Smile

The dentist is done.

It's a requirement before going to oncology next week and before treatment. I'm now waiting in a cafe for a phone call from a stop smoking service. I really should stop before any treatment. In reality I'm only vaping, the real smoking stopped about a month ago. What I need from them is the tablets that stop your brain craving nicotine.

Time to enjoy my coffee and samosa before negotiating for something better than rubbish patches and mouth spray. I've had that before and in all honesty it made very little difference. I have a high nicotine dependency.

Hopefully their call will be on time too. No time to hang around these days.

Cancer

 

It's time to resurrect this blog.

As the title suggests I have T3 squamous carcinoma of the right vocal cord.
As this blog still exists and is doing nothing I might as well use it to document what looks to be a very tricky road ahead, and that's just the treatment. Living with cancer at the moment, apart from the squeaky voice, is fine. Having read lots of peoples testimonials it all gets bad once the treatment starts.
It would seem that the side effects of radiotherapy and chemotherapy aren't nice at all.

So this is where I get to vent and complain and quite frankly have a laugh at this whole ridiculous situation that I find myself in. I'll also be blogging about other day-to-day stuff just to remind me what I'm missing once they start destroying the cancer.

Oh yeah, that picture above.
Cross your eyes and a third image appears in the middle in glorious 3D. It shows what I had to look at on a normal lunch break in my work truck. I won't be back in that for a while.
Not so bad then.

In The Clouds

Having bought a Tyros 3 at the beginning of the year I've been trying ways to get compositions onto the keyboard.

I do play the instrument but I don't really like the recording procedure so I've been messing around with software to at least start a tune. I can then record the backing to the Tyros and revoice and embellish it later. By far the most productive method is to get some decent chords together with ChordPulse, output the chords to JJazzLab and pipe the result from that into the Tyros. It seems to work well.

Above is a backing track I've made. I'll hopefully get round to uploading the finished track at some point.
 

Time To Play

 

Apparently the best instrument you own is the one you play.

Currently I am playing my Yamaha PSR-e313 which I bought in a charity shop for £35 about 3 months ago. I have other keyboards but for some reason this one just seems very comfortable to play. It has 100 styles which provide auto accompaniment as you throw chords and melodies at it. This is something I love doing. I usually know when I want to play but not what I want to play so messing around for an hour or so until something sticks is good fun.

I found a style today which made me play differently than I had been for the previous hour. A decent chord progression emerged and before I knew it I had recorded the track for reference and written some lyrics for it. It's far from finished and these little demos are useful references for the future.

While a lot of musicians hate the idea of arranger keyboards I think that if nothing else they are a great starting point. No rigging up loads of gear, no faffing around try to get that 'just right' sound before I start playing and loads of styles that I can try without having to start from scratch.

There's no point powering up the studio when there's nothing to record.

Pure Tripe

It's that time of year again.

The time of year when Santa can be seen shopping in Hillfields. He's been going there for decades. When I was younger and used to live in Hillfields I'd see him in December and say hello. I always got good presents in them days. Now that I don't bump into him anymore I get bugger all.

Right, I'm off to drink my tea until I can think of more rubbish to put up here.

Please don't bother commenting on this post or you'll end up being the odd person out.

Happy Xmas etc etc.