Gardening leave

 I do tend to leave the gardening 'au naturel' but have done a bit lately in preparation for winter. Almost completed the front, then noticed loads of little caterpilars and spiders hanging out there so just cleared around the heather and left them to it. Good excuse really. 

Nice walk in the park at Leyland - didn't know they had a Giant Redwood, but they do. In the afternoon I made progress with the MPC in that I put it on its own switch with the mixer, speakers, keyboard and Octatrack. Means I can work entirely in it with no other distractions. Want to get into sampling next so the keyboard will be the little Reface CS for a while. First, must get back into basic stuff - can't edit notes on it but with the OT between keyboard and MPC it means I can record stuff into that then into Akai - much better/faster. Again it took yonks to find the arpeggiator - had to get manual out - but I will remember in future. Think there should be an Undo that only affects notes not just last action, which could be tweaking synth noise or selecting a new patch. Looked for clear all option for all data in a sequence as I'm sure that's possible. Did track by track in the end. Oh and it desperately needs a regular mixer with FX obvious per track, or to my thinking it does, but I'm getting there. Didn't record anything of value but the doing was worth it. Trick is to keep at it rather than leaving it a few more weeks ;)

Thursday we went to Malham. Excellent day. 

Friday was a bit different - Tim and I did the patio mat/soil matrix. Thought I was surely in the good books but made mistake of embracing the idea of a chaotic spread of plants, quickly rescinded but damage was done. I made a prawn curry later and almost redeemed myself. 

Saturday morning I ordered the Strymon NightSky I'd been pondering. I mean, you only live once, right? Maybe a Headshock session today, think we've earned it. 

Yesterday's HS track Clonkett is interesting. There was a point, quite early on, when Tim was doing this cool arpeggio and I was doing a very simple piano tune, that it could have been wonderful. Alas we didn't capture that and I've totally forgotten the melody now. It was so simple I remember at the time thinking 'this will be easy to remember'. Ho ho not so. 

Right now I'm torn - itching to get into the studio, itching to write that big scene at the end ot the novel, not itching quite so much to slog through the MPC again. 

Tomorrow Broc has his bollocks off. And with that...