Yesterday. 8.15 am: Having tended to the inbox, I began writing a list of interrogative questions to address to a candidate for the post of vicar at Holy Trinity Church, at a meeting to be held in the late afternoon. 10.00 am: Studiology. The re-modification to Pedalboard IV. The tube gain pedal returned to the board. It was too good to be away for very long. Then, I attended to the mains power distribution and plugboards. The quality of the electricity firing the effectors contributes greatly to the quality of their operation. It really isn’t just a matter of plugging into a wall socket.

11.00 am: Off to School to look inside my physical inbox (aka ‘the pigeon hole’), sign off on postgraduate applications, and meeting again a successful MA applicant who had deferred their place for a year. 1.00 pm: We’d invited our former vicar and his wife for lunch. He’s delivering the Holy Week services this year .

3.00 pm: One of my finalising PhD Fine Art students came to the house to work with me on the soundtrack to one of their principal and concluding works. Great fun! 4.40 pm: Off to the parish Rectory to attend the preliminary interview committee for the post of Holy Trinity Church’s new vicar.

7.30 pm: Studiology: On with the analogue/digital translation of the records and back to the pedalboard project. Having inserted an Electro Harmonix Synth Engine between Pedalboards IV & V, I began to hear a guitar sound that has been in my head for several years. It was powerful, terrifying, and invigorating:

Maundy Thursday (The Thursday of Mysteries). 8.15 am: I wrote up my feedback on yesterday’s interview, cleared by virtual desktop, and entered the studio for the final day before my Easter vacation. The translations continued, with the Pauline epistles. The entire of the New Testament will be completed by the close of the day:

2.00 pm: One ought not to conclude, too early, that optimisation has been achieved. Therefore, I set about a wholesale reconsideration of the pedalboard array:

Test. Test. Test.

7.30 pm: The final session before vacation. The Synth Engine effectors were re-routed in parallel, a chorus effector inserted into their combined loop circuit, and the dual output from the engines fed into a delay unit in order to widen the stereo field. I’d not before attempted this configuration. I doubt whether many, if any, others have had the occasion to, either. This set up allows me to adjust each engine (and, therefore, their left and right signals) independently, and to smooth the transitions from one chordal change to another. The character of the guitar’s sonority and timbre is sober, fulsome, and reedy — somewhat like a church pipe organ:

9.40 pm: Over, for now.