9.20 am. Off to the Farmers’ Market to buy eggs, and to take in Mr Sewell’ exhibition, Revelation, presently showing at the Morlan Centre, Aberystwyth. I was reminded of a type of European Abstraction Expressionism that emerged during the early 1950s. This was more lyrical, colourful, and less angst-ridden than the American variety. Pulling off a domestic-scale abstraction is a challenge. Mr Sewell’s paintings accommodate the restraint well. In other words, they don’t look like shrunken versions of larger things. Why can’t leisure agencies such as Premier Inn and Travel Lodge purchase small works like these for their bedrooms — rather than that insipid, cloned pap which someone, who was clearly not in the know, advised them was desirable art?:

10.30 am. On with the handboard testing and a minor reconfiguration of the studio’s desk light array. While rummaging through my cases of wires and plugs, I alighted upon this box set. Scourby was an American voice actor. In 1953, after four years work, he completed the first ever audio recording of the entire Bible: 169 records with a runtime of 84.5 hours:

I applaud the ambition; it’s magisterial. He’d translated the written text into a spoken text. Can this is process be taken one step further, either visually or sonically? Am I looking at the prime candidate for a notional The Pictorial Bible IV or The Aural Bible III? Whatever the case, the challenge of producing a single work that encapsulates the whole Bible looms above me like Everest.

1.40 pm. After lunch, I connected all three handboards together and immediately hit a snag. It’s impossible to achieve unity gain (a common volume of signal input/output) across the whole system. The Moog board, for example, is ‘quieter’ than the other two but, at the same time, ‘peaks’ alarmingly. (I see red, and not green, lights). In short, the problem is caused by differences of capacitance and resistance across and between the boards:

The only remedy is to detach the three boards and run a common signal into them each separately, and to match their output volumes independently via a multi-channel mixer. I met this issue when attempting to conjoin two large pedalboards several years ago:

Once again, the problem may give produce to a better outcome than had it not arisen. At present, each handboard is active in the chain, with all the effectors modulate each other. Nothing wrong with that as a potential, but it’s not economic and is very difficult to control. Furthermore, one’s ear cannot discern what is contributing to the output sound and, therefore, which effector to adjust in order to modify it. But how does one split a single output three ways without creating an earth loop hum in the system? This is the sort of problem that I’ve come to cherish. [Long pause.] This might work:

4.30 pm. Reconfigured the Moog handboard. 5.20 pm. Enough! Enough! 6.20 pm. Practise session 1. 7.20 pm. An evening with the family.