I might start mirroring thoughts from my LJ here more often, if they're at all relevant.

The latest cluster of murmuring on the Internet over the last couple of days has been caused by Microsoft Songsmith, their latest attempt to become Apple by showing that they can do something fun and creative. Naturally this has been a disaster, largely because of the unintentional hilarity of the demonstration video that has found its way into the hands of Youtube, which has all the highbrow quality, acting and production values of a Sham-Wow infomercial. (Particularly note anything that Token Vaguely Foreign Man says in the middle.) And like everyone else, I was looking forward to going through it and then ripping it apart like Christmas wrapping paper... but after playing about with it a bit myself, I have to admit that technically, the concept is an interesting one.

On the surface, of course, the idea of Songsmith is patently hideous. As demonstrated in the video, its premise is that you can select a style and tempo, then it can digest your strained attempts at singing something and vomit out a sequence of chords that conform to the melody, relieving you of the inconvenient creative process in the middle. The disadvantage of this being that it's only a computer with a limited bank of musical patterns for each style, transforming everything you sing into it into Reggie Wilson Plays the Lift Music Classics. Artistically, it's nothing short of an insult to reduce musical qualities to instantly changeable slider bars (I'm not sure what the programmatic effect of each really is - "jazziness" might as well be labelled "percentage of wrong chords" from my experience), and this has everyone heated up about today's increasing gravitation towards instant solutions rather than spending the time to do anything remotely worthwhile.

But it was after singing something that I'm piecing together in Modplug (which I'm still using after nine years - let's face it, this isn't going to change that) into it that I began in a small way to appreciate what Songsmith was doing. I had tried this out to see if Songsmith's idea of the chords to use matched up at all to my own, to experiment with its effectiveness in choosing them. Honestly, any attempt at something so based on very human feeling through a computer is technically quite impressive - it apparently goes through note sequences from thousands of popular songs that they've looked at for the patterns - and though it had its odd choices here and there (which you could always blame on your voice - it's difficult to tell) it got things surprisingly right about half the time. In particular I was very surprised to find, after correcting some of the more extravagant choices, that one of its suggestions for me (the as-yet-unexplored potential of D minor) actually sounded better than what I had originally. Once I had tried translating it back into the Modplug version I decided that it was good enough to keep.

This isn't going to be the death of creativity as it seems to be promoting itself - it's never going to be able to produce anything that isn't instantly recognizable as a template set to different chords. But as something to play about with, to experiment, its immediacy is quite welcome in that you can change its ideas around yourself to see what fits best - equivalent to stabbing at a Yamaha keyboard on one-finger chord mode, which is appropriate given that that's what it's going to make every song sound like anyway.

As far as spectacular achievements go, though, it is certainly going to get one, in that it's about to make Myspace even more abhorrent.

I know everyone's saying it, but if this is one of the avalanche of Christmas journals you've clicked on, have a good Christmas or whatever else you happed to celebrate. And thanks again for putting me on your watch list :)

(I wanted to get the election journal off my front page, really.)

How's this for a meme? I think if anything deserves to be spread around, it's this:

VOTE!

I'm not a political person - or at least, I wasn't until a couple of months ago. This is the first election campaign I've been in America for, and there's absolutely no escape from it. And I don't want to attach any of my own views to this encouragement - just to get anyone reading this who's in America, no matter what they believe in, to go out next week (or earlier) and use your right to have your say. Because as a resident who's not yet a citizen, I can guarantee you that even if you don't think it matters, you really won't fully appreciate that right until you no longer have it.

Frankly I can't wait for it to be over.

My parents recently got themselves a VHS to DVD converter for rescuing some old tapes, and sent over some programmes I grew up watching in the 80s... even though this is only 30 seconds I think it's my favourite out of the whole collection so far :) It's cute enough as it is, but watch the ending...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJBZz7JkZk8

TributeToThePast is the account I'm uploading all these to, by the way - if you grew up in Britain around the same time I did, you might recognize some classics there.

Even though I've only been submitting tabs and bits and pieces of game music recently, I have spent some time writing original material. I'm still using Modplug for my composing, but it's likely that I'll try and release tablatures at the same time as the electronic versions this time.

Listing the tracklist that I have in mind ages before releasing anything is always a lot of fun because the final albums bear little or no resemblance to them. However, with fragments of most of these songs already in the works, the tracklist for (the album that will not be called) Unreality will be (nothing like):

1. Unreality
2. The Truth
3. My Children
4. [Unnamed]
5. This Corruption
6. Risk and Reward
7. One Perfect Soul
8. Find You
9. The Last of My Angels

The first one's nearly finished (and will be a return to a traditional fast-paced opener after "Welcome to the Machine" went against that trend) - however, my power supply exploded yesterday so things will be delayed a bit...

Hello. You might remember me as the one who used to actually submit music before disappearing for ages.

In truth I've been in something of a creative slump as far as music is concerned (and I haven't been doing enough to my other projects either). However, since November I've finally been learning the guitar myself, and with the addition of a decent amount of music-related hardware I got for Christmas, I may at some point be able to start playing and recording my own songs. It'll take a fair bit of practice, though.

I've also been experimenting with Guitar Pro 5, which I like a lot so far - it's the first MIDI-capable music program that I've felt rather comfortable writing in. As a result, I hope I'm going to finally be able to provide tabs and MIDIs of my music to people who have asked me about them. It's ironic that after I concentrated on MOD because I thought it was flexible, it became the obstacle in getting my music to a wider audience.

I'll definitely finish the "Machine World" album in Modplug... at some point, when it's ready. Starting to release an album before it's actually been written has its problems. I don't want the last three songs to be rushed while I'd rather be doing other things, though.

I'll submit the GP5 and MIDI for Hand of Fate soon - I'm not sure if it's as good as can be, but I don't think it went badly at all for a first attempt.

Just over a year at the site, and one thousand pageviews to show for it - I've no idea if that's impressive or not, but it's a milestone nonetheless. (The journal title's from a Helloween song - which is great, incidentally.) Thanks to everyone reading this for listening to the music I create, and I hope you continue to enjoy the last few releases of the Machine World album as and when I write them.

Sorry about being almost totally inactive recently - I've been doing quite a lot to the game project that I'm working on, and work's been going through a busy period as well because writing content management systems for three different people when you've got two coders is not an easy task. I hope I'll be able to listen to other people's music soon...

Thanks to an early birthday present from my wife, I also have the new project of finally learning the guitar. It's going to be a good while before I get anything played for real that's acceptable to put up here, but I think it's been going pretty well for two weeks... I'm now going to go back to cutting my finger to bits trying to play B Minor.

I really haven't been active here at all recently apart from accidentally sparking the Great Sandwich Wars of 2007 on the forums, having concentrated too much on my SheezyArt account - but now I'm just about ready to start releasing music again, probably doing the tracks fortnightly to give myself time to write the second half of the album without breaking the pattern.

The first track, "Welcome to the Machine", should be going up almost immediately.

Machine World

1. Welcome to the Machine [9:28]
2. Be More Than Just a Number [5:42]
3. Two Souls, One Mind [4:52]
4. Tale of the Cave [10:37]
5. Temple of Rust [4:45]
6. Rule the World [?:??]
7. Wonder [?:??]
8. Invisible [?:??]
9. The Last Day [?:??]
10. When the Machine Stops [4:47]

In between hitting F5 continuously on Fox Amoore's page, music writing has been proceeding surprisingly fast, and today the first of the songs on the new still-unnamed album was finished. It's a medium-fast piece, alternating between minor verses and major choruses in a similar way to A Thousand Lives, and is named what might be the longest song title I've ever used - Be More Than Just a Number. It also uses a chiptune-like instrument that hasn't appeared in any of my music before, embracing the electronic side of it a little more. Also a first time for me, it has a fadeout rather than a "proper" ending. I've never liked those myself, but sometimes, as I've discovered, it seems to fit.

In fact, so many songs have taken shape that I'm able to provide a likely tracklist for the collection. We'll see how similar it turns out...

Tracklist for Unnamed Eighth Album (Counting The First Three That Were Mostly Rubbish)

1. Welcome to the Machine - Needs most of its lyrics
2. Be More Than Just a Number - 5:42
3. Two Souls, One Mind - Halfway
4. Tale of the Cave - Almost there
5. Pathfinder - Hardly started
6. Invisible - Little more than a chorus
7. Wonder - Haven't started
8. The Last Day - Planned but not written
9. When the Machine Stops - Cover/"bonus" song, written by a Tibetian musician called Atlantis

The trouble with finally finding a place to submit music was that I was going to completely run out of submissions eventually. Getting into this community has remotivated me incredibly, though, and as much to sort things out in my own head as tell people what I've been up to, this is what I'm thinking of for my next set of songs...

After some playing around with ideas, I decided I was fed up of writing "concept albums" and decided to make this one a little looser in theme, with the songs not necessarily related - therefore, it doesn't have a title yet and will probably be named after one of the songs.

Songs that are some way into completion and will probably see the light of day

Welcome to the Machine - Now, at the time I started writing this I wasn't aware that Pink Floyd already had a song called that. Instead, I got the title and main guitar part from the terrifying level at the end of Ecco the Dolphin, which I later learned was itself inspired by Pink Floyd. I've got three minutes of it done so far, and it includes heavier drums near the beginning, leading into a slightly Nightwish-inspired harpsichord part that I really like.

Be More Than Just a Number - About the race for money and status in a computer-driven society, but I haven't got it all worked out yet. This is quite pop-like and positive, with a chorus in a major key and a chiptune-inspired beginning. I wasn't too sure about that at first, but I think it might have worked out!

Unnamed song #94 - I hadn't actually tried a storytelling song that was based on an existing plot for ages (I think the last one was "Heart of the Beast" from Dreamscape) and this is a return to that idea for me. I don't want to reveal what it's about until it's ready, because again it's a pretty unusual choice - don't challenge me to turn anything into a power metal epic, because chances are I'll do it! Quite a lot of the parts in this are rather lighter - I've found a pretty great acoustic guitar instrument and I'm experimenting with it a lot here. Six and a half minutes are done... which is a lot more than I thought, actually, so I'll have to be careful of the length of this one.

Two Souls, One Mind - In the same theme as "My Kingdom", about the feeling of not wanting to be yourself and lead two separate lives. I have a reasonable amount of this done, but a lot of the length is made up of different variations on the theme of the chorus - it needs much more variety. I'm going to attempt having both major and minor versions of the chorus here.

Half-formed ideas

Memoria - An idea that I quite like about loss of memory. Only the chorus is done, and it needs a lot of work to be worked up into a full song.

Earthkeepers - Another single chorus file, about the people who really control the world. Again, very happy-sounding so far, and needs more of an idea before I can flesh it out.

Fool's Errand - That won't be the subject of the song, I just named the file after the game I was playing too much of at the time. This evolved directly out of my cover of "Kingdom for a Heart" after changing around some ideas in it, so it has a Sonata Arctica feel to it. If I ever find a decent subject to fit the chorus I have so far, it might turn out quite well...

The Last Day - About the eventual end of the world, and whether humanity will survive it. I find this idea so absolutely overwhelming, as it's completely unimaginable to us what will happen in billions of years' time. It has an acoustic intro that I've had saved up for a while, but I really need to spend more time on the chords to get it to work. The chorus is thought up but not done - I have a lot of writing on the subject collected up, and I'll have to sift through it and decide what to include in the lyrics...

Scraps

Temple of Rust - Another mind-related song, about storing your negative emotions and being afraid to show them.

Wonder - So much metal music (including my earlier pieces) is very pessimistic (see The Last Day, above), and it's depressing to view yourself as a race that can only kill and harm... I want to put something together to remind me that there is good in this world, and despite the world's problems, we have achieved so much as a species.

Master of Chaos - Generic power song with a daft power metal title. You've got to have at least one!

That was rather longer than I thought... it looks like I have enough ideas to be getting on with after all. I've also got a cover of Sonata Arctica's "Weballergy" started, but it hasn't got beyond the chorus yet, and another cover called "When the Machine Stops" by a Tibetian musician calls Atlantis, but I can't get its chords to sound right at all.

At the recommendation of several of the musicians here, I opened an account at SheezyArt last night.

http://davidn.sheezyart.com

I've had a brief explore around and tested it out by submitting one of my newer songs (which seems to have gone down pretty decently). I just have two problems with the site so far:

1. I find it pretty difficult to navigate, not least because some people's user pages look suspiciously like Myspace.
2. There's the option to downvote submissions. I can't think of any possible positive outcome that could have.

But still, I've been typing random names into the address bar to see if I could find anyone that I recognized - if you do have an account there, feel free to watch me or give me a note to watch you back, and we'll continue to expand our ever-growing network and take over the universe.

I was interested in  wolfhound's recent (incredibly in-depth) study into how to get music noticed on FA. We have two musical titans in the form of  foxamoore and  mandoandy, who are both amazing, but in a site primarily dominated by visual art it's often difficult for new musicians to get much attention. So I wanted to point out to anyone reading this some people with only a few musical submissions who I think need to get a few more listens...

 IkodoMoonstrife - He's been around a while, but I only just heard his Doom-like version of Nightwish's "Wish I Had An Angel", so I wanted to mention that. If anything, it's proof that synthesized versions of rock can work well after all.

 LadyDuckula - Has two music submissions at the moment - a really quite beautiful piano piece, and (what I'm really mentioning her for) a NES version of the Eastenders music!

 Aden - Another piano piece that sounds genuinely like it could be something by Sonata Arctica. (More on his old account).

 Faemandra - People in Germany seem to be born with some sort of power metal gene, and he's definitely got it - the unfinished version of "One step" sounds slightly rough at the moment, but has the makings of something of real professional quality.

 AZ-Solii - I don't know what his name means, but listen to the only submission he has up - it's a Castlevania-like choir piece. And according to the study, classical is one of the most difficult genres to get noticed for...

By now you might have noticed the distinct absence of the sixth and final part of "My Kingdom" - I've been visiting my home in Scotland for a few days and as you all know, they haven't discovered the Internet here yet. I've brought it with me, so I'll upload it either when I get the chance here, or on Wednesday.

I do have a couple of messages to reply to, and I promise I'll get around to those soon - but in the meantime, thanks for all the watches and comments left recently. It really brightens me up (far more than it should, perhaps) when I get new messages - this thing's even more addictive than Facebook.

And my pageview count has just passed 500. But apart from reminding you that you always wanted a way to de-watch people's journals, that's all usefulness to this entry exhausted.

What was previously thought impossible has happened - I have dragged myself through the badly-coded mess of my music site (it was written while I was first learning PHP), put in a couple of ugly hacks to make things easier, and put up the releases for the last two albums I've released here.

The files on the site are the .IT sources of the songs rather than MP3s, and you'll need a tracker such as Modplug to open them. But this lets the people who were wanting tablature get the note information so they can experiment around with them.

A direct link to the commentary page of "My Kingdom" -

http://www.davidnewton.co.nr/modsit.....?album=kingdom

Strangely enough I notice that someone's already gone through and downloaded each of the new songs. Someone must have been keeping a closer eye on that for the year since it was last updated than I ever thought...

I know journals are the dullest thing ever to appear on the new messages list, but still...

Due to Modplug Central going down, I lost most of my motivation to write music at about the end of 2005, but after getting a great response here (thanks again to everyone who's watched me), I got some inspiration back and I think I'm almost ready to begin releasing new material. The new album/set/whatever you want to call it is to be named "My Kingdom", and most of the content of it is going to be based on a subject I've touched on quite a lot before - the idea of escaping to another world, and in some ways, the furry community itself.

Most of these are finished or almost finished - the only significant things I need to complete are "Eye of the Beholder", which I haven't started yet, and the title song, which is already twelve minutes long and nowhere near finished - it will probably eventually be split up into sub-sections. I should be releasing the first of them at the end of the week.

1. Hand of Fate [4:20]
2. Open Your Eyes [6:06]
3. A Thousand Lives [5:43]
4. Lazarus [8:11]
5. Eye of the Beholder [?:??]
6. The Fallen Angel [9:12]
7. Forever [5:11]
8. My Kingdom [?:??]

I really meant to put this in the journal earlier, but better late than never - Druox the Furrinator (what an incredible name) recently did a cover of my old song "The Doomsday Project" which can be found here - http://www.furaffinity.net/view/321738/ . I'd like to thank him for taking the time to do that, particularly as it involved picking apart the original file and learning each track individually. It's great to hear something I wrote actually being played!

And I've just passed the 200 pageview mark. I've actually got a cover of my own to post tomorrow morning when the site is less prone to breaking.

The lunacy continues on the forums, as if you needed anyone else pointing that out to you. I think I'll probably try and avoid them for a while.

I don't have quite so much time now because I've started a new job, so I don't think I'll start releasing my new set of material just yet. Instead, there's another album's worth that was written before the "Unsung Legends" set that I can put up - some of it is noticeably older (end of 2003-ish), but it's not to the level that I'm totally embarrassed about it. I might touch them all up a bit before release, though.

So, the tracklist to be released over the next couple of weeks is "From Alpha to Omega". From looking at these titles it might give some idea as to where I got inspiration from...

1. The Creator [12:53]
2. Reflections [11:49]
3. Guardian of Memories [6:52]
4. Holy War [5:07]
5. Devils and Angels [6:27]
6. The Sage Who Became a Star [4:13]
7. Albion [11:00]
8. The Doomsday Project [6:23]

(Well, we all have to start somewhere, you know.)

I've only been on here a month, and didn't really know what to expect at first, but on the whole I've felt very welcome into the community so far. Thanks again to anyone who's commented on/listened to my music and that I've somehow skipped over giving the traditional "thanks" shout to (though I think I got them all).

Now that I've finished releasing the songs from the "Dreamscape" album, the question is what to put up next - I do have a couple of songs finished from the set that I'm writing at the moment, but I wouldn't be able to release more than a couple of them before having massive time gaps in between releases.

There's always the option of going back and releasing one of my older sets, one for every few days as before - the songs on "From Alpha to Omega" I'm a bit less happy with, but they're still not totally terrible.

Of course, the most important question is what colour the icon should be for whatever set I decide to release next...