A moderately better night’s sleep. 7.45 am: A communion. 8.30 am: I commenced writing the Easter Sunday morning’s intercessions. 9.00 am: Studiology. I set up the Fender Twin Amp and a Shure SM57 microphone to test both the operation of the revised Pedalboard III and techniques for recording, acoustically, in the studio. In the background, I battled with the resurgence of the Adobe Audition CS6 drag n’ drop problem (and a curious new instability in its general performance, as well) on one computer and the failed opening of the same, on another. Like sorrows, software problems ‘come not as single spies’. Has my trusted DAW finally lost its fight against IOS upgrades? Utterly frustrating:

In order to redeem the time, I put on a pace and completed the textual spine to the piece. It remains for me to push the composition beyond the boundaries of its predecessors. When I conceived a live-performance version of ‘Double Blind’, individual words from the texts were allocated to sampler banks, so that I’d be able to improvise around the turntablism:

The recordings were still on the device. An opportunity presented itself. A press-fest ensued, in and around necessary software updates. (Today, nothing was straightforward.) The initial draft of ‘Double Blind’ was completed by the close of the afternoon. Once all the drafts are finished, then I’ll work them up together until they’re resolved. They feel like a set. Two remain: the long ‘One Blind’  and another (to be decided).

7.30 pm: While I, heart in mouth, upgraded my MacBook Pro to the most recent iOS (I will regret this), I recorded a ‘teststrip’ of an overdriven Gibson Les Paul modified by the Digitech FreqOut (feedback) effector, while playing a rather angular chordal progression that I use during my warm-up sessions:

Then, it was back to my intercessions. It’s always a slow burn and an almost futile endeavour: attempting to encapsulate – meaningfully and without merely listing – the issues of the larger and small pictures of world events and everyday practicalities of congregational members.