9.15 am. A trip to the Farmers’ Market in cold rain, the megaphonic bleat of a mobile party candidate drifting on the wind. What!?:

At the market, the ‘egg lady’ hadn’t arrived, and the ‘pasty man’ wanted to sell up and go home soon (such was the weather). A forlorn turnout.

10.15 am. My morning was focussed on rationalising Handboard 1. Simplicity, economy, and functionality are the guiding principles. The introduction of a delay effector on Handboards 1 & 2, and a reverberation effector on Handboard 2, helps to restore the stereo ‘image’ of the sound source at the end of the processing chain. Now, too, both boards are symmetrical in terms of their final stage modulation:

It remains for me to decide whether Handboard 3 (which is routed through the mixer’s effects loop) is superfluous.

The are several pitfalls to using effectors to colour a source. For example, one can be beguiled by the effect. Rigour is called for. The sound produced must articulate some aspect of either the source content or its processing. (In this case: the meaning and construction of the second commandment’s text, and its conversion into an engraving.) In this regard, the effectors are subordinate to, and interpretive of, the source — rather than an end in themselves.

1.30 pm. Following lunch, I made trial of the effects-loop and direct-to-computer recording facility. Both are operational. 2.30 pm. On with the book proposal and a little CD propagation research. The problem with composing a proposal is knowing what not to deal with, and what has not been dealt in other authors’ publications already. In short, one needs to find the hole in the subject field and plug it. I’m getting somewhere. (I think.)

5.15 pm. The dank air and grey clouds have persisted throughout day. The garbled, gritty sound of a public-address system, now very far off, is still audible:

5.20 pm. No more! 6.20 pm. Practise session 2: dynamic expression.  7.30 pm. An evening with the family.