Author: Stoneygate

Code Like A Girl

The last week has been a bit bonkers, as I’ve been trying to fit work around helping a good friend with a family crisis. I haven’t got as much done as I would have liked, but some things are just more important, and I’ve still been able to make a little progress.

Over last weekend, I wrote an article for an online publication called Code Like A Girl, which you may possibly have heard of if you’re interested in encouraging more girls to do STEM subjects, or you’re a bit of a computer geek. During the week, there has been communication with the editorial team, minor changes made, and they have published it this evening.  The article is a bit of a mashup of a couple of the articles in this blog, and describes how I made the video for Sunrise but I thought I’d share it here anyway as I’m feeling somewhat chuffed to have been included on their writing team and had an article published about my work.  I anticipate writing at least another article about a different video I’ve made with a similar technique, maybe going into a little more depth about the code this time.

Guerrilla Snowdrop Temptation

This is not a great photo of snowdrops.  I left it too long before I went outside (it was cold, I’ve been avoiding it!). The snowdrops have, as a consequence, gone over, so most of the white flowers have disappeared already and been replaced by green pods, presumably containing seeds.

When I first came to this house, there were only a very few snowdrops that appeared, but every year, there have been more. In addition to the ones in this picture, there are a couple of other large clumps of them in the middle of the lawn which were not there before. (I admit, I did use a bulb or two to plug a gap in the lawn where there had been a large weed that left a hole when I pulled it out – I’m really not a gardener).

Given how easily they are spreading around my garden, it should in theory have already been full of them, but the previous owner had turfed the grassed area, so maybe there were more that were lost when the lawn was redone. Or maybe it is because I don’t look after the garden very much, so they have more chance to spread.

I feel tempted to dig up a few spare bulbs and start a new cluster in the public land nearby, which already has a lot of daffodils every spring. It would give me something extra to look forward to seeing when the long winter months haven’t quite given up the ghost, and I’d be able to smile to myself, knowing who was responsible, and that this act of green vandalism would be there for far longer than I will be.  I’ve always liked the idea of yarn-bombing but not the idea of how it would look after it had been there a while.  Maybe I will sneakily plant some bulbs beneath a few trees… I am managing to convince myself it is a good idea…

Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night

Digital StillCameraA couple of mornings in the last week, I have had the privilege of hearing the dawn chorus start, and listening to the incredible singing of our local blackbird. (I haven’t actually checked it is definitely a blackbird, as I’ve been listening from the comfort of my bed, but I’m fairly sure…)

It all starts about 6am when the birds in the nearby city centre park start up, and then quickly spreads to the back gardens of our street and the next.

The song has repetition, variations and a call and response like structure, as if he is competing with a rival that is too far away for me to hear from indoors. Or pausing for breath. The song’s structure starts with a simple repeated motif, with the variations becoming more and more complex, his virtuoso performance sounding almost effortless. But singing with his whole being.

And this particular bird has an intonation like the Swedish chef from the Muppets through certain sections of his song. Really, no kidding.

Pick Myself Up & Start Again

The last few weeks have been a little rough. I worked fairly hard through January, then after helping out at a local community event on 4th Feb (just in the kitchen, no music involved) I was super-tired. I took the Sunday off to recuperate, but had a sore throat all day Monday, and then got ill for a couple of weeks with some sort of lurgy which just didn’t want to shift. The glands on my neck were up, my brain wasn’t on full power, and even simple tasks were wearing me out quickly. I was starting to wonder if I’d somehow managed to contract glandular fever* when things suddenly started improving and I began to get my life back again, just slowly.

Anyway, the reason I’m telling you all this is to explain why I vanished off the face of the internet for best part of a month now, bar a few random tweets. I’m working again, but it’s taking a while to get back up to my normal pace and have the energy to communicate. (Spot the introvert?).

I had wanted to work on what should become the second album this month, a set of instrumental tracks based on a well known novel. The aim was to write ten more minutes of music, give or take, to finish it off. I did make a start, but found I needed to do something where I was making more definite progress, before I move onto that project.

Mushrooms with brown top and white underside

So, there’s this song called Thieving Autumn which I have been working on intermittently since the end of September, and which I want to include on the third album, whenever that happens. I’m still not sure about all the lyrics, but I’ve gone ahead and started to work out instrumentation and parts for a recorded version, because that was more straightforward than writing something completely from scratch when my brain was still woolly from the lurgy.

Somehow the recorded version has ended up with a substantially different chord set to the guitar version I worked out in January, which is odd, because I have sung along to both. I haven’t figured out what’s happening there yet – some of the guitar chords may be alternatives, I may have accidentally taken it into a different key for the recording, or just not noted using a capo when I wrote down the chords in January.

I’ve got most of the backing track roughly together now, and need to work out how I want it to end. Then the main thing will be to do some serious work on developing the lyrics, trying to put into practice what I learned from the Berklee-based lyric-writing course I followed on Coursera last autumn. Off to the rhyming dictionaries!

*Glandular fever is called mono in the States.

Pick Myself Up & Start Again

The last few weeks have been a little rough. I worked fairly hard through January, then after helping out at a local community event on 4th Feb (just in the kitchen, no music involved) I was super-tired. I took the Sunday off to recuperate, but had a sore throat all day Monday, and then got ill for a couple of weeks with some sort of lurgy which just didn’t want to shift. The glands on my neck were up, my brain wasn’t on full power, and even simple tasks were wearing me out quickly. I was starting to wonder if I’d somehow managed to contract glandular fever* when things suddenly started improving and I began to get my life back again, just slowly.
Anyway, the reason I’m telling you all this is to explain why I vanished off the face of the internet for best part of a month now, bar a few random tweets. I’m working again, but it’s taking a while to get back up to my normal pace and have the energy to communicate. (Spot the introvert?).
I had wanted to work on what should become the second album this month, a set of instrumental tracks based on a well known novel. The aim was to write ten more minutes of music, give or take, to finish it off. I did make a start, but found I needed to do something where I was making more definite progress, before I move onto that project.
Mushrooms with brown top and white underside
So, there’s this song called Thieving Autumn which I have been working on intermittently since the end of September, and which I want to include on the third album, whenever that happens. I’m still not sure about all the lyrics, but I’ve gone ahead and started to work out instrumentation and parts for a recorded version, because that was more straightforward than writing something completely from scratch when my brain was still woolly from the lurgy.
Somehow the recorded version has ended up with a substantially different chord set to the guitar version I worked out in January, which is odd, because I have sung along to both. I haven’t figured out what’s happening there yet – some of the guitar chords may be alternatives, I may have accidentally taken it into a different key for the recording, or just not noted using a capo when I wrote down the chords in January.
I’ve got most of the backing track roughly together now, and need to work out how I want it to end. Then the main thing will be to do some serious work on developing the lyrics, trying to put into practice what I learned from the Berklee-based lyric-writing course I followed on Coursera last autumn. Off to the rhyming dictionaries!
*Glandular fever is called mono in the States.

Silver Bird

I made various video backgrounds from animations that I worked on in Processing in preparation for a gig I played at the start of January. In the event, the venue’s projector wasn’t available, so they weren’t used. But the preparation work isn’t wasted, I have some videos in hand for future live performances. Plus, I took some of the footage generated for Silver Bird and edited it into this video.

In fact, the timing could not have been more perfect. No sooner had I finished the video than I got an email from BBC Introducing (Lincolnshire) to say they had used Silver Bird in their show the previous Saturday. This was an exciting end to what has been a brilliant month for me, where I’ve made a lot of new contacts and felt like I’d scratched the surface of whatever this music thing is.

January So Far

It’s been a while since I posted a proper update, so I thought it was about time. January has been busy so far, mainly with publicising the Sleepwalker album. Plus there was a gig in Loughborough on 8th, where I provided the headline act to an open mic session, Cafe Live. I didn’t feel like parts of the gig went all that well, but I am always my own worst critic. It goes with the whole musician territory. People who were in the audience have told me they enjoyed my set, which was about 40-45mins long this time, longer than I am so far used to. I need to get more used to doing longer sets so I chill out more when I’m performing. It’s a strange feeling having so many pairs of eyes looking at you for so long!

I started off with some acoustic numbers with the guitar, including some Suzanne Vega covers – Gypsy and Knight Moves – and then moved on to the electronic tracks, singing and playing percussion or guitar over the backing that I pre-sequenced. There was a mix of album tracks and some I haven’t released, like Beautiful Deadly. Unfortunately we couldn’t project my videos this time, so I have yet to try these out with a live audience, but I’m thinking I’ll share some of the work I did to prepare video snippets for this gig on my youtube channel.

I’ve been continuing to research radio stations, podcasts and programmes that might be interested in my music, as well as blogs and other news outlets. This is quite time-consuming, but is starting to work. My hometown’s newspaper ran an article on me, and I had my first podcast play on Nottingham show the Sunday Alternative this weekend, with the title track to the Sleepwalker album. Do take a listen to the show if you haven’t already, I really enjoyed it. It’s mainly local Notts rock bands, but they slipped in my triphop/chillout track at the end, which was super-nice of them.