Oh, Jamendo, be thou patient with me

From Lifedrawings

Album Cover for Dance of the Solar Wind, a short collection of prosepoems (lightened and brightened a bit on the smaller Jamendo version, posted below - the album is not published yet, will add link when the album is publicly available).

I haven't painted The Lady and the Chimera because I've been working on a short album of prosepoems for uploading to Jamendo. It's been a challenging process. After my first upload of the poems, before the album had been moderated, so not public, I realized I had neglected to remove the blurb at the end of my recordings with the date, my blog url, etc.

That required extensive searches through 3 hard drives looking for the original Garageband file that had the voice recording and the music so that I could remove the voice without affecting the music. Sometimes I had to re-do the voice recording and Garageband is a bit frustrating in that it doesn't allow you to have two Garageband files open simultaneously. Anyway, that was all done.

I uploaded again.

As soon as I heard the first poem and part of the second I cringed. The sound levels were too far off for comfort.

Second delete. I'm not a musician and I don't have a mixer, only Garageband, Audacity and my ear. While I attempted to line all 5 recordings in one file in Audacity and run a "Normalize" filter on it, the sound levels still were uneven.

Oh, sure I allowed clipping at the upper and lower ends of the sound wave, and then later decided that poem could be quieter but it was clipped and that entailed going back to the original and going through all the loops to get an unclipped version back in its place that then had to have its volume increased.

Eventually I did it by ear as best I could. This one up .02 decibels, that one down by -1 decibel.

Lawd, it's not perfect by any means, but it's the best I can do. Except for the beginning bit of the prosepoem, not the intro, which I quietened, of Light Catches Diamonds, and don't touch the sound because within seconds it decreases, it's listenable on earphones without changing the volume every time a new prosepoem begins.

The prosepoems span four years, hence the difficulty.

It's a short album, about 16 minutes. It contains, Dance of the Solar Wind, Light Catches Diamonds, Love Letters on Sand Mandalas, Roses and Hands, and Meridians of Culture. Not necessarily the best grouping of my work - I could have done a love poem album, and a jazzy one, rather than this mix.

Wanted to try it out, that's all. To see. These pieces in themselves were time-consuming processes. All except one half minute one, they have a music background. That's been a new development for me this year. Jamendo is a music site. I hope the moderator passes my album of prosepoems.

Anyway, besides the anxiety over the volumes, I've been having conniptions over the album cover. A friend thought the red pencil self-portrait more striking, but I liked the brown, so I upload to Twitpic and asked for feedback. The brown self-portrait was unanimous among those who responded.

Only in the middle of the night I had a vision of another album cover, and in the morning remembered this painting, Pulsing Hea(r)t, Eye of Ra. So I began working on the album cover pictured above, which took hours, and I think it more appropriate to the title and the contents.

Jamendo is not allowing me to change the cover even though the album hasn't been moderated yet and is not public.

This means re-uploading, a 4th time. Oh Jamendo, be thou patient with me.

Here's the original one I posted for voting on:

From Lifedrawings