9.00 am. More admin-type tasks: follow-up emails, module scheduling and curriculum updates and posting, and responding to the unforeseen. The challenge is to remain creatively intelligent in the dutiful dispatch of the mundane. One should aim to plan in advance of life at all times. 11.20 am. A long-overdue return to the studio. But a little tidying and reorganisation was required before a serious engagement could commence. This, in part, was the preparation of the mind for intention.

12.00 am. The pedalboard and handboard arrays, which I’d designed over the Christmas holidays, required a rationalisation of wiring routes and an ergonomic arrangement describing an arc beneath my feet and at my right hand, to permit ease of access to all switches and controls:

1.40 pm. I completed the morning’s tasks, and began to schematise the connections:

There is one signal route that I’d been able neither to resolve nor properly conceive. (Before a solution can be found, one must first describe the problem as clearly and simply as possible.) I wanted to be able to create a sonic background and, then, switch to solo guitar mode, in order play over it in the foreground. Conventional signal-loop configurations can’t fulfil this function. The answer required the insertion of a sampler/looper on the handboard array, placed after the switching unit, in order to store a sample a sound (up to 5 minutes), permit the handboard array to be then turned off, and for a solo to be played without being routed actively through the handboard while, at the same time, hearing the sample recorded through that array behind the solo:

5.00 pm. ‘Silencio!’ 6.30 pm. Practise session 1. 7.30 pm. An evening with my family.