Blog: FUTUREGASM

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Last night i had an exciting brush with THE FUTURE!

As we get closer to the commencement of the actual Mental Judo sessions, we're all thinking about what we're going to do when we get there, and also how we'll get everything finished off afterwards. 'Tiger' Tom McClure has been CHARGED with doing the string and BRASS arrangements, and he's been trying to get started on this using a programme called SIBELIUS. He's been working on "Girlfriend Alarmed", and I recently discovered that he's been painstakingly recreating the other instrumentation AND vocal melody in MIDI format, to use THEM as the basis for his arrangements. It TROUBLED me to think of Tom sat in his house late into the evening trying to replicate the BASS patterns, when surely there was no need, so we have been EXPERIMENTING with different ways round it. The favoured idea was for him to use something ELSE to play along with, using his MIDI keyboard, then export THAT over to his Music Scripture programme...

SO last night he sent me a MIDI file, and i whacked it into my Sonic Foundry programme. It worked! It sounded like STRINGS! Excited, I then added in the Ukelele Version of "Girlfriend Alarmed" i'd one for the last Demo CD... and that worked too! It was like an EERIE 80's remix of George Formby, with ukelele to the FORE backed by a plinky casio organ version of the bass and vocal melodies and HUGE STRINGS!

It was also RATHER THRILLING - if we can get this to work it means he and i can pass each other WORK IN PROGRESS over the email, and work TOGETHER on sorting things out! If he wants me to hear something, he can SEND me it, rather than trying to play it down the phone! If i want to describe something to him, i can SEND it, rather than getting the train to Leicester and saying "It goes sort of DER DER dum de DAAAH! But green-grey!"

It is, in short, a thrilling glimpse of a future almost too beautiful to comprehend! Let's GO there!

posted 3/8/2005 by MJ Hibbett

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