Sunday 8 July 2012

On Thursday Alasdair and I were back in the university concert hall with more ballads. I took the dulcitone with me this time, so our version of Hind Horn, based largely on Duncan Williamson’s, started off with the Kraftwerk Autobahn riff played on strangely wooden-sounding tuning forks. I’ll have to think of something more original for the final thing but it sounded great.

On Friday I had my long-awaited induction into classical editing on Pro Tools, so ever since then I’ve been sneaking off to the sofa or the hammock with a big Sony laptop to edit the Mackintosh sessions, and I already have rough cuts of about 25 minutes of material. Doing first edits is much more fun than listening to all the takes, or the subsequent long hours spent doing painstaking tweaks. And it’s a huge relief, as those hours and hours of wav files have been staring at me reproachfully for the last two years: they might start to take shape into a record soon.

I now also have two prints by Wilf Lunn on the wall in my office: his childhood memoir of being brought up in Rastrick by deaf parents is fantastic too, just the thing to aid my convalescence when I was suffering with a stinking cold a couple of weeks ago.  Someone gave me his ‘Mad Things to Make from Vision On’ book when I was about 10, and I can still do lollipop lettering.