Thursday 5th of April, 2001
On the VST list there is a link to download a new MDA Piano VST instrument plug-in. I download it. It crashes VST. Oh well...
I take the Nick stuff into Walker's. I chat to Jacky, the designer about it for a bit, and then we move on to other subjects. She says that her new neighbours (on both sides) have steam-cleaned their drives and one of them just swept the debris into the road. I say that this is a very Daily-Mail-reader behaviour. I do hope there weren't any ardent Daily Mail readers within earshot. I'm such a coward. Then on the way out I spend a while chatting to Amanda on reception about guitars and all that.
I get home. Steve Beaver, who is to be the percussionist in my band, calls (I left a message saying "hi" a couple of days ago, and we chat for a bit. Now I have to get back to Peter and formulate a Modus Operandi for the Band. Scary.
At lunch I finish Men At Arms and start Moving Pictures.
I listen back to the mixes I did yesterday. They are definitely wrong - the vocal is too high for a start. The one with the guitar and accordian in stereo (rather than panned) is intriguing, but will it leave any room for the double bass (which I need to record next) and other possible instruments?
Joe Quillin calls about me helping him with the cover for his CD. I start going into detail about what he needs to ask about from the CD makers for example if the price they are quoting is from disc or from supplied films. Awful though it it, I quite enjoy going all professional for a moment. Sometimes its nice to remember (or be reminded) that one actually knows something.
I mislay the stylus for the graphics tablet, prompting me to clear and vacuum the sofa. Exactly how vacuuming the sofa is going to help me find the stylus isn't clear - it is powerful, but not that powerful. But it's good that I did it, though. Nice clean sofa, and with all that stuff out of the way I can sit in the middle of the sofa, rather than at one end. Like a really wide chair, it is. After I've done all that, the stylus just appears of its own accord, as though it had been there all the time. Of course in the rational modern world, we shouldn't consider the possiblity that inanimate objects can appear and disappear on whim, just to annoy us. They do it all the time, though. It's like something I was talking about to Steve - that although I am open to the oddnesses that edge our prosaic lives, if it came to the crunch, I'd have to throw in my lot with the Rationalists.
Believing two contradictory things at the same time isn't a bad thing, I think. Perhaps it's a fundamental characteristic of human existence.
I try the MDA Piano again. It works. I use it to make a House-ish sort of track, and then decide to use a dub-delay plug-in that I downloaded the other day, which suggests that I slow the track down from 120bpm to 80bpm, and it stops sounding House-ish and becomes dubesque. It keeps me up, anyway.
And when I finally get to bed, I can't get to sleep. There is a very particular kind of awake-ness, that which strikes us when we would much rather be asleep. That we could be so awake during the day. That I could be so keen for sleep at 11:00 at night as I am at 4:00 in the afternoon.