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'If you get
a chance, keep up with McGuinness's diary - it is as full of insight as it is
contrarianism' Metro
Tuesday
9 March 2010
By 9am
this morning I'd put added two harmonium overdubs to the ongoing dance
band/sampling experiment. After a bit more work on that I stopped for an
early lunch to listen to Bill Drummond's Re-imagining
of Belfast, which should appear on this
podcast too, if I've got the right one. If you listen, you'll
understand why I was so keen to take Bill to Skye back in 2007.
Sunday
7 March 2010
Back
on the Dahon
today for a trip into town before clearing out the greenhouse: spring has
arrived. While I was in town I picked up a vinyl copy of this
at Monorail, and on vinyl it
sounds great: everything went onto tape before it hit ProTools too. If
you've already got one, you might be thinking that Gordon
Ferries and I are starting to resemble one another: not so, the
captions are the wrong way round. Ali was convinced that Coral and Tar
should be 'just a B-side', but it's much better than that - I'm very happy
to have my wee harmonium accompanying him discreetly on such a beautiful
song at the end of the record. It's just a shame it was in B major and all
my thirds are wide: I should have got Sam to speed the tape up and then
played it in C.
Isn't this
interesting?
Friday
5 March 2010
Hope
you watched last night's episode of skins
and didn't notice my singing at the end, while Ollie was channeling his
inner Tony Hadley
to win fair maid, and the Ukulele
Orchestra were doing their thing.
Much
to my relief everyone has now agreed to the paltry offer of cash we made
for the right to release their Edinburgh Festival performances on CD, so
if all goes well a live album should be out in August. By Tuesday night it
even had a catalogue number. I've been doing little bits of editing in
amongst the other tasks surrounding my desk, and I've even started on the
booklet notes.
David
Erzberger came over for a harpsichord lesson this afternoon, which took a
very interesting turn with us trying out exercises in divided attention,
or 'how to improve your playing by looking out of the window'.
Wednesday
3 March 2010
Just
when I was thinking that I really should be listening to 6music to show
solidarity, WFMU played the Dokaka
version of Stevie Wonder's I Wish. Where did they get that from
then? I put on 6music for about 15 seconds and the signal was so
hyper-compressed that I couldn't listen to it. I thought the loudness wars
were so last decade.
Tuesday
2 March 2010
Work
avoidance strategies for today included taking the dishwasher to bits and
successfully putting it back together again, so that it's functioning with
a few parts missing, and their replacements are now on order. I also did a
bit of mixing on my newly-assembled backing track for exercises 11-20 of
Hanon, made up almost entirely of samples of Chris, DG and Alison making
unorthodox noises on their instruments. I thought it would make an
interesting study to hear how the various sounds would blend. Alison came
over for lunch, and on listening said 'It sounds like you, but it sounds
like us as well'. Not that I'm a control freak or anything: to be
honest I stole the idea from these
people.
When
not engaged in work avoidance, I gave my attention to two funding
applications and further developments over our forthcoming live CD.
Saturday
27 February 2010
Here's
the aerial view of my sample-trimming workspace this morning after
visiting the farmers market. The stylophone behind the MIDI controller
keyboard is to use as a pitch reference, suggesting a relaxed attitude
towards intonation - as does the fact that I'm still listening to WFMU
while working. This was prompted by a throwaway comment from Alison the
other day: 'sometimes out of tune is good'.
The
flights I'd booked to Canada for the summer which seemed a bit too cheap
to be true turned to be exactly that, when I heard by email last night
that the Canadian supplier had ceased trading. I'll get the money
back on those, but not on the connecting flights I'd booked to get to them
- travel insurance doesn't cover companies going out of business.
Meanwhile,
we're inching ever closer to the prospect of a live CD being released
sometime this year.
Friday
26 February 2010
My
addiction to WFMU continues - great new
tweaks to their iPhone app too. Speaking of radio, you can hear my Mary
Queen of Scots programme on Radio 3 on Sunday,
and for a week afterwards on Listen Again. Next Thursday's episode of Skins
also features me singing (not that you'd notice, I hope).
I was
up at 4.45am yesterday for the journey to Boughton
House and a fascinating day with Gareth Fitzpatrick exploring the
Montagu Music Collection, with the Duke dropping in from time to time to
see how we were getting on. There are far too many treasures to list here,
and enough unique sources of Scottish material to keep scholars and
musicians busy for a decade or two, but also some wonderful chance finds
such as these - I wonder if they've been there for the last 200 years or
so.
I now
have a very large list of half-answered questions about different bits and
pieces, that I'll be bothering people with by email for a while, and I
also now have a better idea of what notes Kellie actually wrote in the C
minor quartet that appears on Fiddler
Tam. My guesses from the very corrupt source that is the
Kilvarock MS weren't far off, but the closer I get to what he wrote, the
more I'm convinced that it's a very good piece.
lunch
break in the kitchen
On the
way back I bumped into Raymond
MacDonald who'd been in London rehearsing for a session on Jazz
on 3. He'd been on the same early morning flight too, but we were both
too knackered to spot each other. Apparently I get a passing mention in
this month's issue of The
Wire.
later
Just back from a Wee Curry Shop lunch with Bill Lloyd and Tommy
Pearson, in town for the ABO
conference on deckchair re-arrangement. Tommy made a very rash promise to
ConCal which we'll hold him to sometime.
Sunday
21 February 2010
I've
been rediscovering the joys of the great WFMU
on my phone. This morning I was particularly enjoying the very curious
choice of music being played off vinyl on Airborne
Event with Dan Bodah (he even played Andreas
Vollenweider), only to discover that the whole point of the programme
is that it's made up of records and CDs people have sent in to be played
one last time before he cathartically smashes them with a hammer on air.
He did make an excellent case for Mr V's LP's destruction. Afterwards:
'The world is a better place'. It's genuinely refreshing to have a whole
show where the DJ talks at length about the worst aspects of the music,
even when he likes it. And my life is richer for having heard this,
but I don't want to hear it ever again.
Talking
of mining music of questionable quality from the past, I spent some of
yesterday's sunny Saturday afternoon reliving the past with my old Atari
ST and Steinberg Pro24, which unlike Cubase v2, will run on a TV without
the now defunct mono Atari monitor. All I could recover was the stuff that
I'd recorded in 1989 and 1990, but I did find out that I only made a
backing track for the first 10 exercises of Hanon after all: the full 20
must have been on the drum machine a few years earlier. I'm not sure if I
can summon up the will to do it all again in the interests of less tedious
technical exercise: let's see ...
Otherwise,
I've been dealing with the endless deluge of email, enormous application
forms, record companies, and a forthcoming visit to a potentially very
rich collection of unknown manuscripts.
Friday
19 February 2010
With
an assortment of the great and the good - McCartney, Lloyd
Webber, the National Trust - all stepping up to the plate to offer to
save Abbey Road studios, I wonder
if it's not unconnected that it took them nearly a year (327 days to be
exact) to chase up a cheque of mine that got lost, relating to a memorable
session in the hallowed Studio 2 last February. I think EMI's credit
control facility is in India, so maybe the cheque got lost en route there.
But if it takes them a year to even think about chasing invoices, no
wonder EMI wants rid of the studios.
Only a
decade ago the classical music industry in the UK and its related
businesses like film scoring were still seen as amongst the strongest in
the world. Already Abbey Road is being considered as a museum.
I
spent part of this afternoon trimming and normalising samples which
consisted mostly of DG and Chris making silly noises. But some of them
might prove useful.
Wednesday
17 February 2010
One of
several excellent birthday presents from yesterday (design by Matt
Jones). More active than this
and more measured than this.
I'm
up to my elbows in funding applications, and listening to Jordi
Savall and ALK on Spotify.
Monday
15 February 2010
Much
as I'm enjoying not being a practising musician for three months, it's
quite strange to be spending my time planning projects that are in the
future, without actually accomplishing very much in the present. Apart
from putting up shower doors of course. And on eBay I've been flogging
bits and pieces of equipment that have been cluttering up the shelves in
here.
Yesterday
I got the laptop back into service as a recording device to jam down a
quick demo version of 'Adew Dundie', in the Skene MS version that gets the
rhythm wrong (twice), and I discovered that the version in my head and in
my fingers was wrong too - but differently wrong. But it got me thinking
about how we choose the basses for tunes, especially 17th century tunes.
We tend to assume that baroque rules apply, and that where I-IV-V chords
seem to fit, they're our first ports of call. But what about trying binary
I-O first instead? Also, the appalling state of my guitar playing reminded
me that I must sort out all those samplable noises that Chris and DG made
in here after our visit to The
Banana Leaf back in October.
Sunday
14 February 2010
This
weekend was thrown off course by my ill-advised attempts to put up a
sliding shower door. I got it done in the end, but I'll never trust a
B&Q self-assembly box ever again. It included screws and plugs in the
wrong sizes, and the instructions were full of helpful advice along the
lines of ... Step 1: do this. Step 2: do that. Step 3: make sure you did
this other thing before you did Step 2. Thanks to Mr Mohammed and the gang
at our local
post office, where as I suspected, I could buy HSS drill bits at 10am
on a Sunday morning.
This
cheered me up hugely for some reason.
Friday
12 February 2010
I
finally had the chance to listen to Paddy McAloon's home-made epic Let's
Change the World with Music today, after getting a sneak preview from
the multitrack at Calum Malcolm's place a month or two ago. I Love Music
must be the only song ever to include the words 'Pierre Boulez' and 'motherfucker'.
Wednesday
10 February 2010
I have
to draw your attention to this very
admirable enterprise - explore and enjoy. And email Steve to congratulate
him.
I'm
trying not to be too distracted by the recent delivery of one of these.
Meanwhile, this
is why being on stage with M Marra Esq is a good thing. I was stage left hiding
behind Su-a.
Sunday
7 February 2010
Over
the last couple of days I've had a few brushes with technology, with
varying degrees of success.
I got
my harpsichord down from its usual position up against the wall on Friday
(for the first time since its outing to Dumfries in October, shame) and of
course it was staggeringly out of tune. A chance to test out Cleartune
on my phone, and to indulge the habit I learned from John Raymond of
playing the instrument after tuning only one register. John always used to
play 'Oh I do like to be beside the seaside', but the amazing random
resonances led me off in a different direction altogether, and I reached
for another new acquisition to be tested, a Zoom
H4 field recorder. The result sounded like this.
In
1987 I bought a Korg drum machine and one of the first things I programmed
into it was a drum track for the whole of Book 1 of Hanon's The
Virtuoso-Pianist, to make the playing of those exercises a bit less
dull. A few years later, when I had a more elaborate MIDI set up at home,
I made a complete backing track to practise to, with every exercise
accompanied in a different style. I even tried to persuade a publisher to
sell it to music students (with no luck). Recently I found an old cassette
which had a demo version of exercises 1-10 on it, but I was sure I'd done
the whole book. The only way to find out would be to dig out my old Atari
ST, fire up Cubase (v2) and search through some old floppy discs. So my ST
came down from the attic yesterday, and the old mono monitor came out of
the cellar ... and it was dead. Cubase would only run in monochrome hi-res
mode so no more karaoke Hanon, and off to the recycling depot with the
monitor.
I also
tried using Virgin Media's online backup service Vstuff this weekend,
despite experience telling me that anything branded Virgin Media has a
tendency to be unreliable if it works at all. In this case, experience was
right - it doesn't work.
All
this as a background to fundraising for and management of future projects,
booking travel, a bit of teaching, our company AGM, and other backroom
activities ...
I'm
not the only one who noticed this,
that 'keep calm and carry on' has been replaced with 'shut up and be
afraid' for no good reason. I don't think it's OK either.
Friday
29 January 2010
Lovers
of the quirkier parts of Glasgow west end culture (including the peerless TchaiOvna)
still have time to object to the development that would entirely surround Otago
Lane with high flats. My own trip into the west end today was to
eavesdrop on the La Serenissima
rehearsal and catch up with Mhairi, Adrian and Katy.
I like
Michael Landy's art
bin very much, partly because I'm a bit of a hoarder and have to force
myself to get rid of stuff. Meanwhile, I've dug out my old Walkman Professional to listen to the wee
pile of old cassettes that's built up around my desk: today's included the Portsmouth Sinfonia plays the
Popular Classics, which includes this
and this.
In
amongst everything else, some gradual movement today towards our Edinburgh
recordings being released.
Thursday
28 January 2010
Still
at my desk with proposals and budgets for later in the year, and
occasional breaks to play guitar right
hand studies. I've been listening to this,
and got most of the way through the album before discovering how the
sounds were made: a sort of steampunk home studio. The music reminds me of
Hatfield and the
North for some reason ...
Thanks
to Iain for noticing that I didn't say when the Mary Queen of Scots
programme is going out. Best current guess is 28 February on the Early
Music Show.
Reading
the news of the much-vaunted iPad, it seems to be another device largely
for the passive receiving of content. Ho hum. Personally I've still to
find a device with half as useful a design as the old Psion
5 (I still miss it). OK, it had a boring LCD display, so you couldn't
watch things, but the batteries lasted for weeks rather than hours. And
despite being really tiny, its nifty folding design incorporated a
keyboard with nearly full-size proper keys, so you could easily input a
lot of information and get some work done. Is it really true that as
someone who likes to do things where possible, rather than watch other
people doing stuff, I'm in a small minority? And does no-one else find
that strange or sad? I remember being really shocked when I bought a
minidisc recorder a few years ago (Nov 2002)
and it had no mic inputs: a recorder that could only record what someone
else had already recorded for you. At least the iPad has a microphone ...
Tuesday
26 January 2010
Soup
of the day: French Onion and Thyme (heart
buchanan, lunchtime meeting with Chrissy). Tea of the day: Brodie's
China Keemun (bought in Jenners
food hall yesterday). Task of the day: ConCal budgets for the coming
year.
Monday
25 January 2010
The Edinburgh Larder,
with chorizo, lentil and parsnip soup and Gunpowder tea
I'm halfway through my day as a Radio 3 presenter, and thought I'd use
a couple of free hours to exercise my democratic rights visiting the
Scottish Parliament building to use the loo, and then sloping off here.
We
were in Stirling Castle this morning, recording Barnaby and Bill making musical
sense of the Os, Is and IIs that surround this intriguing 3D figure -
Head 7
really does look like Thatcher's Spitting
Image puppet, but with a Statue of Liberty hairstyle. In fact it's
Julius Caesar!
This
is one of the last chances to see John Donaldson's wonderful reproductions
before they're painted (!) and mounted in the palace, in time for its
re-opening to the public next summer. Thanks to Matthew Shelley from Historic
Scotland for making it possible.
Producer
Les Pratt and I sat in James V and Marie de Guise's chairs in the Great
Hall for me to record some of the script. You can probably guess who's
queen.
Bill
gave a wonderful musical exegesis of the complete sequence from head 20,
then Barnaby played his reproduction of the Iain Dall chanter (c.1690) in
the Chapel Royal. It sounded very much at home.
And
then we adjourned to the Darnley
Coffee House, which is ridiculously appropriate given that we were
making a programme about Mary Queen of Scots, for some of Neil's amazing
soup. We arrived just in time for the board to be chalked up as follows:
Yes,
that's right, Haggis Neeps and Tatties Soup (the optional haggis floating
on the top) for Burns Night. It was superb. Then we bumped into Alasdair
Campbell who kindly offered Bill and Barnaby a place to rehearse in
the Tolbooth round the corner, before Bill's train came.
later,
at home
Palace no.2 of the day was the Palace of Holyroodhouse, where Deborah
Clarke showed us round Mary's apartments and the site of Rizzio's murder,
which is genuinely unsettling, even with all the later mythologising of
the event taken into account. What you don't get from a picture like
the famous
one by John Opie, is the sense that Mary's private supper room off her
bedchamber is tiny - fitting six people in around a table would have been
a squeeze in itself, let alone a murderous mob.
When
we came to record, we had to turn all the lights and their fans off to get
silence, so we were making our way around Mary's rooms and artefacts in
the dark.
My
Burns Supper tonight was a haggis supper from the chip shop on my way home
from the station. Not my best nutritional decision of the day.
Sunday
24 January 2010
I'm
gradually getting through the week's email deluge, and also found time
today to walk up to Greenside Reservoir (still frozen over).
The
new series of Skins starts on E4
this Thursday. I had a (small) hand in the music for episodes 1 and 6 this
time round, but I haven't seen the final cuts, so I'll be watching with
bated breath as ever. Previous series are on special offer at iTunes too
...
Saturday
23 January 2010
It was
very sociable at the farmers market this morning, where I bumped into
various neighbours, Alison (fresh back from working in London) and Maeve
(visiting Glasgow for Celtic Connections) dropped by, and we had time for
a cup of tea and some hot buttery pancakes.
It's
been a busy week, mostly still dealing with the details of the year's
projects, and getting them nearer to a place where we can hit the 'GO'
button and say that they're definite. On Thursday I went over to the RSAMD
to hear Bill Taylor
and Margaret Stewart
experimenting with Gaelic bardic song: Kenna
Campbell and Margaret
Bennett were also there, so there was an almost tangible wealth of
experience in the room. Afterwards, sitting around in the RSAMD foyer over
some soup allowed for useful meetings with Alison, Bill, Barnaby, Greg and
quite a few other people who just happened to be around. It's wonderful to
have a place where students and musicians can hang out, but I guess it's
also very easy suddenly to discover that once you've spoken to everyone,
there's no time left to do any actual work. So I finally finished off my
script for Monday's palace visits yesterday.
Wednesday
20 January 2010
We're
making serious headway now with ConCal plans for the year ahead. If it all
comes off, we'll have up at least three, and possibly five, recording
projects underway in some form or another by the end of the year - that
just can't be right, there's no recording industry any more.
My
favourite joke of the day was when I was filling in my Royal Palaces
security form for a visit to Holyrood next week. One of the few forms of
ID that they'll accept is a Firearms Licence.
Tuesday
19 January 2010
I felt
quite healthy yesterday, fitted in a bike ride and swim. Well, it lasted a
day.
Barnaby
wangled me a ticket to Bobby McFerrin's school show this morning which was
a treat. Little TOrch (a small chunk of the Treacherous
Orchestra) played a great set too: it's refreshing to hear a
band that will happily play the same strathspey for about 4 minutes, and
keep it entertaining for about 2000 kids. Last night Barnaby and I were both at
Alasdair Roberts's place for a very convivial gathering of musos and
others.
It's
not often that I hear something that unexpectedly grabs my attention and
makes me stop what I'm doing, but Ollie
Halsall's guitar solo on Kevin Ayers's otherwise rather unremarkable Another
Rolling Stone makes a space for itself in an unassuming fashion, and
then does something strikingly beautiful.
Saturday
16 January 2010
I
would very much like one of these.
Friday
15 January 2010
Back
from a quick dash to Edinburgh this morning with Alison, to spy out the
venue for a concert in May 2011 at the invitation of the nice people at Nadfas.
Quite a
nice room really ... those Edinburgh lawyers knew how to look after
themselves.
Thursday
14 January 2010
I'm
writing the first draft of a radio script at my desk: it's late, and I'm
surrounded by paper, with a glass of Guinness Foreign Extra on my left and
a mug of tea on my right. It's not exactly Lorenzo da Ponte's Tokay,
snuff and bell, but it'll do. At least I now know more about
16th-century Scottish music than I did a few days ago, and my right hand
guitar technique is improving. This year's ConCal projects are gradually
taking shape too.
Saturday
9 January 2010
from
the kitchen window this morning
from
the front gate - more usually the street resembles an overcrowded car park
The
pond at the bottom of our road became a curling pond and skating rink
today, probably for the first time in decades. Not quite the bonspiel
but exciting nonetheless.
In
my idealism below about not working for other people, I forgot that I have
a radio programme to write for the BBC, so I spent Thursday afternoon in
the library working on that, and then I caught a cold. An excuse to
practise guitar exercises and watch the darts.
Wednesday
6 January 2010
New
Year Resolutions always get sticky a few days in. I spent most of last
year working for other people: it was all on fun projects (I only did jobs
I really wanted to do), but by the end of the year the pile of undone
ConCal projects and other stuff of my own had reached a critical mass. So
I decided that I'd spend the first few months of this year not working for
other people. And only a day and a bit in, I'm reminded of just how much
time and energy is spent generating even a small amount of momentum in any
group undertaking. The joy of just showing up and playing, like at
Sushil's session on Monday, suddenly seems very welcome. And working on my
own stuff, I don't get paid as much.
But
while at my desk today I fitted in a quite fortuitous conversation about
repertoire with Suzie, I've
dipped my toe into Google Docs for the first time, I've watched the foxes
going about their business in the snow outside, and I've listened to The
Who's first three albums (and a bit of Radio 3 for the first time in
ages). Still furthering my musical education.
Tuesday
5 January 2010
More
snow this morning, and it's not due to get above freezing for another week
yet: this is really unusual. I'm going to ease myself back into work
today, after spending the whole morning taking down Christmas decorations.
Yesterday
I was back at La Chunky, joining in
on a session for Sushil's next
album. I took the sensible combination of guitar, stylophone, melodica and
laptop, and managed to get all of them in there somewhere, along with the
studio's trusty Welmar upright piano. Iain
MacInnes pointed out that wah-wah stylophone sounds like a very
irritated duck. With the piano, I only really heard what I was playing
when we listened back in the control room, as the excellent Stu
Brown had been directed to channel Keith Moon, so the piano was
covered in blankets in an attempt to get a bit of separation and I
couldn't hear a thing ... it sounded a bit like Roxy Music actually.
We
reprised last January's reggae version of The Slave's Lament with Mairi
Campbell, and a horn section of Raymond
MacDonald on sax, me on melodica, and Iain MacInnes on whistle: not a
combination you come across often. When I was in full ring-modulated and
delayed guitar flight, I couldn't always tell which weird noises were
coming from me, and which were Dave
McGowan getting an incredible variety of sound from his pedal steel.
The studio had never managed to fit in eight people playing at once
before: these photos don't really give an impression of the amiable crush.
Scottish smallpipes sound fantastic with steel guitar,
incidentally.
Sushil
in retro analogue mode with cassette
me
and baby guitar - note stylophone and melodica neatly laid out before
starting
later
I started work eventually, pinning down dates and travel for projects in
the second half of the year ... while watching the BDO
darts championship of course. It's that time of year again.
Saturday
2 January 2010
Strange
musical synchronicity of the day coming up. I listened to The
Troggs Tapes for the first time this afternoon, still filling gaps in
my musical education. And then I found myself stumbling across 'The Best
of Bernard
Cribbins' on Spotify, and there on 'B-side
Blues' is a cryptic reference to ... The Troggs Tapes. Mr Cribbins
points out the sound of a 12-string guitar, and then that 'The Troglodytes
found it indispensable'. Now that is bizarre.
Anyway,
a Good New Year to one and all. I saw another, more experienced
ophthalmologist on Thursday, who basically told me that the previous one
was talking complete nonsense and I have only one eye condition, but I
have it very bad. Which is what I'd suspected.
Also
on Thursday my Yamaha travel guitar arrived, so I've been practising,
re-stringing it, mucking about, and putting it through a variety of silly
effects on my laptop in preparation for a session or two this week.
There's only a bit less paper on the floor.
This
year's new year's day walk looked like this:
and
today's like this:
|
concerto caledonia
