It's been a while.

And if you're not a music-fiend you're probably going to be sore disappointed now. Because I have been up to my elbows in the magic stuff. To be precise, I have been applying a pet tornado of wheedling, coathangers, caffeine, cable, software, hardware and Potter to get some recording of my own stuff done. I had thought that with a spanky Mac and a Toneport I was well set. This was before I discovered that none of the software I was using would play nicely with its peers. You get what you pay for, and I am using freeware and the stuff that came on the box when I bought it. I resolved to use this in preference to a "proper" solution, because it doesn't really work. And Tiggers quite like that these days. A real muso-creature would get plugins and so forth sorted so that his or her sequencer synced up nicely to the recording software via clever drivers and luscious plugins and patches. I like wire. Long wire. Long cheap wire.

Then again, the real deal might not run the whole lot simultaneously on three platforms - a Mac, an XP box and Ubuntu on something else under the bed and hook it all up via wired ethernet. My house is tiny though, and all the stuff I'm clicking with and on is motley in its OS allegiances. So we have what we have. Drum loops made with Hydrogen on a Mac butchered in Audacity on a PC, and then fed out to a cheap desk with a reverb before diving back on themselves in the Garageband metaverse. Whether the results are usable is still up in the air, but it means I get to think of seventies Jamaica while I twiddle real knobs. And that's good. Inter-software communication has proven so fraught that it's actually easier to send stuff out to a desk and then back again. All this, and servicing my mid-sized collection of mid-range guitars and basses, has kept me from writing stuff on the web. It has no doubt been sorely missed ;-)

Will it ever stop raining? I've got enough rain noises recorded to make a water album by now. And scarcely any decent thunder. Robbed, I tell you. So I hole up at home, and to give you some idea how insular I have been I have seen no flooding, and I learn about MIDI controllers and advanced setup for basses and valve amp mods and EQ and recording and Macs. And I have a little stuff done. I shall seek someone to tell me when I've got far enough out there, but only once I am positive I've gone a bit far.

More soon, but I have an echo calling.