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The older I get, the more I realise that the only sensible response to an increasingly irrational world is to try and make nice things for people. And so I make music. Lots of it.
My latest full-length album sees me going more ambient than I've ever done before thanks to some new gear I recently added to the studio. Restless comprises six tracks which were improvised and recorded live, with no edits; what I did is what you hear. That's not something I do very often and by "very often" I mean "at all." You can also explore my increasingly extensive discography of older material at Bandcamp.
Looking for social media? Please follow me on Mastodon and check out my photos at Pixelfed and Flickr. If you're still dealing with Meta, for the moment I still have a Facebook Artist Page and an Instagram account.
FAWM gets under way in just over 24 hours, and I think I'm pretty much ready. I spent a happy couple of hours last night creating some custom patches for the Pocket Master I got this week (the menu-diving aspect isn't that bad, it turns out) and I'm very pleased with how good they sound. I've refreshed my default template in Ableton Live so that it reflects my current idea of what my best practice should be for new recordings. And I have installed the latest update of Arturia's Pigments software synth (it now has a new "modal" sound engine that's based on physical modelling and the FX section has new filters and even a vocoder!)
DHL have just delivered a few last-minute items for the studio including a set of flatwound strings for the Fender Jazz and a couple of better cables to run from the mixer I've plugged all of my synths into to the main mixer on the other side of the room. This afternoon I'll put new strings on the Jazz and I think I'll also restring my Squier Strat and the Parker Fly, because they're overdue for a change.
After that, I think I'll be all set.
I just saw a toot on Mastodon where the writer used "besiege you" instead of "beseech you" and oh, I get that vibe.
Not now, 2024 YR4.
It's been just over three weeks since my Red Panda Particle 2 was delivered and you won't be at all surprised to know that I've been playing with it a lot ever since. In the past week or so I've managed to configure Ableton Live so that I can drive both it and my Chase Bliss Mood Mk 2 using Max For Live without needing to use an external app; this turned out to be much more important than I'd expected it to be, because the Red Panda web editor turned out to block Live from talking to my Ableton Push, which is rather inconvenient given how central the Push is to my workflow.
Once I'd figured out what was going on and installed a solution (the first Max For Live device I found didn't do what I needed it to, but then I found one on Patchstorage that was pretty much just what I was looking for) and then carried out some experiments to see where the Particle 2 was happiest sitting in my effects chain, I had lots of fun generating vast washes of gert lush reverberant goodness that put the videos I posted last week (see below) to shame. So what else could I do but set about recording an entire full-length album of such things? Here it is:
I didn't know I could make music of the sort that you'll find on Restless. That's probably because up until this month, I wouldn't have been able to. I love the way new gear can unlock aspects of creativity that I didn't know were there...
And speaking of which: that Sonicake Pocket Master practice amp arrived yesterday lunchtime and I spent the next hour downloading a firmware update for it, installing a preset librarian that runs under Windows, and searching (to no avail) for its preset editor on the Google Play store. It's not there; they've got one for iOS on the Apple Store but not Google's so instead, I ended up downloading the .apk for my Android phone directly from the Sonicake website, but I haven't installed it yet because this will involve disabling some of Google's safeguards on running third-party software on my phone. It's not a complete show stopper because you can edit the patches on the device itself, but this involves some serious menu diving given that the only controls available on the device consist of a jog wheel and a plus and a minus button. But it's the sound that I'm interested in, so I stopped playing on the computer, plugged in a guitar, and ended up wailing away on the Ibanez RG770 with it for the rest of the afternoon. And actually, it's not bad at all. In fact it's really rather good. It even comes with a metal clip so that you can attach it to your guitar strap.
Judging by the sort of presets it comes with (there's a total of one hundred memory slots: fifty factory presets and another fifty for your own patches which are filled with copies of the factory presets when you first get it out of the box) I'd say that it's predominantly aimed at metalhead kids who want to play thrash or djent in their bedrooms and that's why I ended up using the RG770 for most of my road test. You can have plenty of stroppy, shouty fun with it on headphones or by feeding the output into your mixer (I very was surprised to find that the output jack wasn't a mini-jack like the Katana Go's but a proper TRS quarter-inch jack, which was nice). The tones can occasionally veer towards the harsh side, but quite honestly I was expecting that, given the thing's price point (it costs less than £50) and there is nothing going on that a judicious bit of eq can't tame. There are also some nice dense reverb effects built in, and I was able to get some bright clean tones out of it that enhanced the clang of my Squier Strat rather nicely. I can see myself using those sounds just as they are.
It also has a built-in guitar tuner and a metronome (the menu describes this as "Drums" and while this might be technically correct as the sounds used are drum samples, it seems close to false advertising). The build quality was considerably better than I was expecting, though I don't know if the thing will last or stand up to being knocked about too much on my desk, but in the short term at least, I think I'll be using it to get some big brash sounds for FAWM.
The FAWM website has gone live for this year's challenge (and yes, that's me at the end of Burr's welcome video saying "Oh yes!" because he asked me to...)
Much kudos is due to Burr, Beto, Nancy, Eric, Jen, John and the rest of the gang for all the hard work they've put in over the last couple of months to get the new, very sleek and spiffy-looking website up and running. It has lots of new features built in under the hood which are intended to make FAWMing a nicer experience for everyone (and also make life easier for moderators like me, hooray!) And instead of a simple FAQ there's now a boatload of comprehensive help documentation what I wrote available on the site's brand-new support pages.
But I have already suspended two new user accounts whose email addresses showed up in the Stop Forum Spam database, and it's not even lunchtime. See what I mean about spammers?
Over the past year I've built up so much credit with my energy supplier that it was getting ridiculous. So I asked for some of it back, and it landed in my bank account this morning with a considerable thud. I like being environmentally friendly, but being paid to generate electricity is even better.
So as I'm feeling flush and FAWM is approaching, I have just ordered a Sonicake Pocket Master guitar amp-and-effects-in-a-matchbox gizmo. And yes, I know I already have a Boss Katana Go (which I managed to get before they were discontinued) and I absolutely love it to bits and use it a lot, particularly on the Fender Jazz Bass, but that demo video for the Pocket Master just makes the thing difficult to resist. Impossible, even.
I'm sure I'll be reviewing it here on the blog once it's arrived.
The FAWM website should be coming back online today and as a moderator this means that I will have to assume my role in helping to keep things clear of SEO spammers and adverts for all manner of unpleasant things which have nothing to do with writing fourteen songs in twenty-eight days.
I hate spam.
For most of the last few days I've been busy helping to test the updated February Album Writing Month challenge website (the plan is for it to come back online for all users at some time tomorrow) and writing new help documentation for it. It's been nice to revisit my technical author skills, particularly as I've been encouraged to inject a little humour (and the occasional meme) in to the work. FAWM has an entertaining and rich culture which has developed since it first started two decades ago and I've been trying to weave some of that culture into the help pages. Songwriting should be fun, after all.
As you can see below I've also been spending time tweaking my studio in readiness for FAWM, but in doing so I have unexpectedly found myself working on a new ambient album, and as of right now I've got around half an hour of music finished. Each piece was entirely improvised and was recorded in a single take—neither of which I'm used to doing. The results sound very ambient indeed. I'm even beginning to think about how practical it would be to do some live streaming on Twitch along these lines; I suspect it would be pretty straightforward, but we'll see.
There's no Bandcamp Friday next month, but I'm planning on finishing this album and releasing it before FAWM kicks off once again at noon GMT on February 1st so that I can devote my undivided attention to writing (at least) fourteen songs in twenty-eight days.
It was below freezing here last night but today it's bright and sunny outside and the birds are flocking to the bird feeders I have set up in my back garden.
Which is handy, as this weekend it's the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch and as soon as I've updated the blog I'm going to put out a fresh scoop of food on the bird table and then sit by the window for an hour and see what shows up.
I've been doing these birdwatches since the 1980s, when they used to take place in the summer and I'd get people to sponsor me for each bird species I managed to identify in 24 hours. Some years I'd manage totals of more than fifty species by including a visit to Minsmere in Suffolk during the day, but I won't get anything like that here at home. It'll still be a very enjoyable way to spend the afternoon, though. And as I'm at home I can drink tea and dunk biscuits while I'm doing it, which is a welcome bonus.
I didn't just stay off social media on Monday; I didn't turn the TV on once. Instead, I spent the day reorganising my bedroom studio, which mainly consisted of changing cable runs, re-ordering mixer inputs and relabelling them all, switching out insert cables for low-profile ones with angled jacks (which has given me slightly more room on the desk) and reprogramming mix levels for presets on a couple of effects so that they're consistently audible. And now the Particle 2 runs into the Ocean Machine instead of the other way round, which seems to give much better-sounding results from the primary effects send on the desk. As a result, my ambienting has now got to the point where my setup will happily carry on all by itself:
Yes, I'm completely avoiding thinking about the state of the world at the moment. I don't have enough spoons to address the shitshow that is happening right now. As it is, I can barely deal with getting out of bed each day and all I can say about my current state of health is that when I do wake up each morning, my first reaction is one of baffled surprise that another day has arrived and somehow I'm still alive.
I'm not dead yet. So I'm going to focus on making the world a nicer place in whatever way I can. Given my circumstances, there isn't much of any significance I can do in that respect, but making music is one thing I can do, so let's start with that. I'm not going to roll over and give up. Not yet. Not until the day when I can't get out of bed any more.
I haven't logged on to Facebook this week. I won't be posting anything on Instagram, either. The way things are looking, I'm unlikely to be going back to them, either—at least, not on a regular basis. I have already removed the Facebook and Instagram apps from my phone, just to make sure. That's not a particularly significant act in the grander scheme of things, but it made me feel a little better this morning.
Instead, you can find me as @headfirstonly@mastodon.social over on Mastodon (where I've been since 2017) and as @headfirstonly@pixelfed.social at Pixelfed (where I signed up earlier this month.) Neither of these platforms spy on users or gather data on them without permission or spew a seemingly-endless torrent of misinformation and advertising at me. And neither of them is run by a narcissistic oligarch. I was less than surprised to realise that actually, these things do matter to me.
Do they matter to you?
David Lynch would have been 79 tomorrow. But he has left us, and the world feels much emptier, and significantly less weird than it did.
I first encountered his universe when some friends rented Eraserhead (1977) on video at some point in the first half of the 1980s. That film is all the evidence you need that he had an extraordinary talent for capturing the subconscious on celluloid. More than that; he could somehow trap Jungian archetypes in the camera. I've had conversations with friends who were freaked out because they'd seen things on screen in his movies that they knew from their own dreams. The imagery is surreal and disturbing but somehow also hauntingly sublime. We watched The Elephant Man (1980) together at much the same time and there isn't another director I can think of who understood how black and white cinematography could create magic like he did; but his work in colour takes your breath away. I still love his version of the Frank Herbert science fiction epic Dune (1984), even if it was nothing like the movie Dino De Laurentiis (or the rest of the world) was expecting. I can still remember going to see the Dune Exhibition at Universal Studios in LA that summer and being blown away by the costume design. Lynch never made another big-budget film but instead turned to crafting one disquieting treasure after another like Blue Velvet (1986), Wild At Heart (1990), Lost Highway (1997)—a film which I became utterly obsessed by—which he followed up with the surprisingly mainstream The Straight Story (1999) and the anything but mainstream masterpieces Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006). Watch any of those films and you'll discover worlds unlike anything else you've ever seen on the screen. And nobody could integrate music into the production quite like David Lynch could.
But it's always going to be Twin Peaks (1990) which will be the achievement for which he'll be most widely remembered. There aren't many television series which would induce me to travel half-way around the planet so I could make a pilgrimage to the locations where it was filmed, but for Twin Peaks I did exactly that back in 2012.
When I found out that he was working on a sequel set twenty-five years after the events of the show (just like Laura promises Dale at the end of the final episode of the 1991 series) I nearly lost my mind with joy. And the Return (2014) was even better than I had hoped. All I need to say to you if you've seen it are two words: "Episode eight." You'll know exactly what I mean.
Thank you for everything, maestro.
A quick reminder that there will be a free listening party for the new ICH album tonight at 20:00 GMT (15:00 ET, 12:00 PT) and you will all be most welcome.
As I promised yesterday, I have some new music for you. This one isn't like anything else I've ever been involved with releasing on Bandcamp. It's very much its own thing, so it has its own, separate identity and artist name: ICH. Yes, I'm in a band now.
Wir Sind ICH is a collaboration with my friends Ingrid N in Dresden, Germany and Henry Lowman in Great Falls, Virginia. This album came about simply because a mutual acquaintance of ours told us—during one of the listening parties on Bandcamp run by the nice people at Iapetus—that we really ought to be working together. We thought this was such a good idea that it's exactly what we did. The name we've chosen is simply the initials of our first names: Ingrid, Chris, and Henry.
The tracks are presented in the chronological order in which they were made, so you can listen to us as we discover the most effective way to work together and then run off with the results. Listening back to the album now, it's fascinating how the sounds evolve and certain motifs reoccur, played by different members of the ensemble on multiple instruments. It was great fun to make, and I suspect that this won't be the only thing you hear from us.
At the moment you can name your own price for 88 minutes of meditative, ambient goodness on a truly epic scale. I hope you'll give it a listen. And if you want to join all three of us for a listen, we're holding a listening party for the album this Sunday, January 19th at 20:00 UTC/GMT (21:00 CET) on Bandcamp. See you there!
Tomorrow I will have some super special music news for you.
Stay tuned!
I was getting some stuff out of the loft a few days ago and I knocked a couple of flight cases over. They crashed to the "floor" up there but I picked them back up and didn't think anything more of the matter until I went to bed that night, looked up, and saw that one of the plasterboard panels making up the ceiling was hanging loose by a couple of inches.
Ooops.
It could have been a lot worse. I've had friends who have put a foot through their ceilings before now. But this morning my local friendly neighbourhood home improvements guy has just put everything back how it should be, and I'm very pleased about that, to put it mildly.
After playing with my new Red Panda Particle 2 for a few days, I'm really impressed with it. I've already downloaded more than fifty presets for it from Patchstorage and I've been having lots of fun working through them to see how they fit into a send chain from my mixer that incorporates a Mooer Ocean Machine, the Particle 2, and my Eventide H90. I have also set up a second send channel which goes to my Chase Bliss Mood Mk 2 and I can even send the output from the Mood into the other effects chain, and vice versa. And this is before you factor in any effects from all the guitar pedals I have at my feet in the studio, or the sophisticated digital effects that my more modern synthesizers have built in to them.
The results, it's safe to say, are proving to be extremely lush. With the Mood's micro-looper channel engaged and set to either its "tape" or "stretch" mode, whatever sound I make ends up gaining an immense reverb tail that goes on and on and on and it continuously evolves in unexpected and interesting ways that are an absolute delight. You have to hear it to believe it. So here: listen for yourself!
I think you can expect lots of dreamy, ambient music from me once FAWM starts next month.
It's actually well above freezing outside this morning. Right now it's a balmy 6°C (43°F) in the back garden, which is a darn sight better than the -6°C it was overnight several times earlier this week! I just checked the forecast for the next week here, and there's no sign of a frost expected at all.
Even if my watch doesn't agree with me (it rated me "bad" for the depth of my sleep and gave me a score of 90 overall), I reckon that I had a good night last night. This wasn't what I'd expected at all, as I had decided by way of an experiment to try getting through the night without any painkillers, and I'd even left off the ankle support I use to strap up my left foot. Much to my surprise, I didn't wake up once. I kept nice and warm under the duvet despite it being -6°C (21°F) outside.
Maybe I should just give up trying to figure out what's going on...
For the whole of next month I'll be spending every day shut away in my home recording studio. Once again I'll be attempting to write 14 songs in 28 days for February Album Writing Month (FAWM). The blog will no doubt become obsessed with documenting my progress.
I've spent a happy and productive few hours today writing a bunch of help documents for the FAWM website, which will come out of hibernation on January 25th. It's the first tech authoring work I've done for a couple of years, but I still seem to enjoy the practice and the afternoon passed by remarkably quickly.
I think I'm done for today, though. I keep getting sidetracked.
It's been a whole year since I stopped taking antidepressants. If you've been reading this blog for any length of time you'll know that this hasn't exactly been a smooth ride, but I'm still convinced that it was the right thing to do. I definitely feel as if my cognitive abilities have sharpened back up since I stopped any medication. I was sick of the brain fog I'd had all the time I was on meds; they made it difficult for me to concentrate—and back in the day I'd been the sort of person who would regularly spend six hours or more doing something creative and never notice the passage of time.
I doubt that I'd have got through the year this way if I was still in a job. My stress levels are much, much lower than they used to be and they dropped still further yesterday when I found out that a gig where I'd agreed to deputise as a band's bass player later this month has been cancelled. Much as I love playing music live (and one of the members of the band in question told me he was sure I'd have been able to do the job standing on my head) I was getting profoundly stressed about cocking things up and letting them down.
On Tuesday night (before I found out the gig was cancelled) I struggled to sleep. Aside from being stressed, I'm in a lot of pain at the moment and even after taking a couple of paracetamol tablets I just couldn't settle. I let the ruminating thoughts take over, and once my amygdala had got the bit between its teeth, it's very hard to damp things back down again. It's a miserable experience, particularly because I know exactly what's going on and yet I still can't stop it happening. All I managed were a few short bursts of fitful dozing and that meant I got very little NREM sleep, so my watch gave me a "Bad" score on Wednesday morning. By the early evening I was exhausted. When I got to bed last night, I fell asleep immediately and only woke up once before morning. Today my sleep score has jumped from 82 to 98.
That seems to be the way things go these days; if I think I've finally cracked getting a decent night's rest, the following night is guaranteed to be one where it all goes to pieces again. Believe me, it gets rather debilitating after a while. For now, I feel okay but we'll have to see how I get on tonight.
Should you be interested in such things, I thought I'd let you know that I've updated my home page with a photograph of me wearing the new glasses I picked up last week. I also brought some of the text there up to date, as I realised that it hadn't been touched for a few years.
I really ought to check on some of this website's more out-of-the-way pages more often. It's nearly thirty years since I first started to put it together, after all...
It's still cold here. Yesterday afternoon it tried to snow in a very desultory sort of way and last night there was another hard frost with temperatures of -5°C (23°F) once again. Tonight the forecast is for it to get colder still—the TV weather forecast suggests it may turn out to be the coldest night of this winter—but the weather we're having at the moment pales into insignificance compared to the winter of 1962–63 when the country froze from Boxing Day right through to the beginning of March. I was just two years old at the time, but I have vague memories of playing in the snow. Last night I watched a BBC Winterwatch programme presented by Chris Packham that was made on the Big Freeze's fiftieth anniversary (the programme is also on YouTube, if you can't use the iPlayer link). It included a 1963 BBC broadcast by Cliff Michelmore, Derek Hart, and Kenneth Allsop about how the UK coped (or rather, how it didn't) with the lowest temperatures and the heaviest snowfall that the country had experienced for more than 200 years. In much of the country water pipes froze solid so tankers had to supply people with drinking water. Parts of Devon and Cornwall were buried under fifteen feet of snow for weeks. Supplies of vegetables, milk, coal, candles, glass milk bottles, and even disposable nappies came close to running out. The National Grid couldn't cope with demand, pylons and power lines iced up, and the electricity supply was subject to rolling blackouts. Dozens of people died in accidents that were directly attributable to the weather conditions and according to some sources the low temperatures were responsible for an additional 90,000 deaths over the course of the winter.
In the closing credits of that 1963 broadcast, I saw that the designer was a certain Ridley Scott. He did a good job putting the show together without any visible sign of a budget. I wonder what happened to him?
I was surprised by how much my mood was improved yesterday by simply staying away from social media and any news channels—and, as it turned out, by ignoring the television entirely into the bargain. Instead, I focused on making music, practising my bass playing, and spending much of the rest of the day just reading books. It was lovely.
I think I'm going to make a habit of doing this at least once a week from now on.
My latest package of new studio gear arrived yesterday. As I mentioned earlier, this included a new effect pedal: a Red Panda Particle 2 and I spent much of yesterday afternoon and evening playing with it. I am very impressed with it already, but I'll need to use Red Particle's web editor to enable MIDI synchronisation with my DAW over USB and tweak some of its other settings before I'm entirely happy with the results I'm getting from it. But why in God's name would you recommend using the editor in the Chrome browser, RP? I deleted Chrome ages ago back when the rest of us realised that Google had turned evil. It appears to work just fine in Firefox, anyway.
One of the other new bits of gear was much less problematic to set up. The Harley Benton ISO 10AC Pro effect power plant was recommended to me by one of the two people who were responsible for making me decide to buy the Particle 2 in the first place: EEE himself, Erik Emil Eskildsen. "Make sure you get the one with a mains lead that plugs in to it, not the one with a separate wall wart," he said, and that was very good advice. It's a hefty bit of kit and looks like it's extremely well constructed. With my gear plugged in to it, I've noticed a significant reduction in the amount of signal noise coming from my effects chain. That's thanks to its filtered power supply; the more effects I use, the more important I've realised it is for things to have a clean AC feed. Another advantage of the Harley Benton is that its multiple outputs (ten of 'em!) have let me replace a handful of the cheap old switched-mode PSUs which I've been using for years and which were taking up most of one of my studio's many eight-way extension leads (and those wall warts were the source of all that nasty signal noise in the first place, of course). Now, I have some spare three-pin sockets available again!
I think the next step will be to mount the PSU and most of my floor pedal collection on a proper pedal board (probably something like this) so that I can organise my stomp box tap-dancing more efficiently and keep the frankly horrendous rats' nest of cables that is currently under my feet out of the way a bit more. And not that I'm likely to do so in the near future or anything, but it would make it much simpler to take my setup on the road if I need to, too.
The sun is shining, so the free electricity I'm getting means that I'm running the washing machine for the first time this year. I needed to; the laundry basket has been full to the brim for the last few days. I talked just now about my mood lifting, and the smell of fresh laundry and a clean set of bedclothes always helps that. I've not been very good at practising self care over the last few years, and I need to be more mindful about doing that.
Look after yourselves, folks. Trust me on this: the older you get, the more important it becomes.
I feel under the weather, and very tired, and this morning I took a much needed lie-in. The bed was much too warm and comfortable to leave and I stayed there until nearly 11:30. I felt the benefit, too. I plan on not doing much for the rest of the day. I'm not going to fire up the studio, I'm not going to do any housework (other than taking all the Christmas decorations down, because it's Twelfth Night) and the blog is going to be the extent of my computer work today. Maybe I was hoping I'd get a snow day today; I'm going to take one anyway.
It did snow yesterday evening, and it even started to stick a bit, but by 11 pm heavy rain had washed it all away. This morning it's well above freezing outside and the temperature is expected to reach double figures by late afternoon, which is an unusually warm spell for this time of year. It's going to be a wet one, though: the yellow and amber warnings of snow and ice were cancelled first thing this morning and the Met Office has replaced them with a yellow warning for heavy rain. And the warmth will be very temporary, too. Things are expected to turn much colder again tomorrow and stay that way for the rest of the week.
I won't be posting a blog tomorrow. I've decided to spend the day in my own little bubble, in isolation from the rest of the world. I'll be taking a day off from my regular news and social media feeds because I suspect there won't be much in the way of positive stuff going on. Instead, I am planning on spending the day playing with a new effect unit, which I'm expecting to arrive in the morning. There will be more about that after I've had a chance to put it through its paces...
I was surprised to discover when I woke up this morning that even though I'm no longer in full-time (or even part-time) employment, the Christmas break has still exerted its usual effect and I had absolutely no idea at all what day of the week it was. Apparently it's Saturday. Right. Got it.
With temperatures falling to -5°C (23°F) it was another bitterly cold night here last night and when I opened the curtains earlier, everything outside was covered in thick frost. I'm hunkered down in the warmth of the living room, where I've had the gas fire running for the last half an hour. Unlike the last couple of days, the weather is grey and overcast and I won't be getting any sunshine at all today, by the looks of things. Nevertheless I've been running the fan heater in the conservatory again, but the conservatory roof is still covered in ice and it's still well below freezing outside.
It's definitely a day for staying in, so that's what I'm going to do.
A couple of weeks ago I discovered that the Røde Stereo Bar existed, and as I do a lot of field recording which I work into my music and the thing was going for a knock-down price in one of my favourite online retailers' Christmas sales, I bought one. Of course I did.
There are a lot of different ways to set up two microphones for recording in stereo. The Tascam DR-40 portable digital recorder I've had for years comes with two built-in mics which by default are positioned for what's known as X-Y recording, but you can swing them outwards and record with an A-B placement instead, which Tascam suggest gets a wider-sounding stereo field. I've got decent results using the built-in mics in both positions over the last five years or so, but in all honesty I can't say I've ever noticed much of a difference because the difference in spacing is barely more than an inch. However the Tascam also has two XLR sockets, and it can provide enough phantom power to them to drive a pair of separate large- or small-diaphragm condenser microphones. As soon as I realised it could do that, I started thinking about trying out some of the mics in my collection with it. The Stereo Bar was the missing piece of the puzzle. Now I'm no longer limited to using the Tascam's X-Y or A-B setup and I can try as many different configurations as I want. This is what the Stereo Bar looks like when it's set up for ORTF recording (where the mic capsules are placed exactly 17 cm apart to mimic the separation between our ears) with a couple of AKG small-diaphragm condenser mics:
So I will be spending some time today having a play to see what sort of results I can get with this sort of setup. I love this sort of thing.
Last night was the coldest night of the winter so far. The temperature in the back garden fell to -6°C (21°F) and it wasn't any warmer when I got up. Inside the conservatory, it was just 2°C and I'm not sure I believe the desktop thermometer I have sitting in front of me any more, because when I first sat down at my desk it was only reading 10°C (that's just 50°F). As it's sunny today, I'm running a fan heater for free off the solar panels to warm the conservatory up a bit. I have also put the gas fire on in the living room and I think I'm going to be running the central heating system for the rest of the morning, at the very least. I'm very fortunate to be able to afford to do that; I've built up a ridiculous amount of credit with my energy provider over the past year and I'll be asking for some of it back. Yesterday, I updated my energy usage stats for December, and my total usage of 1470 kWh was almost the same as last year (1489 kWh) but significantly down on 2022 (2003 kWh). Having a new boiler fitted last year has obviously made a big difference to how much energy I use, but the biggest factor that affects my bills these days is getting paid for any electricity I export back to the grid from my solar panels. They generated more than 31 kWh just in the first three days of this week, which were overcast and dull; yesterday and today I've had uninterrupted sunshine all day, so the roof will have generated much more.
When the next weather front rolls in here on Saturday night, things will most likely get interesting for a time, because when it hits the cold air mass which is sitting over the country the first thing it'll do is dump a load of snow. Accordingly, the Met Office have just issued an amber warning of snow and ice for here from 18:00h on Saturday. But the snow won't hang around for long and the amber warning expires at 12:00h on Sunday. I suspect that by the time I get up on Sunday morning, any snow we do get here will already have turned to rain. The temperatures by Monday are expected to be back in double figures here, which is well above average for this time of year. But further north, the warnings for snow remain in place until Monday lunchtime and when all that snow melts, there will no doubt be more flooding to contend with.
And yes, you're not imagining it: the weather is doing lots of weird things at the moment. When academics start using words like "perilous" when discussing how unstable the climate has become, I think the rest of us ought to be rather more concerned about it than we seem to be.
I popped down to Thornbury yesterday afternoon to pick up my new glasses and maybe it was because it was bitterly cold rather than anything else, but compared to what it was like when I was there just before Christmas, the place felt deserted. I didn't stick around, either. After doing a quick bit of food shopping I hastily beat a retreat. I've no plans to go anywhere else for at least the next week; I have books to read, films to watch, and music to make.
And I can see what I'm doing again. I'm pleased with the new frames and I can read the text on the monitor I'm looking at right now without having to squint or tilt my head backwards, which is helpful.
After a hectic New Year's Eve I was expecting to fall asleep in seconds last night, but that didn't happen. I was still awake at half past one in the morning. I don't know why; I was extremely tired, and I'd only had one caffeinated beverage all day. But when I did finally drift off to sleep, I was really zonked. I was completely dead to the world, although I do remember waking up at half past four. Nevertheless, I somehow managed to spend 57% of the night in NREM sleep, which was enough for the app on my phone to give me a sleep score of 100 once again this morning.
I wish that I agreed with my phone's assessment and felt like I'd had a good night's sleep. I don't. I really don't. I'm sitting here yawning.
I've got the central heating on. The temperature outside is distinctly wintry this morning. There was a hard frost with temperatures down to -1°C (31°F) overnight. The forecast for tonight is for things to get even colder and that Met Office yellow warning of snow is still in place for the weekend, although as I started to type this sentence, my phone pinged to inform me that its duration has been shortened and it will now cease at midnight on Sunday night instead of 09:00h on Monday morning.
A cold front blew through yesterday (with gusts of more than 50 mph here, so I'd made sure I'd corralled my bins in advance, as the saying goes). Today it's clear and bright, with the wind coming from the north. For the first time in a couple of weeks I'm getting some very welcome sunshine and the roof is currently putting out more than 3 kW. Most of that is being exported back to the National Grid. That's more like it!
I hope today's sunshine means that people can dry out further north. Manchester has always had a reputation as a rainy city and thanks to its location on the windward side of the Pennines, it's thoroughly well deserved but even so, yesterday it got a quite ridiculous amount of the stuff. The heavy rain led to some unprecedented (and quite alarming) flooding. I've never seen anything like it.
As I expected, I had a rather late night last night and it was after 3 am when my head finally hit the pillow. But I wasn't partying, I was working; I was back at the Town Hall in Chipping Sodbury, doing front of house sound for my friends Function 246 once again. With a decent-sized room (and stage) and our drummer Andrew's kit miked up accordingly, I got to really crank up the PA and push it further than I've ever done before. The reactions to this were perplexing, but predictable; the younger people complained to me that the band wasn't loud enough but some of the more mature people (and I'm trying to be polite here, even if some of them weren't) complained bitterly that it was much too loud.
In my opinion it sounded really good. And the dance floor during their third and final set (seeing in the new year at midnight with The Final Countdown timed to finish at just the right moment) was absolutely rammed from start to finish. Job done.
However, I'm paying the price of being on my feet all night and even after a rock-and-roll nightcap of a mince pie and two paracetamol tablets when I got home, I only managed a sleep score of 76. Today I'm up and about, but I ache all over. Nevertheless, I've already had my coffee and breakfast croissant and as usual I'm watching the New Year's Day concert from the Musikverein in Vienna on the telly. And crikey, they've got the 83-year-old Ricardo Muti back this year! The Vienna Phil sound glorious as ever.
But 2025 is already showing signs that it's going to be one of those years. The Met Office has just issued a yellow warning of snow for most of the country from 12:00h on Saturday until 09:00h on Monday morning...
Here's a nicely satisfying mathematics fact, if you're a nerd like me: 2025 is the only year this century that is the square of an integer (it's 452).
442 was 1936, and 462 is 2116...