Tuesday 3rd of April, 2001
Touchstone track to start the day - completely gorgeous cover version of Zappa's Idiot Bastard Son from The Zappa Album by Ensemble Abrosius from Finland. Followed by a Hedningarna track.
Go all the way to the shop to get milk. .I don't usually face the world until after I've had my coffee, so this is an interesting development. Lovely day. If I as more than half-way conscious I could appreciate it.
For no rational reason I make another attempt to work out how Finale works so that I can make chord charts for my songs. "Why don't you just write them out by hand?" they all chorused. Yes, indeed.
But I've got software. Why do things the easy way when you've got software?
Talk to the designer at Walker's about the Nick cover, and she has some extra stuff emailed over.
My fridge now only contains cheese. Decide I should go to the supermarket and get vegetables before I die of some hideous cheese-related malady.
Now many oranges, some grapefruit and a bag of peppers. (And some other stuff)
A friend of Pa's has passed a curious device from the Far East to him (and he has passed it on to me). It is a CD player specifically designed for playing Video CDs (you know - those CDs with bootlegs of current releases on them, probably shot on a Camcorder while the film was running, often with subtitles in chinese. Takes me back to the early 80s, it does). It also plays normal CDs, and has a kareoke feature (that is to say, there are two jack sockets on the front that you can plug microphones into and a spectacularly cheesy echo. Thus you can sing or play over the top of a Kareoke backing track. Or in my case a bootleg of The Talented Mr Ripley). It also has "Mp3" emblazoned on it, although how, exactly, you get it to play MP3s is a bit of a mystery.
Certainly the manual doesn't help. But it does have "Remote control through 49 very popular keys", "Original singing follows automatically" (not too original, I hope). Oh, and helpfully, "[If] the music does not work - please use stereo speaker".
Go off to Queen's Park to record with The Moog Poet, who appears to be quietly fermenting dreams of world conquest.We are in the front room/studio of someone called Eric, also the keyboard player for the day. I think the idea is that we play and he records direct to Minidisk. Fair enough. The first jam goes alright, but when it's played back it turns out that the bass (me) is much too loud and the congas (Tom) cannot be heard. So we try it again. Eventually it appears that in order to get it to the right sort of levels I and the keyboard need to be nearly inaudible.
Eric's taken with some chording I come up with, so there's possibly some work there. He asks if I'm used to low-paying gigs. Um, I think I am...
Inspiration looses its hold after a couple of hours. Sadly, we keep going for about four hours. Still, there was some interesting stuff for me. anyway. I was playing through a little Pandora effects box - just the presets, basically, and both the guitar and the fretless bass. The bass was good with a lot of fuzz on it. At the end, I'm just doing a finger-picking thrash (if you can imagine such a thing) with the thumb doing a kind of Stooges E-G-G# bassline and the other fingers a drone over the top. On playback it's quite an impressive noise.
Back home at about 11:00. Very tired.