Saturday 7 January 2006

Just back from London - door to door in less than 3½ hours: hooray for Stansted. In the mail waiting for me was a CD of demos from Michael Marra, a listening copy of the mastered Lion CD (see below) and ... my hat. Hooray again.

Thursday evening was spent in the gracious company of Ben Turner (and a rather sick Stellar) at Finesplice, mastering the CD with a multitude of sound-tweaking tools and a pair of very finely-tuned ears. Alison joined us halfway through, with Katherine monitoring progress by phone.

And yesterday Alison and I set off on a little Schetky keyboards odyssey, visiting Harold Lester to try out his wonderful 18th century Portuguese fortepiano by Antunes, and then trying some of the same music with harpsichord at the Guildhall (bumping into Annette Isserlis and Ken Aiso there). It looks like this record's only going to have fortepiano on it after all, but we'll try out a Kirckman/Broadwood-type harpsichord before ruling it out.

In transit I've been reading the long-awaited (by me anyway) Tricked by Alex Robinson. One of the few comic artists who draws characters that you really get to like.