Sunday 29 February 2004

One of the most useful pieces of advice at melodicas.com is to use a shot glass to keep the screws in when you take the thing apart: the perfect screw receptacle. The problem is that all the way through the rather tiresome process, you're gazing at the glass wishing that there was something more gratifying in it. I've just spent some time with a chainsaw file, a screwdriver and a tuning meter (and a whisky glass), and having got the melodica what seemed like in tune, I tried playing it along with the CD of re-edited Dowland and it was still stinkingly out. Aargh. There's probably some obscure temperament at play that I haven't figured out, but I think if I tune the track up by 7 or 8 cents it might be a bit easier to get to the bottom of what's going on. Another unexpected job.

The rest of today was taken up with scheduling, looking over the company accounts for 02/03, printing out Kellie scores for the session producer along with a few parts that were missing, testing a few microphones with the cheap minidisc recorder I bought a couple of weeks ago, and far more importantly than all of this, building a great big fire in the back garden and warming myself at it for an hour or so on a beautiful sunny winter's day.