Steady as she goes • June 2, 2017, 11:50 AM

Finally I'm in a position to update you all on what I've been doing in the last year and a half. It might not seem like much at first glance, but when you look at it, it's a lot of work.

As you may recall, I mentioned in my last entry a project to digitize several hundred hours' worth of audio cassettes. This I managed to do—by the second-last week of April 2016, believe it or not. The reason for my having set that deadline was that I wanted to have the tapes ready for donation into our church rummage sale, which is held on the last Saturday of April and October. That part of the process was kinda gruelling in a way. I did the initial transfer with Audacity using the Windows 7 computer I usually use for my multitrack audio production, but because I wanted to use Cool Edit 96 to extract and edit the material, and the nearest computer I had that would run Cool Edit 96 was an older Windows XP computer that did not have high-speed USB ports, transferring the material back and forth between the two computers ate up a lot of time. I managed to mitigate that to some degree by transferring the material at twice normal speed and at an 88.2 kHz sampling rate, but even that didn't do wonders for my health—my cramming so much work into such a relatively short time jacked up my blood glucose to the point where my doctor was considering putting me on insulin. (He eventually did last August; more on this below.)

At one point I even ended up incurring a 41-hour day between December 21 and 22, 2015. I worked on the project for much of December 21, and because I would have to get up at 5:00 the next morning for my annual Rotary Club Christmas gig, I went to bed early. But sleep wouldn't come for some reason. So I got up at 5:00, got cleaned up, and did the gig. Normally I would have gone to bed right after coming home, but I decided to work on that day's tapes instead, figuring that the sooner I started working on them, the sooner I would finish. Unfortunately, by the time I was finished, my sister had come for supper, and I wasn't able to grab a nap with her there—and I had a choir practice to do that evening as organist. Fortunately, I was able to get to sleep when I came home after that. Thankfully, I've never had to be up for that long a stretch since then.

In the last week of April 2016 I was all set to run the tapes through the "fast erase" function of an old answering machine when I discovered that the machine had a broken drive belt. So I had to spend the next six months erasing the tapes in order to prepare them for the October sale—and I had to do this in real time. I didn't have a bulk tape eraser, and while my tape deck is a two-deck model that allows me to dub from one cassette to another, its playback deck does not have a pause button. Fortunately, all I had to do was start the erasure process, and then I was able to do other things while the tape deck did its stuff. The tapes went into the October sale on schedule, but did not sell.

Then I discovered another batch of tapes, only 49 in number this time. Working at the far less breakneck pace of one tape a day, six days a week, I did the transfers in January and February of this year, and then spent the next two months erasing most of those tapes. Except for the few tapes I wanted to keep, the tapes went into the rummage sale in late April, but did not sell either.

I have other transfer projects on the horizon, which deal with certain of my prerecorded audio and video tapes, including 8-tracks, reel-to-reel tapes and Betamax tapes, and certain of my records, but I'll wait until late summer to start tackling those. My ultimate aim is to complete the decluttering process, thereby setting up an outstanding work environment for when I start working on my music full-time. Trust me—when you've spent the last 45 years or so as something of a packrat, you really need to take the time to clear things away systematically!

At the moment I'm doing another audio transfer project. A couple of months ago a friend of mine gave me a whole stack of LPs—62 discs in all, plus two 45s—which he wanted me to digitize. At the rate of one disc a day, six discs a week, I figured I could get the whole project done in ten weeks; three of those discs contain material that I already have on CD. Currently I'm just about to wrap up the seventh week of that process. Because the amount of pops and scratches I need to digitally remove varies from one disc to the next, some of the LPs take only a few hours, while others take the better part of the day. Audacity has a "click removal" subroutine that can automatically remove some of those pops and scratches, but if you use it too heavily you risk creating distortion in the audio you want to keep. So I try to shoot for middle ground. To some extent this calls for artistic judgement: for example, one of the albums I processed was the Beatles' White Album. I hadn't heard "Blackbird" in a while, and so what I thought were pops and clicks oddly occurring in perfect time with the guitar, and cleaned out at least half of, turned out to be a metronome track! So I had to re-transfer the song and do the manual declicking all over again.

On the performance front, our Cayenne Spice vocal trio has undergone a personnel change. Last year one of our vocalists decided to leave in order to pursue other interests, resulting in us finding a replacement. However, since the replacement has since begun teaching in Kingston, the future of Cayenne Spice beyond a gig we have on June 26 is in some degree of doubt.

Meanwhile, I managed to find time to record in March a new song I wrote on February 28—and unlike other songs I've written, this one came very quickly, almost by itself. Entitled "The Crush", it's about my favorite actress and how I feel about her. Though I had already had aspirations to write such a song for the previous two years, "The Crush" began from a melodic idea I heard in a dream. I was with three or four other people in a kitchen in a house out in the country, and one of the people, a man in his late 50s or early 60s, was dressed as a clown, in full white face makeup and a small tuft of dark orange hair. As we listened to the melody, the clown found it so beautiful and so sentimental that he actually began to weep. At that point I woke up, feeling that if the melody could make that kind of impact on a clown, I had to write it down, and I did. This melody became the basis for the A section. Later in the day I was noodling around on the digital piano prior to our choir practice that evening, and came up with the B section of the tune. As for the lyrics, I decided they should be on a subject I felt equally sentimental about, and I wrote them over the course of the day, finishing them after I got home.

By the way, I will not publicly reveal the identity of this actress, just as I am keeping secret from the public the identity of the soccer player that "Love in My Heart" refers to. Not only do I want to keep the public guessing, but in this case I have a more sensitive reason as well. I released "The Crush" on March 30, only to learn two days later, to my horror, that the timing of the release had inadvertently and unfortunately coincided with the 36th anniversary of John Hinckley's assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. Hinckley, as many of you will recall, had an obsessive fixation on actress Jodie Foster and was trying to get her attention through the attempt on Reagan's life. Considering the subject matter of "The Crush", I immediately went into damage control mode in an attempt to quash any erroneous rumors to the effect that I had timed the release with the anniversary in mind. As I wrote on my Facebook page, I had no such notion. First, after 36 years I had no recollection of the anniversary date until I saw it referred to in the paper (if you look around the room and remember everything you see that is brown, is it reasonable to expect you will remember 36 years from now everything you just saw that was green?). Second, another thing on my agenda that week was the renewal of my health card. As some of you know, our health care system here in Canada is provincially subsidized, and in Ontario we have to renew our health cards every five years. My initial plan was to mix and release "The Crush" on March 29 and start the process of renewing my card the next day. However, I had already put off the latter process for a few weeks already, and so I decided to do that first and release "The Crush" on March 30 instead. When I learned of the anniversary, I was almost sick to my stomach, more figuratively than physically, but the release of the song was already water under the bridge by that point. So with all this in mind, if I let the cat out of the bag as to who the actress is, then I'm concerned that this coincidence might invite so much talk about her for all the wrong reasons that having to put up with it day after day would be beyond her comfort zone—if not immediately, then after a while. I love her way too much to want to put her through that. As I say in the lyrics, when it comes to matters of the heart, you have to think with both brain and heart, not just one at the expense of the other.

Last July, as part of my trip to Toronto, I went to various places there and in Mississauga and Richmond Hill to work on a photo project involving my stuffed animals. What I do is bring a certain animal to an intersection where one of the roads shares the name with that animal, and take a photo of that animal there—for example, I took a bear named Sebastian to Sebastian and Eglinton West in Mississauga. In this case I went to something like twenty-one shooting locations over three days—at the time, my project was planned to wrap up by the summer of 2026 (hey, I can only take so many animals to Toronto over two trips a year!). Unfortunately I sorely underestimated the amount of walking I would have to do, and as a result I ended up having a callus on my foot and had to cut my trip to Toronto short by a day or so. When I came home and showed my foot to my doctor, he took it as a sign that my diabetes was out of control, and started me on insulin. To avoid foot problems in the future, I reworked my project so that it will end in 2029 instead: I will do no more than ten or eleven shooting locations in the summer and five in the winter. At the time my blood glucose was in the 20-25 mmol/L range; I titrated up to 41 units and brought it down to the 4-10 range. I titrated back down to 36, and while it's usually in the 9-14 range these days, I attribute that partly to the fact that the hours I'm spending on the LP project are longer than I thought they'd be. Maybe it's partly because of all the coffee I've been drinking in the last few weeks. I'll have to see how things progress in that regard when I have that project out of the way.

As for gigs on the horizon, one of the singers in Cayenne Spice, recently retired, is looking to have me accompany her for gigs on the seniors' home circuit, but nothing has been set in stone yet.

All in all, it's steady as she goes. Stay tuned!