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.