Danny Stewart

What follows is a collection of thoughts assembled based on a recent email exchange with a fellow Doctor Who fan. A lot of these thoughts have rattled around in my head for years, but this is perhaps among the most cohesively I have written them out, so I felt that it might be good to share some of my views. I don’t expect people to relate, but it’s nice to have something to refer people to when I rant about my hatred for the new series.

As most of you know, there is no love lost for the new series as far as I am concerned. Last of the Time Lords way back in 2007 was what finally killed it for me. Once that amount of damage was done, it was never able to come back for me. After that point I became wise to the fact that this beast masquerading as Doctor Who bore no resemblance to the show that captured my imagination as a child. (I suspect I knew it subconsciously, but did not allow myself to believe it.) After that point the new series became, more or less, a joke to me, but it was far worse than just a simple joke. In the public consciousness, this was Doctor Who now. I hear people I follow on the internet outside of the Doctor Who community talking about how they saw the latest episode, and it’s hard for me not to interrupt and tell them that what they’re watching is not Doctor Who. I miss the days prior to 2005 when I could tell people my favorite show was Doctor Who and have them look at me blankly, rather than having them identify that name with the abomination that has egregiously claimed its title.

And yet, for some reason, I continue watching it. It gnaws at my soul to see what they’re doing to it, but I live in the tiniest amount of hope that maybe, somehow, they will steer the show ever so slightly in a better direction. I had hoped that Steven Moffat’s takeover heralded such a change. His first two episodes, The Eleventh Hour and The Beast Below were a sign of a promising change in direction. So much so that I wonder if the BBC pushed back and asked him to return to the over-the-top fantasy-style show that RTD had churned out. The overall quality of the episodes deteriorates more and more with each passing episode and yet, like a train wreck, I can’t stop watching it, hoping that somehow it will turn the corner. (I don’t expect it at this point.) All I have left is the occasional one-off episode that harkens back to the feel of the classic series, which is what (to me) The God Complex was, and that is the reason I embarked on re-scoring it. Such a rare gem of an episode combined with a truly offensively bad score from Murray Gold, and I felt that it deserved better, so I set out to fix it (and I’m immensely proud of the job Chris and I did on it).

Doctor Who is so near and dear to my heart that I doubt I will ever be able to truly give up on it, though I have come closer to doing so this past season than I ever have before.

The impression I have always gotten from the new series and the people behind it is that their priorities are totally the antithesis of the priorities in place for classic Doctor Who. The strongest example is the lack of care put into the title sequence and theme and the lack of commentary on them for the DVD releases. These were things that were a big deal, and quite substantially groundbreaking for their time. On the new series, it’s just another damned TV show, and it’s about catering to a juvenile audience with explosions and cheap thrills. The pre-titles sequence of this latest Christmas special is among the most horrifying my brain is capable of processing. I won’t describe it, because any description would not adequately cover how terrible it was.

Some of you may have noticed that I posted an updated version of my Beyond the Farthest Star mix on SoundCloud. I pulled that out of the archive and attempted to consolidate down wherever possible, eliminating samples of the original themes and replacing them with things of my own design.

This is a change I’ve noted in myself over the past year or two: significantly less reliance on samples of the original themes. Just because I have isolated Derbyshire elements and the Howell bassline doesn’t mean they have to be stuffed into everything, no matter how great they may sound. It just leaves a mix feeling predictable, unless something very new is done with those samples. I think that’s why even Murray Gold dropped the Derbyshire melody in his latest theme.

Heavily orchestral renditions of the Doctor Who theme lack so many of the necessary qualities of what a Doctor Who theme should be, and are often composed in entirely the wrong spirit (Murray Gold’s, for example). I don’t like them at all.

Something like my own Epic 2011 may work well as a theme for the new series, but then, I am personally very disillusioned with the new series, and in my mind it is not and is unlikely to ever be “proper” Doctor Who, so therefore while it provides me a new playground where I can branch out into other areas of composition, it does not reflect my ideal of what a theme should be or sound like.

The new series is in no position to push boundaries in title sequence or theme music; if anything, they seem to be seeking a more and more mainstream audience, which saddens me, but by now is only to be expected. (Murray Gold’s latest theme, while far from perfect, is a small step in the right direction. It contains too much bombast in some places, such as the choir buildup to the middle eight, but overall it is much more scaled back, and the electronic elements shine through more clearly—both of which earn points from me.)

I already began to have a feeling of “too much” even while working on Epic 2011; it’s why it branched off into the original and the “alternate” mix. The alternate has a much stronger brass component towards the end of the theme, which, again, was a great deal of fun to put together, but as I listened back I felt “no, this is too much.” I branched my project file off to a separate save before I continued, so I was free to push it as much as I wanted but could return to the less over-the-top version when I’d gotten it all out of my system.

I will say that the sense of “too much” has diminished considerably from the train wreck that was Murray Gold’s 2008 (Voyage of the Damned on) theme. That thing was atrocious.

Perhaps I’ll shelve Epic 2011 for a bit and put some effort into a new theme with entirely electronic (or electronically-manipulated) sound sources. I may pull the bassline out of Epic 2011 and start building a new theme around that, as the bassline in the current version is brand new (I just created it yesterday). I feel it’s almost too good to go to waste in a theme like Epic 2011.

If I hate orchestral Doctor Who themes so much, why do I spend my time composing them? I think it has to do with my branching out as a musician. I’m at the point where I’m having a lot of fun just “playing” with melodies and layers, but I’m still not at a point where I’m comfortable enough to be solidly developing my own music. I frequently hate my own stuff and abandon it before it has the chance to develop into something that doesn’t suck. As my friends know, especially those who are musically inclined themselves, I do not take compliments well. I genuinely do not believe that my work holds any value, and thus I tend to retreat even further, potentially even invalidating the opinions of those who speak favorably about my work (“well, this is crap and I know it’s crap, so the fact that they’re telling me it’s good invalidates their opinions on my work”).

Therefore the Doctor Who theme ends up, constantly, as my musical playground. There is a pre-existing structure to it that I know intimately, but within that structure I am free to play and develop, both with sounds and melodies. It is a very limited arena where I am free to try many things on a single piece. The Doctor Who theme is where I am most comfortable, so that is where I play. I am not afraid to post or share versions of the Doctor Who theme where I would be much more hesitant to attempt to write something original and share that to the world. It goes out to a potentially much wider audience, whereas the Doctor Who theme almost feels like it is my private domain, knowing it as well as I do.

I’ve gotten the Doctor Who theme boiled down to a science now, and I do wonder whether that makes me too close to it to produce something truly unique. Between Delia Derbyshire’s original and Peter Howell’s version, there is basically a set of “rules” (at least that’s how I consider them) that define how you should and shouldn’t modify bits of the theme. The bassline, especially, is the most fundamental part (and, tellingly, this is the part Murray Gold cares least about). It is the bassline that drives the theme, and remains a constant behind everything else. In Murray Gold’s renditions the bassline seems dropped in as an afterthought, and he has made critical errors in terms of understanding the notation (which should be inconceivable considering he is sitting on Delia Derbyshire’s original multitrack). One could argue, as I’m sure Murray himself would, that it is down to creative license, but the manner of these mistakes strongly suggests to me that it is simply down to laziness and a lack of careful examination of the original theme. At least if it were a conscious choice, I could live with that. But everything I know about Murray Gold and everything I have studied in his versions of the theme tell me that this is not a conscious choice; it’s just a lazy rush job. And for an official Doctor Who theme, that is so tragic as to almost be a crime.

My ideal position would put me in the role of an “overseer” of Doctor Who themes. Let someone else bring something new to the table, where they are free to experiment as they wish, but have the theme run by me so that I can correct small technical errors that stem from ignorance rather than those that were made for a creative purpose (for which a case could certainly be made). Many, many people simply do not realize what the original theme does, and if they knew, there is a good chance that is the way they would do it in their own versions. That’s what I try to help people with when I’m involved with someone else’s theme. I consider myself a “Doctor Who theme fact checker” of sorts. I have many of the original materials and I know the construction of the original themes inside and out, so my goal would be to ensure that knowledge gets passed on so that an informed choice can be made.

Stay tuned later this week; I am finally beginning the process of assembling and posting some of the more basic rules of the Doctor Who theme.

Drinking heavily and watching “Paradise Towers” with a friend.

Drinking heavily and watching “Paradise Towers” with a friend.

Ever since I first heard about Marco Arment’s Second Crack, I knew it was exactly what I have wanted for a very long time. It is a simple, straightforward, lightweight, static file-based, Markdown-powered blogging engine. For months if not years, I have wondered why nothing like this existed. All I wanted was something that allowed me to write up a blog post using nothing but Markdown in a plain text file, drop that file into a folder, and have a blog post up on my site.

This is exactly what Marco delivered, except better (thanks to some really slick Dropbox integration). He’s been using it on his own site forever, but just yesterday he very generously released the source code for it. I jumped at the opportunity.

It’s taken many hours of configuration, head-scratching, and light bulbs going off, but my new Second Crack-powered site is live. I absolutely adore it. Thanks so much, Marco, for delivering the blogging engine I’ve always wanted.

Someone on Twitter asked me about any gotchas I ran into when installing Marco Arment’s Second Crack as the blog engine powering DannyStewart.com. For the sake of anyone else looking to do what I’ve done, I thought I’d write a little bit about my experience. (Despite what Marco says, I highly recommend Second Crack.)

Disclaimer: I did not write Second Crack and am not an expert here. I may have done this very badly. You should not necessarily trust anything I say. All I can tell you is that as of right now I have my site working the way I want it.

First of all, my server is hosted with Linode and is running Debian 6 with Apache. I checked out the Git repo on the server. I had a choice here. I could put it in /home/danny or I could put it in /srv/www where I host my site. I wasn’t as sure of what I was doing at first, so for simplicity and convenience (especially early on), I placed it in with my site (/srv/www/secondcrack). This isn’t necessary, so it’s really up to you.

Then, I installed the CLI version of Dropbox along with their dropbox.py utility, both available for download directly from the main Dropbox page. After installation, I excluded every directory in my Dropbox (using dropbox.py) except the top-level Blog folder. I didn’t want my 30+ GB of other stuff syncing across to my server.

Once everything was syncing over, I added the following lines to my crontab.

* * * * * danny /srv/www/secondcrack/engine/update.sh /home/danny/Dropbox/Blog /srv/www/secondcrack   
* * * * * danny /home/danny/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd

I did this because I wanted Second Crack running under my user. Then I restarted cron and verified that update.sh was running with a ps -A.

Finally, once I had everything working the way I wanted to, I erased the built-in www folder that Second Crack writes to by default, and I symlinked the secondcrack/www folder back to the root of my website, so that all the files would be written directly there without me having to move my Second Crack install from where it was already.

Working around permissions

The biggest problem I ran into was with the bookmarklet. When you use the bookmarklet, it tries to write a text file directly to your Dropbox drafts folder. This is no good on my setup because the danny user owns my Dropbox folder, while the user Apache runs as (www-data) can’t write to (or even see) danny’s Dropbox.

So I created a draft_temp folder in the root of where my site is hosted from, and then wrote the following shell script:

#!/bin/bash

BASH_LOCK_DIR="/home/danny/move_drafts.sh.lock"

if mkdir "$BASH_LOCK_DIR" ; then
    trap "rmdir '$BASH_LOCK_DIR' 2>/dev/null ; exit" INT TERM EXIT

    while true ; do
        inotifywait -q -q -r -t 30 -e close_write -e create -e delete -e moved_from /srv/www/draft_temp/
            if [ $? -eq 0 ] ; then
                mv /srv/www/draft_temp/* /home/danny/Dropbox/Blog/drafts/
            fi
    done

    rmdir "$BASH_LOCK_DIR" 2>/dev/null
    trap - INT TERM EXIT
else
   echo "Already running"
fi

This uses inotifywait (like Second Crack) to watch the draft_temp folder, and the moment I create a new draft using the bookmarklet, this script instantly moves it to my Dropbox folder. Just put this in your crontab like the previous entries.

Triggering a rebuild

Every time you make a global change (such as a modification to the template files), the easiest way to trigger a rebuild of the site is to first empty the secondcrack/cache folder, then just change anything in your Dropbox’s Blog folder. Delete something and then undo it, add a random word to a post then save and undo, etc. Just get Dropbox to sync the change and notice that a file is different, and then it will rebuild.

If a post breaks

If a post breaks, such as (in the example Marco cites) when you remove a post from the middle of several posts in one day and they do not re-number properly, there is an easy fix. Just drag all the posts from that month’s folder back to the drafts/_publish-now folder. They will be published again, with their original timestamps, except any broken numbering or missing posts will be fixed. Turns out, this is not such a great idea after all. It can cause duplicate posts. Instead, limit yourself to just the posts from that day, and you might be better served by moving them to _publish_now one at a time, in order.

If I did something stupid…

…and you want to help me make my setup less stupid, please feel free to email me (see my Contact page) or tweet me at @dannystewart. The same thing goes if you have questions about something I didn’t cover here. I would be happy to add it.

It’s 4:00 in the morning and I just woke up to a slew of emails informing me that my server had exploded. This was because I had majorly screwed up with the shell script I had written to move drafts. I forgot to include a section checking whether the script was already running, so the script kept running itself repeatedly until it brought the server to its knees.

I’ve corrected the script on my server and in the original post, so if you were unfortunate enough to copy that script from me, make sure you update yours as well.

Diva is a new soft synth from u-he, makers of my beloved Zebra. They emailed me about it in mid-December with a trial and an offer of a discount. I jumped on it immediately, but didn’t really have a chance to sit down with it until last night.

Here’s what they say about it:

The oscillators, filters and envelopes closely model components found in some of the great monophonic and polyphonic synthesizers of yesteryear. Modules can be mixed and matched so you can build hybrids, but what sets DIVA apart is the sheer authenticity of the analogue sound.

They’re not kidding. The sound of this synth is fantastic, and the interface is a joy to use. Zebra is a more complicated beast to tame, and its interface illustrates that pretty well. But what Diva lacks in complexity (not necessarily a bad thing, in my opinion) it more than makes up for with its sound and its wonderfully intuitive interface.

The flexibility of the modules you can “snap” together makes it hard to tear yourself away from it. When I realized what I could do last night, I started putting the pieces together to recreate my beloved Juno-6. It managed to feel like it even down to its look. (Some of the modules, like DCO for example, are specifically modeled after the Juno.)

The one regret I have about this synth is that there is no arpeggiator. That feels like quite an omission, and is one reason why it won’t be replacing my Juno any time soon. That said, though, for a lot of my projects, I may now have found something worthy of standing in for Zebra—and it seems only fitting that it’s from the same people.

Check out my Diva test to hear what Diva can do. There are no effects plugins anywhere but on the main melody. Listen to those atmospheric pads, strings, and bells behind it, and the tone of that bass. Seriously impressive.

For anyone interested, I’ve just whipped up a quick comparison demonstrating my Doctor Who bassline with Diva set to Divine (the highest possible accuracy setting) compared with Diva set to Draft (the lowest possible accuracy setting). Not a humongous difference, but Divine is (obviously) noticeably better.