Thursday 28 June 2012

On Monday I gave some attention to the rhyme schemes in Hume’s songs, which require a bit of thought as to how to make them convincing. For example, ‘love’ rhymes with ‘Jove’ and with ‘prove’ in different songs – and let’s not even bring in Burns’s spelling of ‘luve’ in Red Red Rose. Attempts at historical pronunciation can be embarrassing if the end result sounds like the singer or actor is just trying to put on an ill-fitting accent, but there’s some good stuff on this (more here).

Now that our Hume-related attention is turning from the music to the logistics of getting everyone in the room at the same time, I’ve had a brief chance to listen to some more of the takes from the Mackintosh recording sessions two years ago. Despite having had them available on every computer and mobile device ever since, I’ve still got an hour of material to go before I’ve even completed my first set of preliminary notes before editing.  I’m treating this as a lesson not to try to record music like that any more: with time for lots of takes, unless you’re ruthless about chucking stuff away as you go along, you just give yourself an enormous production job down the line.  So the Hume recording will be using our Revenge-style ‘two takes, fix anything that’s still dodgy after that, move on’ technique which worked rather well in Aldeburgh: we’ll have rehearsed for quite a while, and we’ll be basically replicating the show from the previous day, as before. We’ll also be returning to the wonderful acoustic of Crichton Church, which Roy O’Neil reminded me we haven’t recorded in since 2004. We’ll still take our own heaters.

I’ve been helping my mum and dad with their impending house move, after 56 years.  Tempting as it is to attempt lots of the admin online, it usually fails compared to phone calls and face-to-face. The site www.iammoving.com which is recommended on a government website is a huge waste of time: it generates blank PDFs to send out, and the companies it contacted for me all either refused to accept the information, or received it in the wrong department and took the wrong course of action as a result. Avoid.  Also, my O2 broadband dongle (which only comes out for holidays) managed to corrupt the registry on my trusty old Dell laptop, so hooray for Google and the various suggestions which saved me from the hours I would have spent following Microsoft’s advice. Chkdsk to the rescue.

The dulcitone is back out of its flightcase beside me here, and is being pressed into service with some ballads in preparation for more rehearsal with Alasdair next week.