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a Mystery Instrument hint

Nobody’s figured out what instrument I turned into a fake double-bass with processing tricks in the instrumental recording I posted last week. So here’s a hint – no, wait, two hints:

1. A couple of people have been close, in the sense of being in the right category of instrument. But in each case, they’ve wandered away again by adding on to their initial guess.

2. Directly relevant to clue 1: yes, it sounds bowed. That does not mean the original instrument actually was bowed, and, in fact, it wasn’t. That’s one reason why it’s so amazing. XD

And, of course, from the first post, I repeat:

0. It’s not synthetic, and it’s not a double-bass.

This is a contest, so here’s where you can listen to the tracks, and also the tiny rules list, which is tiny.

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an embarrassing stumble towards irrelevancy

Remember all those rounds of Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) racist and sexist pratfail in 2013?

Well, now that SFWA is trying to clean up its act, here comes the pushback, with a petition against “political correctness” and violations of the First Amendment by… applying editorial control to its own publication.

A publication which is, by the way, supposed to be the official house organ of this supposedly professional writer’s organisation, and not the fanzine of a moderately horrible Old Phart Phan.

These things are inevitable, but man, is it still embarrassing. Not because it’s happening – that’s inevitable; old-school holders of racial and gender entitlement will generally push back at any perceived loss of that entitlement. It’s a turf war. That’s only to be expected.

No, it’s embarrassing because of some of the signatories. Many of them are the sorts you’d expect, but some of them aren’t, and in them, I am disappointed, for multiple reasons.

First, the idea. The confusion of “what we want in our trade publication” and the mere idea of editing with censorship, in people who are old enough to know better.

Second, the damn thing leads off with “political correctness.” Anybody who starts with this line has no goddamn facts. To steal a line, “political correctness” is a dog-whistle for resentment about feeling pressured to treat people decently.

Finally, look at this thing. Content aside, this came from a professional writer? This sprawling slurry of rambling resentment apparently formatted by a hyperkinetic hamster who has no comprehension of punctuation and an unsettling attraction to the spacebar?

As someone who has pulled $1.50 a word writing, albeit technical writing, I am appalled on that basis alone.

Honestly, how many faces can one hand palm, anyway?

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