Tuesday 30 March 2010
Queen Street Low Level station, FREEZING
I'm on my way home from a long day's work at Delphian HQ working on the master of our Edinburgh live CD, which unless we change our minds will be called Late Night Sessions. Eight hours of hard concentration and listening has paid off I think, with a rather nice record, and my brain dribbling out of my ears.  We'll listen again in the cold light of another day and see if it's really finished.

Great chunks of central Scotland are under snow again: I was very happy to be seeing it from the comfort of the train this morning, sharing a carriage with another Dahon Ciao owner.

More on evaluation culture - Grahame Lock from this article in today's Guardian: 

Imagine that managers are going to assess the quality of restaurant meals but they have no sense of taste. They have no idea – everything tastes the same to them. So what are they going to do?  They will undertake evaluations such as how many minutes did it take for the soup to arrive at your table, how many words of explanation did the waiter use, and so on.

The first sentence is the key one.

Hm, perhaps I should have bought a black beret (see fourth paragraph).

Monday 29 March 2010

Barnaby came over this morning and we slaved over a hot Word document for a few hours. Then I practised some Haydn, and this evening started on a recorded version of Corne Yairds built around a guide track of my terrible guitar playing (and, more usefully, a click provided by one of Pamela's recorders): all that time spent learning lute tablature last summer didn't go to waste after all. There are now four tracks gradually coming together on my laptop, enough for an EP.

I just looked out the window and it's snowing again - what happened to spring?

Friday 26 March 2010

I've been writing; it takes me a long time.  I also fitted in a bit of recording on a 28 year old project, and on Wednesday spent a happy hour and more in Tchaiovna with Steve S-T sharing enthusiasms. 

Here are some pictures of melodicas in black and white (cool stand) and in colour (especially the socks), to make up for the fact that mine is a little neglected at the moment. 

I've been listening to this a lot - Mr Frith will be playing in Edinburgh 21 May, see you there -  and reading this.

Sunday 21 March 2010

Looking for this I found this and am none the wiser about either. Dan Bodah played a track from the LP this morning.

I'm finishing off another funding application here, mostly a straightforward and clear process in this case. But there's a section on 'evaluation' where you have to detail 'how you plan to monitor the progress of your activity and to evaluate your achievements from the start and throughout the activity'. Again, that sounds fair enough ... until you start to think about it. If you're any kind of artist, evaluation is what you do. All the time. In fact, given that no-one is going to be fed, clothed or sheltered by my making music, the only motivation left for doing it is to do it as well as possible, and constantly redefining the criteria for that is part of the process. Is what I'm doing any good? How do I make it better? Is what I've just done any good? Is it worse than what I was doing three years ago? If so, why? Is what I mean by 'good' now more appropriate than what I meant by 'good' then? Did we work well together that week? Why wasn't so-and-so on quite as good form as s/he was the time before? What can we do to make sure s/he gives their best? Is anyone out there interested in what we do anyway? How do we fit in with what's going elsewhere? Are we looking in the best places to find our audience? Trying to provide a detailed plan for a structured evaluation is a bit like being asked to explain how you intend to keep your respiratory system going for the next week. It's certainly possible, but the response is likely either to be fatuous or exceedingly lengthy, and either way it won't  actually help you to breathe.

Saturday 20 March 2010

Settling into what I hope will be a quiet weekend here, catching up on unanswered and unopened mail.

Yesterday in the morning I headed for the Rosneath peninsula with John and Sally Butt, to look at a rather spectacular Broadwood grand piano from 1844: very nice it was too. Then I had another go at recording harpsichord parts to go with Bill's harp playing, before deciding that I couldn't mentally multi-task quite well enough, and re-stringing my guitar instead. Thanks to Billy from Guitar Guitar for recommending d'Addario extra hard strings to compensate for the short scale length (and to Allan Neave for recommending him). Later on, my backing track for Hanon book 1 was complete ... for the time being.

I'm including the following sentence (pasted from our skype conversation) at the request of Catherine Motuz for the benefit of some Basel residents: 'I think being an artist of any kind involves wondering what to do with your life: it's part of the process'. There, public service blogging. Catherine's been busy on Photoshop too.

Thursday 18 March 2010

There are lots of reasons why I like this: for one thing, my home recording efforts aren't quite so well lit. Bill Taylor came over this afternoon with a small collection of wire-strung harps.

Wednesday 17 March 2010

Back from the Western Baths with Greg, where we repaired after some mandolin testing.

Yesterday my copy of the new CD by Chris and DG arrived in the post, and it's enormously entertaining. I think 'completely bonkers' were my exact words. Get one here. I took the silly photo of them standing in a digger that's on the inside of the digipak.

I've also been reading this (well done Dave F).

Tuesday 16 March 2010

Oh no! My lifestyle plans for after August are shattered.

Healthier lifestyle plans are celebrated in this book, which keeps luring me away from my desk and over to the sofa. And it features the Western Baths, the Arlington, Drumsheugh, North Woodside, and Govanhill (or Calder Street as we called it) where in my 20s I finally learnt to swim with the help of my dad. Sadly Whiteinch baths, where he used to take me on Saturday mornings when I was much younger, was demolished in 1998. I wish I'd made the effort to go back there first. And I'd never realised until now that the strange bowl-like features along the edge of all the old pools were actually spitoons. Oh.

Monday 15 March 2010

I'm starting the day by looking at some CD booklet design drafts ... later on I'm going to crawl out of my hermit hole here and go to a concert: that will be radical. Yesterday morning I picked Pamela up from the station, so that before her rehearsal she could come over and play impossible stunt recorder overdubs on the tracks I've been putting together. She laid about 15 recorders out on the sofa and asked me which one to use: and I had absolutely no idea.

later
The RSAMD foyer is a very useful place for bumping into musicians, which I guess is partly what it was designed for. So after hearing Peter Whelan and Pamela do amazing things with their respective concertos by Antonin Reichenauer (a new discovery) and Vivaldi, I could catch up with a few people before getting back on my bike.

Dull task of the day was trawling through the tapes of our Edinburgh concerts in search of clean room atmos. I found some eventually.

Saturday 13 March 2010

40 zebra finches in a room. One of them (at about 46 seconds in) thinks he's Fred Frith. 

Friday 12 March 2010

Pre-10am harpsichord overdubs this morning were brought to a premature halt when I swiftly realised that quarter-comma meantone doesn't go with a 16ft sampled stepwise bassline in equal temperament. Will try again in 1/6 comma another day, but I still think my mug of tea is lying.

It's a useful exercise to listen back to your recorded self immediately afterwards, as often what seemed like a really good idea when you were playing it turns out to be the opposite. I think I nearly always agree with Robert Fripp's observation that it's better for the music if musicians don't get excited: all the things that made me cringe were related to rhythmic over-enthusiasm. 

Adventures in home harpsichord recording: in an A/B test of C414 in mono, as opposed to H4 in stereo, the 414 won. Of course.

I heard from Katy B tonight, now out of hospital and recuperating after an serious bike encounter with a pothole a few days ago. When I was cycling back from the baths this afternoon, there were some guys out patching up some of the nasty wheel traps on the backroads between here and Byres Road.

Oh, send Jamie some love: he and his writing comrades have been getting flamed all day.

Thursday 11 March 2010

I'm trying to keep momentum going by recording first thing in the morning, so three organ parts were in the can by 10am today, and I also programmed some rubato into a galliard by drawing it onto a graph. It's not exactly subtle, but it definitely sounds better than it did metronomic.

Then it was back to writing up a research proposal. I'm very glad I don't write for a living, as I would miss every deadline: the first version of this proposal committed me to writing a book, but I've quietly ditched that bit in favour of building a website instead.

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:

©2010 David McGuinness
all opinions are those of the author - you don't have to share them