A less-productive-than-planned day

[almeda]

Helpful Factors

• exapno last night brought over the (91MB! !?!?!) installer file for a Finale PrintMusic demo, because although I OWN a copy, I can't find the serial number, and it won't let me run it without reassuring it that I DID buy a copy. So now I have Sheet Music Capability, which is also Multitrack MIDI Playback Ability. Yay.
  
• Coke is life.
  
• I have a keyboard (thanks, tarkrai!) and a laptop all handy to a Comfy Chair to sit in. On a different floor than the computer set up for sound recording, but I'll get to that later.
  
• NPR. Sweet, sweet NPR.
  
• Filkhavenners on IRC, both for sanity-refills and a few thorny music-theory questions. For example, Finale insists that I tell it what key the composition is before I, y'know, start entering notes. I knew I had C# and F# and the rest unsharped-or-flatted, but had no idea what key that was until told. Yay for help!

Unhelpful Factors

• Ajax. Really, he gets his own little sublist, because he is Very Talented at Unhelpfulness.
  • Insisting on sitting on the back two-thirds of the seat of the chair by the synthesizer-and-laptop.
  • Woo-wooing manic-worriedly while frisking about, alternating said with catapulting into my lap and acting like he wanted something. What, I still have no idea, but he wanted SOMETHING.
  • Digging frantically on the pages of my staff-paper notebook.
  • Trying to steal my pencil, since it's clearly a stick, and sticks are of course his department.
  • Thoroughly, and worriedly, licking my hand. Though at least I got him onto my LEFT hand, letting me lean awkwardly over and try to concentrate and write on the staff paper with my (dominant) right hand.
  • Barking, wooing, baying, and whining at me when I sing/play through the melodies to try to figure out if I have the right notes lined up.
• I have to pee far too often for my convenience. Which means when Ajax settled down to nap, I'd get up to go pee, and by the time I got BACK he was all wound up and worried I was leaving. Again. See previous bullet-point tree.
  
• My own weird mental translation blocks. I shoulda been properly 'paper-trained,' musically, in my childhood; I did take more than a year of piano class, and seven years of intensive school choir. However, being me, I instead took shameless advantage of my ability to learn by ear lightning-fast to, uhm, just look at the pages and sing the melodies from memory. Which isn't so helpful NOW.
  
• Trying to relearn to use Finale, suddenly. Hey, at least I'm better with it now than I have been at any other time in my life ("Hi, jerusha," she says sheepishly to the friend she usually makes do this for her).

So despite putting 'finish music crap relating to my harmonies' on my to-do list today in a prominent position, and despite not even getting up to Grandma's today, meaning more time to DO it in, I've spent a lot of time playing with/reassuring my dog (and playing addictive PopCap web games ...). When I have sheet music or mp3s to show, I promise I will. Grr.

Though, indeed, progress HAS been made. Unkinkings and layings-out and whatnot. I even have the melodies written out in sequences-of-letter-notes ... the main problem moving from that to real sheet music is that, unfortunately, I seem chronically unable to write melodies that are entirely composed of simple quarter notes. In "Ache", for example, most of the measures are either 'dotted-q, eighth, quarter' or 'eighth, dotted-q, quarter'. And I'm not even getting into the dotted-eighth rest. Sigh.

Back to wrestling pythons. Or semiquavers. Or whatever. At least I don't change time signature for the chorus, or write in anything but 4/4, 6/8, or 3/4. Yet. Sigh. :->

[ Update, 9PM -- Look! an mp3 of the midi two-track! Comments solicited ]