9.00 am: To town. Into the sun:

A brief jaunt to retrieve a parcel, check a balance, and purchase angled-metal plates for a ‘mod’ to one of my equipment stands today. (My enthusiasm and capacity for DIY doesn’t extend much further than this.) I enjoy the bleached brittle mornings of early winter.

10.20 am: After a watery farce swapping the kitchen and basement dehumidifiers, I made my initial assault on the equipment board … with a bradawl. That done, I initiated the sound session British Landscape in readiness to compose my response to the call for submissions for sound works related to the voice. Given the size of the initial track inputs, the compression and conversion of their formats will take longer than the process of composition, I anticipate. The amassed file, converted from MP3 to 192000Hz and 32-bit resolution, for just one year’s set of lectures for this module, was a whopping 45.5 GB in size.

12.30 pm: A retest of Pedalboard I revealed a ‘hum’ that wasn’t there yesterday. The culprit is likely to be the wah-wah pedal base. That’s the only thing that’s changed since I last plugged in the board. (Problems are always traceable when one adopts a methodological approach.)

12.40 pm: Off to the Food Fayre at the Arts Centre. It was a little underwhelming. In times past, this was a grander and bustling affair. Commercial Christmas is exhausted, in my opinion:

We bought from one vendor who extolled the virtues of responsible carnivorism. He breeds pigs, and sells every part of them. On the way home, I was arrested by a shadow:

Due to the intensity of the light today, it’s possible to see colours in shadows, in the matter of Impressionist painting, especially when they’re viewed against neutral and light-responsive surfaces (such as the garage door, here).

2.10 pm: Back into the studio to obliterate that ‘hum’ on the pedalboard, while my iMac compressed eight hours of lectures into two minutes, which pretty much took up all the RAM it possessed. The integration of Pedalboards I & II worked well. The Eventide modulators are now positioned at hand height and, therefore, tweakable while I’m playing the guitar. But they also need to be controllable from the floor too (via foot switches etc.). A future project:

4.50 pm: Eventide:

5.15 pm: Power down. 6.30 pm: Practise session 1. 7.30 pm: An evening with my wife.