Saturday 13 December 2008

The latter part of this week got busier. Alison and Liz Kenny joined me in the British Library café on Thursday for tea and cakes: Liz assured me that these are an essential part of any library work day. I also bumped into David Owen Norris in the Reading Room, gleefully holding out an obscure edition of Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words and declaring 'This is gold dust!'. Then back in Glasgow yesterday, Matthew from the Edinburgh Festival joined me in Mother India for a very fine lunch, after the Wee Curry Shop was booked out. The spiced haddock with puy lentils, and Matthew's smoked lamb were particularly memorable. But if it sounds like all I've been doing is eating, it's just that I've been working on my own on an assortment of future projects, and such solitary wrangling doesn't really lend itself to be written about.

Still, I did start playing again this week, as last night Mark O'Keeffe and I had our first rehearsal of Hertel partitas in the balcony of the Guinness Room at the RSAMD.  Mark's initial surprise at how fast I was playing them 'That's impossible', soon gave way to him doing even more impossible things on the trumpet - it's really oboe music after all.

Yesterday I also got some hardware delivered along with my Sibelius upgrade, so that I now have a complete mobile studio that will fit in a bag (apart from the mic stands which won't). Sitting here at my desk, I'm surrounded by three pairs of speakers, which seems like an extravagance just to listen in old-fashioned stereo. I did a quick comparison once I'd set the new nearfield monitors up, which went like this. Computer speakers on my desk: well, they sound ok, nicely balanced, easy to listen to, what's the problem? New monitors, just above them: ah, now there's lots more space around everything and I can hear what's going on and where it all is in more detail and with less effort. Hifi speakers (Castle Acoustics Richmond 3) on either side of the fireplace: [response non-verbal, now dancing about].  So I think each set has justified its existence for its own type of listening. 

Tonight with the aid of the monitors I've been timestretching a fiddle part that DG recorded here some time ago ...