Bill Roper's Journal

Did I mention that I'm a fan of Adam Strange?

Not the vast majority of the deconstructionist Adam Strange stories that have been written since Alan Moore passed by the character, to be sure. I want Adam to be a hero. And I have come up with a framework that allows him to be one, which I was sharing with my friend, Sam, over the weekend.

My theory is that the civilization on Rann (which is the planet of Alpha Centauri that Adam Strange travels to in best ERB-like fashion) is old. And static. And virtually everyone on the planet is completely lacking in problem solving skills, because the great machines that their ancestors built supply their every need and are self-repairing.

Except after some untold number of generations, the machines are breaking down. Oops. The things that the machines defended the planet from, whether natural disaster or critter from outer space, are breaking through. This is a bad thing for the people of Rann.

The last scientist on the planet (because, really, why would you need scientists in this utopia?) invented the Zeta beam and aimed it at Earth, hoping to establish communications with the more primitive people just one star system away. But he didn't account for the effects of cosmic radiation on the beam, which converted it from a communication beam to a teleportation beam. Surprise!

Enter Adam Strange, archeologist, who is picked up by the beam and taken to Rann. There he meets the lovely daughter of the last scientist. And unlike everyone else on the planet, Adam Strange has actual problem solving skills. (The scientist and the daughter are trainable. Everyone else is hopeless.)

You may not think of problem-solving skills as a super-power. I invite you to think of some of your co-workers and reconsider that.

And this is why Adam Strange becomes the champion of Rann.

At least, that's *my* take on it.

And I am now visualizing this as a movie starring Paul Rudd. Because it would be a *good* movie.

Anyway, given all that, I wrote a song about it.

And I now have an entry in my personal songbook with a title starting with the letter Z.

I hope you like it!
( Lyrics inside... )

I promised to send Smac digital transfers of the raw tracks for the projects he did with Dodeka. Today, I managed to get the ADAT and the Apollo unit to talk to each other and have now transferred the three tapes that made up "Reap the Wind" into digital format. They are currently (slowly) uploading to Dropbox.

But this is very encouraging. :)

(I sent the stuff as Cubase 13 projects, but even without that, it will be easy enough to extract the audio files for the tracks. Each ADAT tape ends up as a collection of eight 40 minute long WAV files. Which are huge...)

It is possible that my subconscious will do anything to help me avoid working on taxes. Or maybe I've just been listening to Mac McAnally a bit more than usual lately.

But this song came pushing its way up the queue past the song on my desk that I've been working on for several days at about five in the morning. I grabbed my phone and wrote down a verse and a half, then wrote the chorus and the remaining bits this morning after I woke up.

After we got back from lunch, Gretchen took Julie out for a drive. I went upstairs and (instead of working on taxes) set chords to the song and beat the tune into shape. And added the coda when I realized that the song would never resolve without it.

So Gretchen hasn't heard this yet.

But she will soon.
( Lyrics inside... )

This has been a longish endeavor, mostly due to the fact that I'm stubborn. But I finally (I think!) have an electronic filk book that I can work with happily. We'll see how it does when I take it to a convention.

While many of my friends have been using their tablets as devices to hold their fake books for a while, the systems that they are using all require some extensive reformatting of the existing music into a format that scrolls the music in time with about how fast the music is actually played. This system annoys me for reasons that I can't quite put a finger on -- ok, the finger lands on the amount of setup time that all of this is going to take when I have over 200 songs that are going to need to be extensively altered to work with the system. And then I will wait for timing glitches.

What I have really *wanted* is to have a system that is big enough to display two pages of music, just the way that I can do it with two sheets of paper in my analog filk book. There are professional music management systems that will do this. They are ungodly expensive -- that is to say, I could buy a very nice guitar for that amount of money.

Recently, I became aware of some software for the iPad called Forscore. It's designed for music management and is clever enough to allow you to link *two* iPads together and use them as a single music book. All you need are two iPads.

I have *one* iPad and the cost of a second iPad is high enough that this just seemed like a bad idea for me. And iPads are not getting that much cheaper that fast. You can buy *older* iPads, but they are on badly obsolete versions of the operating system, which also seemed like a bad idea.

Yesterday, one of my friends from GT was asking for Android tablet recommendations and John Ridley suggested a 10 inch Android tablet that you could get on Amazon for a bit over $100. I checked this out and it looked to be a nice enough tablet. If only I could get Forscore to run on it. But Forscore is only on iPads.

But I turned up my Google-fu and typed in "Forscore for Android" and found an app called MobileSheets which is available both on Android and iPad tablets. It will import your PDF files. It will manage playlists. It has a scrolling mode. It will link via Bluetooth with a second tablet so that you have a two-page view like a book...

Excuse me? What was that?

I had to try this. So I ordered two tablets from Amazon (the ones that John had recommended) and this morning they arrived. I loaded the trial version of the software onto one of them, determined that it could import my PDF files in a very satisfactory fashion, and then ponied up the $15 for the full version of the software. This is now installed on both of my new tablets, 200+ songs have been converted for use with it, and the tablets successfully linked together, happily scrolling through my Chambanacon playlist (which I used for testing).

The software will also reverse your display so that you can have white text on a black background, which seems easier on the eyes, and it will scale your music to use a larger font if the converted PDF will fit on the page that way. This last feature will require me to do a minor edit and move the songwriter and copyright information from the right margin to the left so that I get the best scaling, but that's a trivial operation.

I have to do it 200+ times, but it's a trivial operation. :)

I will do that *after* I finish the taxes...

I have picked up the tape transfer projects from the studio down in Chicago (and dropped off several more reels). We'll see how things go once everything is inventoried, but I've found some things that I definitely was hoping to find.

In terms of getting anything (other than laundry) done here today, it was a very Steinberg day.

I got up early to get K to her 9 AM rehearsal. When I got home, I watched an episode of "Flip or Flop". Then I realized that I could use my laptop to watch the promo video for the upcoming January 24th release of the Wavelab 12 update. I'll be grabbing it when it comes out, because I like keeping my software up-to-date, even if Wavelab isn't the tool I use most frequently nowadays.

I noticed also that Wavelab now has a special cut-down Wavelab Cast edition for podcasters that's available for $69.99. This dovetails neatly into my suggestion from the panel at Chambanacon on recording on a budget that you should buy into *someone's* ecosystem at the bottom end if it will get you started on what you want to do, because if you need more features, you can always pay for the upgraded version that has them. :)

Then Gretchen and I grabbed lunch at Texas Roadhouse, took lunch to K at rehearsal (as she'd burned more calories than she'd expected to and was ready to eat random set pieces), and headed home. When Gretchen went to take Julie out for some errands, I headed down to the basement, watched a refresher video on using the lanes feature in Cubase (because it had defeated me the last time I looked at it; it turned out that I was using the wrong selection tool), and then proceeded to assemble good (I think) takes of Sally's drums for four of the songs on "Crosstime Bus" where we'd recorded multiple takes ten years or so ago expecting to do exactly this sort of click-and-swear operation.

Actually, there was a fair amount of clicking, but very little swearing, as the lanes interface did just what it was supposed to do. The drums on the four tracks now sound good, including those on the title track, which I worried was going to be my problem child for the album.

This all being done now, I'm in a position to do other work on the album.

Which, given how long this project has been on the shelf, is very encouraging. :)

It was darned cold here today. Like -8 when I went out for lunch. Gretchen decided that she simply wasn't going out and I can't blame her.

I was a little worried about our dryer malfunctioning yesterday, but it turns out that I simply forgot to press the start button. I was in a bit of a hurry at that moment, so I see how I managed to do it. But the load dried overnight and the load of Gretchen's flannel shirts dried today, so the dryer is behaving, which is a relief.

Gretchen wanted to pick things up around the living room today and get out of the Christmas configuration, so we got the attention of the Junior Justice League long enough to manage it, which was good. Julie's posters that she got as Christmas gifts are now framed and waiting to be hung, which makes them much safer than they were before framing.

I spent some time down in the basement today working on Crosstime Bus. The first step in this is "inventory", checking to see exactly what tracks I've actually recorded. I'm making progress on this, but there's more to be done, which I hope to get back to tomorrow.

But tomorrow is more complex than it might otherwise be, because although it's a holiday, the rehearsals for the school musical continue, starting at 9 AM. Ah, well. Gretchen has volunteered to get up in the morning and handle transportation, so that's a good thing for me...

My strategy for dealing with the snow and rain worked out as I had hoped. I went out early this morning while the temperature was still in the mid-20s and the snowblower made short work of clearing the driveway. I had to clear off my car (still parked in the driveway -- maybe next winter I will get it back in the garage) and move it into the street to expedite the process, but once that was done, things proceeded well. This is good, because it is a *whole* lot colder now.

In activities later in the day, Bill Sutton was good enough to send me the raw tracks from the recording he made of my Chambanacon concert and I did a quick mixdown this afternoon. As a high quality MP3 file, this ended up being 111 MB, which is a lot. :) But it was good to sit down and listen to it with Gretchen before I went to rescue K from the apparently very cold bus that they came back from Theaterfest in Bloomington on this evening.

Theaterfest was apparently a lot of fun. I'm glad.

Tunes may well be free, but right now my head is full of music both old and new, and I need to be driving home from GAFilk tomorrow morning.

Can I go to sleep now? :)

The Crosstime Bus project was greatly derailed by having kids. Work, too! But here's what was planned to be on it, with all of the lyrics being available on the filker.com website:

Behind the Mask
Belief
Butterfly Wind
Crosstime Bus
Dance By Starlight
Elements of Disaster
Illusions
Inconstant Moon
It's All Right
Love At First Sight
Mother and Daughter
Out to the Stars
Request
Silver
We Can Change the World
Wings

Sixteen tracks, only one of which is on a previous recording (Request, on the recently released "Live In Germany (mostly...)"), four of which I wrote while seasick on a cruise to Hawaii before the kids were born, and none of which are causing me to scream in horror going "Why did I think recording that would be a good idea?"

No actual progress will be made on this album over the weekend, since I will be at GAFilk. But at least I've checked the contents of the memory hole. :)