I've just walked to the Post Office and back to post a birthday card, and it's a grey old day out there; Charfield Hill was wreathed in mist, and the cloud level is low enough to have completely hidden the Tyndale Monument at Nibley. And yet my mood today is better than it has been all weekend, which I spent feeling very maudlin and unsociable. It's almost certainly because I got a decent night's sleep last night (and another score of 100 from my phone). I'm still in pain, but not as much as I was last week so I think I've recovered from those two long car trips as much as I'm going to. Getting a decent amount of exercise last week will have helped with the pain, too. But as I sit here at the computer I am glad I'm wearing a large and very snug Real World Studios hoodie at the moment, because the house doesn't feel anywhere near as warm as the 16°C which the desktop thermometer in front of me is showing on its display. It's chilly in here, and my hands are cold. I think a large mug of tea may be called for when I've uploaded this post.

The leaves on the cherry tree in the back garden are beginning to turn and there were plenty of leaves from the Virginia creeper on the drive this morning. Autumn has definitely arrived and with the wind coming from the north at the moment, it's not a surprise that the house feels cooler. While I have yet to switch the central heating system back to automatic, I have already used its "boost" setting to blip it on for an hour several times over the past few days. And I've already fired up the gas fire in the living room once, too. The forecast for this week is for the wind to switch back round to the south, so things should warm back up a bit. That's good; for the last three years I haven't needed to switch the heating system back to its timed setting until the last week of November. This summer has been cooler and wetter than those of late and I suspect I might not manage that again in 2024 but I hope I'll make it to November, at least. The last time I didn't manage to hold out until the end of October was back in 2018.

And that reminds me of something I need to do...

I've just updated my energy usage spreadsheet. It's interesting to see how the upgrades I've made to the house over the past couple of years have affected things. Getting a more efficient central heating boiler installed at the end of 2023 brought down my peak usage quite noticeably over last winter when my main energy costs were heating the house and the hot water. But thanks to my new solar panels, I've had to modify the graph which plots my total energy usage since August 2022 so that it shows negative values, which is absolutely wild. Here, have a look:

(Yes, of course I plot this sort of stuff with a spreadsheet. Doesn't everybody?)

Ruth and Rob are celebrating their birthdays today. It really doesn't seem like twenty years ago that I was chronicling their birthday party here on the blog...

I'm pleased to report that the car passed its MOT on Wednesday. The ominous rattle that it's been making for the last couple of months or so turned out not to be the exhaust at all, but a plate on the bottom of the car that protects the oil cooler. It had split, and was too damaged to be welded back together so that needed replacing. Although that was cheaper than a new exhaust, once I'd added getting the air-conditioning system repressurised, the bill was still getting into significant "ouch" territory. It needed to be done, though. And now the car is all set for the winter.

As usual while I was waiting for the car's service to be completed I spent the morning in the Mall at Cribbs Causeway. This year I've really noticed a decline in the variety of shops there (even if a hoarding on one unit which is currently being refitted proclaimed the imminent arrival of a Lego shop) and the number of jewellery shops selling high-end watches is getting ridiculous. Practicalities are out; luxury goods are obviously where the money is. I didn't discover any nice retail opportunities in the kitchen shop, but I did wander over to the rest of the retail park (which is aimed at people in significantly lower income brackets, like me) and picked up stuff like new laces for my hiking boots and a new belt.

Shoelaces. I'm writing about shoelaces now.

Oh, how exciting the blog has become; the trips to exotic foreign countries have stopped, I don't go skiing any more because it's not as much fun when you're on your own; instead you just get the day-to-day ramblings about what has become a rather sad, predominantly solitary existence. How has buying shoelaces become out of the ordinary enough for me to decide that it's worthy of note here? Probably because I am, at heart, a boring old git and I have always been one. But much to my surprise, I'm actually going to defend myself here: the fact that the laces on my boots were frayed right through to the core wasn't actually the thing that has been bugging me for weeks; it was the fact that every time I've put on my boots recently, I didn't do anything at all about replacing them. This week not only did I finally do so, I did so by making a significant effort to get out in the world instead of resorting to buying stuff, sight unseen, off the Internet (a practice which has become my default response to things since the pandemic started). That feels worthy of note to me. I still don't think I'm at the stage where my mental health has deteriorated to the point where I need to go back on medication, but it has definitely declined quite significantly since the summer. I'm just not feeling the joy in anything right now so a new pair of shoelaces feels to me like a major triumph. I wish I was kidding about this, but I'm not. And no, this isn't intended as a "poor little broken me" post that's soliciting your sympathy, either; it's just me being honest about the state of my health at the moment.

Because the blog also acts as my online diary. I use it to record how I'm feeling as much as it's about what I did each week; maybe in another twenty years or so I'll find myself wondering what sort of state I was in as 2024 drew to a close, and I'll be able to come back here and find out. Yeah, Chris: not terrible, but not great, either. I'm not sure I'd get through a personal checkup quite as easily as my car got through its MOT.

In an attempt to cheer myself up a bit, I bought myself some new clothes as I walked back through the Mall to the car dealership. That's not something I do very often at all, but I'm pleased to say that it worked. I ended up walking quite a bit less than I managed last year, when I covered more than six-and-a-half miles, but I still managed to beat my step goal for the day. After calling in at the supermarket on the way home for a food shop, though, I was toast. As a result I slept relatively well on Wednesday night and whether you agree with me or not, that definitely feels like it was unusual enough and nice enough to be worth putting in the blog. So here we are.

I woke up on Thursday morning almost dreading to turn on the news and find out how bad the damage was in Florida from Hurricane Milton, but the West Coast of the state seems to have gotten through Milton's landfall, some 90 miles south of Tampa, relatively lightly. Having said that, the roof of Tropicana Field was shredded despite being designed to withstand winds of 115 mph. I went to at least one game there back when I lived in the area in the 90s. Tropicana Field was the home of the Devil Rays Major League Baseball team; now they're simply known as the Rays.

There have been remarkably few reported fatalities so far, although that will most likely change. There has been at least one incredibly lucky escape. Most of the deaths which have occurred appear to have been caused by an outbreak of tornadoes in the eastern side of Florida rather than by the high winds or storm surge directly associated with Hurricane Milton. After changing course the hurricane made landfall to the south of Tampa Bay which meant that rather than rising, the water levels in Tampa and St Petersburg dropped by five feet as the weather system sucked water out of the bay instead of piling it in. It must have been an eerie sight. But I'm still glad that I don't live in the area any more. A hurricane is rather more excitement than I'm looking for in my weather forecasts.

So, yeah; one active and adventurous day a week is more than enough for me these days. I'm much happier staying in the house making music in my hope studio. On Tuesday evening I had a brief moment of panic when the studio PC started switching to its BIOS screen instead of booting up. I immediately figured out that the most likely problem was that the five-year-old lithium battery on its motherboard had gone flat and luckily I buy CR2032 lithium cells by the dozen these days, so I took the cover off and replaced the battery—which turned out to be a far more complicated procedure than I expected because the battery holder was directly underneath the PC's graphics card, so first of all I had to yank that out. But my diagnostic skills were on point, and the new battery fixed the problem just as I'd hoped. Go me!

I have a number of musical collaborations on the go at the moment, so I have been back at work with Ableton Live. After the initial wobble I blogged about below I'm happy to report that version 12.1 seems to be working fine. I haven't had much need to try out the new features yet, but I've got plenty of stuff to keep me occupied.

It was nice and sunny yesterday so I took advantage of the fact and did my laundry while the panels on my roof were generating plenty of free electricity. What was I saying just now about how mundane the blog has become? This is much more the level of activity that I'm comfortable with getting up to these days. Well, that, and reading; I'm now just five books from my target of reading and reviewing sixty books this year and yesterday morning another splendid-looking hardback landed on my doormat: a signed copy of the autobiography of King Crimson singer and guitarist Jakko M. Jacksyk, Who's The Boy With The Lovely Hair? I'm looking forward to starting that one.

The UK was treated to another spectacular display of the northern lights last night. My brother Dave got some good shots from his back garden in Orpington and Ruth sent me some stunning photos that she'd taken up in York. At 10 pm the aurora was bright enough here for my phone's camera to pick it up through the clouds, although the results were nowhere near as impressive as everyone else's pictures.

In fact from the back garden what I could see looked suspiciously like distant clouds (although I could see stars shining through them) instead of any sort of auroral display I was familiar with. Perhaps the aurora was what was illuminating them?

The weather forecast was for the skies to clear after midnight, so I stayed up late in the hope that I'd get better seeing. I did, but the aurora did not comply. I stood on the back step of the conservatory while the local hedgehogs crashed about at the back of the garden. While my friends were posting spectacular pictures on social media, all I could see was a faint purple glow and my phone's camera hardly made a difference to the view at all:

By the time the skies here had cleared completely—enough for the temperature to drop down to freezing, in fact—the show was over. It felt like a bit of a bust compared with the spectacular display I got back in May but if that hadn't happened, I would no doubt have been raving about just how privileged I am to have seen the aurora from my back garden...

It's going up for four in the afternoon here and I'm pretty much sitting in the dark. There's a thunderstorm watch in place for the region until 3 am tomorrow and right now it's ridiculously gloomy outside and absolutely chucking it down. It's been raining heavily here since half past ten or so this morning and given how waterlogged everywhere around here already was, I was not surprised to hear that the M5 is closed again because it's under water. My neighbours are reporting that the A38 hasn't fared much better, and at least one of the drains in the road here is blocked, which isn't going to help matters at all.

But as Hurricane Milton bears down on the Tampa Bay area (it'll be the first time that the area has taken a direct hit from a hurricane since 1921) I found myself feeling very grateful that I don't live there any more, because the city is facing some pretty serious weather together with a storm surge that could potentially top five metres. More than a million people there have been told to evacuate. I had a play with the NOAA's interactive storm surge flooding map of Tampa just now and while my old digs don't appear to be threatened, I wouldn't want to be there right now, that's for sure.

What was I saying about taking the week off? Ableton Live just got a significant update. I've been using Live as my Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) since version 8 and I've already downloaded and installed the latest update (all 2.9 gigabytes of it!) and have been trying it out this afternoon. I had a minor issue with the new version after the installation had finished. Starting with this version, all data on VST plugins is stored in a separate data file and Live is supposed to perform an automatic scan to create this file when it's started up for the first time. On my machine Live fell over when it tried to do this, but after I restarted it and let it do the scan, it found all of the plugins I have on my studio PC and seems to be working fine.

I suspect the updated saturator will be the new feature I will end up using the most, although I'm keen to give the new monophonic pitch correction effect a try out.

Or I could stick to my guns, and just chill out all week...

Now that 50-90 is over for another year (the website will be going back into hibernation on October 16th) I've been thinking about what lessons I learned from taking part once again. And once again I'm going to summarise the main points (five of them this year) here on the blog. Any opinions expressed herein reflect my personal feelings and are not intended to represent the opinions or policies of the organizers.

5. THE KORG WAVESTATE IS A CREATIVE GOLDMINE

I don't think any piece of kit I've ever acquired has given my interest in sound design such an intense boost as the Korg Wavestate Mk 2. I bought mine back at the end of January in readiness for this year's FAWM adventures and once I started creating my own sounds for it using Korg's editor / librarian software, I found that I was tapping into a seemingly endless source of inspiration (and that's without investigating the ability to import my own samples into its enormous memory, which is still on my list of new things to try). On days where I wasn't feeling the urge to create a song (and I had more than a few of those this year), I'd fire up the editor and just have a play. I'd have another two or three patches saved in less than an hour, and these invariably ended up forming the foundations of a subsequent piece of music. I love the thing.

4. AND SO IS THE WARR GUITAR

This year I've been trying as hard as I can to break out of at least some of the musical habits (or ruts) which I've inevitably acquired over the last fifty-plus years of playing guitar. One brute-force method of achieving that was to take up an entirely new instrument, one which I had absolutely no idea how to play at all. That turned out to be a Trey Gunn signature series 8-string Warr Guitar tuned in Crafty Tuning (that's Bb F C G D A C D from low to high) which I acquired back in May.

I think I was successful in breaking out of any familiar patterns with it, even if—when you get down to analysing its basic structure—the piece of music in the player below is a simple blues. I mean, listen to the final solo on it! This was the thirty-ninth piece that I'd recorded for this summer's challenge, so by rights I should have been running out of ideas by this point but instead here, I feel like I was achieving the fluency I normally get out of a synth line but I was doing so while playing a stringed instrument. And I'd only been playing the thing for a few weeks at this point. I had one of those "Whoa, is that really me?" moments when I played this one back:

3. I ACTUALLY REACHED THE "I'M USING TOO MUCH COMPRESSION" POINT

I honestly didn't think such a thing existed. Believe me, nobody is more surprised by this than I am. Much as I love xFer Audio's ridiculous (and free) OTT Compressor for the outrageous heft it adds to a sound, this year I found myself removing it from the vocal chain in my Ableton projects (it's in my template as a default, sitting immediately after iZotope's Nectar plugin) and using something a bit more subtle instead because it felt like it was just too over the top for what I needed.

2. DON'T BE AFRAID TO REWRITE

I still write lyrics in longhand before I record them. But this year I switched to typing them up into a text file (so that I could post the lyrics on the 50-90 website) before I recorded them rather than transcribing the results after the fact, which is what I used to do. This gave me an opportunity to edit and polish what I'd written before I got round to singing it. The more I did this, the happier I was with the results I was getting, so I am now an enthusiastic convert to the practice of revision.

Similarly, this year I felt comfortable in holding off on posting a song if it felt off somehow or if something was niggling my subconscious about it. Instead I would give the initial recording a listen on my headphones before falling asleep and trust that my subconscious would figure out what to do overnight. I was surprised by how many times I woke up next morning with a clear idea of just what I needed to do to improve the version of the song I'd already made—even to the point of performing major surgery on a song's structure (which thankfully is very easy to do in Ableton).

And there were several occasions where I went back to a song a few days later and remixed it still further. I don't think I've done that before more than a couple of times. While this significantly reduced the speed at which I got to the target of fifty songs, I believe that I ended up with fifty much better songs as a result.

1. AI IS SUCKING THE JOY OUT OF THE EXPERIENCE

I blogged about this last month and I stand by what I said then. I found it very difficult to enjoy the artistry of some of the songs by other FAWMers I was listening to this summer, because I either suspected or knew for certain that they had been made by giving one of several new generative AI websites a text prompt rather than by playing real (or virtual) instruments with a real person doing the singing. And once I realised that I was being put off listening like this, it became really obvious to me that AI was sucking the joy out of taking part. It's really pissed me off, particularly because some of the AI users have swamped the site with the stuff. It's easy to be prolific when all you're doing is typing a few suggestions into a text box on a website. How does an artist who creates everything herself compete with that?

Personally speaking, I'd be much happier if AI tools were excluded from the challenge entirely next year. And to be honest, I'd even include Band In A Box and its ilk in that ban. I can't think of any sort of supportive comment to leave when someone hands off the creative process to a machine like this, so I just don't bother.

Why? Because there's no effort involved. I can't appreciate the artistry of their playing, because they're not playing anything. In fact no work is required at all. There's no mastery needed, and worse still, using AI removes any incentive for a user to work towards achieving it. Their current skill level will never, ever improve. It's like getting your dad to do your homework. You get good marks, but what's the point?

You're probably fed up of hearing me say this, but I feel rather out of sorts this morning, even though I got another sleep score of 100 last night (thank you once again, long-release ibuprofen capsules). So I'm sitting here at the computer and still waiting for the coffee to kick in, listening to XTC's classic album English Settlement as it plays on the big system in the living room.

I don't think I feel down, just very tired. I have no motivation to do much of anything today, I'm afraid. My diet might have something to do with how I'm feeling: I'm no longer jacking up my flagging energy levels with fizzy drinks or snacks, and there isn't a single biscuit, chocolate bar, or packet of crisps anywhere in the house. As a result of that I now weigh less than two hundred pounds for the first time in more than a decade. But this low feeling might also be the form that this year's post-50-90 crash is going to take; this is usually the week when it kicks in for me. When you suddenly come to a complete standstill after you've metaphorically had your creative foot to the floor for more than three months, there is always a reaction. Withdrawing from protracted and intense mental work is tough. Either way, I'll probably spend today just chilling out. Maybe I'll take tomorrow off, too. Later in the week I'll start work on a couple of non-50-90 musical collaborations I have in my queue and once those are under way, I should be fine.

And at least I'm more or less on top of housework at the moment. I took advantage of the nice day on Saturday and managed to get the Virginia creeper trimmed and the lawn cut, so I'm not going to feel guilty or beat myself up over taking a day or two out and doing as little as possible, although as it's sunny right now I'm putting a few loads through the washing machine to take advantage of the free electricity I'm getting from my solar panels. And to be honest I haven't really had time to slob out very much at all so far this year. In fact now that I think about it, I haven't taken a proper break at all since last Christmas. Maybe it would be wiser if I just take the whole of this week off, then?

Thanks to everyone who has already bought my latest album (the link is at the top of the page if you want to give it a listen). As a result of those purchases I got another one of those nice emails from Bandcamp at the weekend telling me that I'd passed another thousand-dollar-milestone in total sales. I love getting those emails even more than I love getting the "ka-ching!" ones, because quite frankly I never thought my musical adventures would ever result in me actually getting paid. With actual money. It's not why I do this, but it's very nice when it happens, all the same.

Right; English Settlement has stopped playing and I've started listening to Yes's Tales From Topographic Oceans, so that looks like my afternoon sorted...

While the clock ticked down to the end of this summer's 50-90 challenge yesterday, I was out and about doing stuff. First of all I called in at Real World to pick up my dinner jacket, which I'd left in the wardrobe in my room when I stayed there in July. Was this a subtle ploy by my subconscious to provide an excuse to go back there for another visit? I don't know, but I wouldn't put it past it. And it worked! Lisa very kindly let me have a peek at the Big Room to see how it looks now that the system in there has been upgraded to 9.1.4 Dolby Atmos immersive audio. The really big Exigy monitors are back where they should be behind the gigantic SSL mixing desk, with the left and right surround speakers attached to the Big Room's pillars and the presence speakers suspended in cages from the ceiling. It looks spectacular. Being in that room never fails to put a big smile on my face; it's the Sistine Chapel of recording studios as far as I'm concerned.

After dragging myself away from Box I headed east to call in at Puretech Solutions so I could drop off a couple of poorly drum machines and collect my newly serviced Juno-60. I had a very nerdy chat about music education with Julie and then drove back home. By the time I'd plugged the Juno back into my studio, the countdown clock had run down and 50-90 was over for another year, but seeing this full stack of synths in my rather more humble studio makes me smile, too.

My final tally of tracks for 50-90 this year was 56. I'm quite happy with that. And with no chance of adding to that total, I didn't set about recording anything new with the Juno but instead settled for a quick play to make sure that it was working correctly (it was, of course. Thanks, Dan!) And I had a more pressing task that I needed to attend to...

...which was to put the finishing touches to the sixth album that I've released on Bandcamp so far in 2024. This one is full of instrumental music that was mostly recorded after I got back from Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios at the end of July. At the time, I felt energised and enthused by the experience but as August wore on I began to notice that rather than this feeling wearing off, it was getting more intense and I realised to my horror that I was becoming properly manic. That episode ended up continuing well into September, at which point I crashed back into a considerably more familiar mood of depression.

Fun times? Not really. I'm glad to say that I think things are settling back down to normal this week. But in trying to capture all of those conflicting feelings as music, I think I ended up making some original and unusual recordings. How many artists do you know who have played a duet with a thunderstorm, eh? Given how up and down it all ended up sounding, I thought that Mood Swings was the perfect name, so that's what I've called the album.

And many thanks to everyone who has (amazingly) already bought a copy!

Yesterday I wrote my fifty-fourth piece of music for this summer's 50-90 songwriting challenge. And this one incorporated the strange sound that Boeing's troubled Starliner spacecraft started making while it was docked to the International Space Station recently. It ended up sounding rather more like the Talking Heads than I'd expected, but I was pleased with the result.

That link will only work for the next couple of weeks or so until the FAWM website goes back into hibernation, by the way. This cuts down the administrative workload of deleting the dozens of spammers who create an account on the site purely so they can tout their wares in the forums or drop a backlink to their websites. And there are a lot of them doing that, too; I've deleted more than sixty fake accounts in the past week alone. Thank goodness the Stop Forum Spam website exists; when I see a new user with a thousand entries in their database (as several I checked did) it's a strong indication that they've not signed up for the challenge in order to hone their songwriting chops...

The site will stop accepting submissions for new songs at 1 pm BST tomorrow (which is when it will no longer be October 1st anywhere on the planet) so I'm planning on getting at least one more song done before then. I'm expecting a couple of new microphones to be delivered this afternoon: a Chinese made MXL 990 large diaphragm condenser microphone and its small diaphragm counterpart, the MXL 991. I'm keen to give them a road test as soon as possible, as despite its extremely low price, the 990 in particular gets some unexpectedly good reviews.

Tomorrow I'm also getting my trusty Juno-60 back from Dan at Puretech. Sadly I won't have time to plug that back in and give it a try out before 50-90 closes but I'm very much looking forward to having it sitting back in my studio where it belongs. It's been a valued part of my musical setup for decades and I've really missed having its sounds available this summer. With the emphasis on "valued", too: there's a recently serviced one for sale on Reverb at the moment that is going for £3,000...

It's Bandcamp Friday this week. I'm hoping to have compiled another full album ready for release then but as I haven't even started to consider the track listing, yet alone come up with a catchy title for it, I may decide to just skip it this month.

I only have so many spoons. And I don't have as many as I used to.