Saturday 10 March 2012

In preparation for the Kenneth Elliott memorial concert in a couple of weeks I’ve been PDF’ing parts again, which is a necessary but frustrating task, especially when you’re working from old handwritten originals. But I like not generating another layer of paper every time we play a gig: having acquired the discipline of seldom writing anything into scores or parts, it means that the electronic versions will do the job every time, so no more need for trips to the post office with envelopes full of marked up music notation, and no need to maintain a paper library of marked-up parts. Everyone can just keep their own if they want to.

Last Sunday night’s session for Skins in the Harry Potter memorial chapel looked a bit like this from my vantage point behind the players.

Robert Irvine, vc Andrew Berridge, vla

Greg Lawson, vln1 Kobus Frick, vln2

Sam Okell at Abbey Road did a lovely job on the mix yesterday, which arrived by email last night. Most of my arrangement survived the process, which on any TV/film job is good going, and you can hear that one at the end of episode 10 on 26 March. Also surviving the mix process so far are Tim’s and my ensemble backing vocals (and my melodica) for his song at the end of episode 9, which should make you laugh.

If you’re in Glasgow on Thursday, you could do much worse than drop in to the university to catch John Butt playing the whole of Book 2 of Bach’s 48 at lunchtime. He did Book 1 last week and it was pretty remarkable.