Portability

The weather here has taken a bit of a chilly turn recently...It's some arctic air being pulled down over the UK according to the forecasters. This means that I've not been able to work in the garden for a while. Actually, that's been OK because I've been recording guitars and bass of late, so I wasn't tempted to set up outside.

I've also been mixing with iZotope's Alloy 2. In their words..."Far more than just a traditional channel strip, Alloy 2 is a modern twist on classic mixing. The basics have been re-imagined with forward-thinking features and time-saving flexibility. Innovative sound sculpting tools are ripe with potential for delivering your distinctive sound. And best of all, Alloy 2 allows you to focus on mixing without distraction, neatly packaging the mixing essentials in a self-contained and completely configurable plug-in that puts everything you need at your fingertips."...and I have to say that it certainly lives up to that!!! The presets are great and with a bit of tweaking, can really breathe extra life into any recording.

I'm looking at getting a more portable audio interface, so I can record real instruments and voices anywhere, as well as a micro DAW control surface to make mixing and transport control easier.

The Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 DSP looks like a nice machine with the advantage of VRM which is Focusrite's Virtual Reference Monitoring. I'd really like to try this new technology as it promises to make mixing on headphones a possibility which would be useful when I'm away from the studio.

Above is the Korg nanoCONTROL 2 which looks like a great DAW controller and will fit in the Blue Flightcase very comfortably. It's buss powered too, so no need to carry another external PSU around.

I really need to get hands on with them to see how they sound and feel...A tricky thing to do with the closure of many of the hi tech music stores.

We've been on a few inspiring and enjoyable trips recently...The Edinburgh Festival (Saw Stewart Lee, Robert Newman, Barry Cryer & Colin Sell and Russell Grant)...Two beach days in North Norfolk...The Pajama Game at the Shaftesbury Theatre with Gary Wilmot...All fantastic!!!

Speaking of trips, I've been reminded of my two weeks in the USA in 2010, which was extended to a month when the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted and closed European airspace for a fortnight. Thankfully, I'd flown with Virgin Atlantic which meant that I could live very comfortably while I waited for the dust to clear at no extra expense. I was lucky enough to be 'stranded' in Southern California, a particularly pleasant place to be with friends and family nearby, but I really missed my friends and family at home, a nice cup of tea and curry. I ate curry for three days on my return!!!

It looks like another Icelandic volcano is working up to an eruption...Here's a webcam which is keeping an eye on it...

http://www.livefromiceland.is/webcams/bardarbunga

The pic at the top of this post was taken in the Botanic Gardens at Edinburgh. It was taken at mid day and hasn't been altered at all...Those aren't stars...They're bits of fluff off a nearby poplar tree!!!

TX Dates...

Highland Emergency is on Channel 5 on Sundays at 10am.

Airline USA is on Sky (various channels) daily.

Solid state

At NAB in April, I visited the LaCie booth a couple of times. I was very taken with their range of Thunderbolt Solid State Drives. Earlier this year, I bought the EWQL orchestral library and found the loading times and disk streaming very slow. I'm not sure what it was that was causing the USB3 bottleneck, but a Thunderbolt SSD seemed to be the answer. I recently got a 1TB Little Big Disk and am very pleased with it. Instruments load very quickly and the stream off the disk is fast enough to cope with heavy use.  I now have the EWQL library as well as Morphestra and Rumble on it. The idea is that I can take the LaCie with me when I know I'll need those sounds, but I can also have a pretty impressive sound battery with BFD3, Omnisphere, Stylus and Garritan sounds if I just have the computer with me. When I'm in the studio, the Lacie will daisy chain into the Belkin hub and run the studio from the MBA.

I've also been experimenting with ways of getting notation into Sibelius, and have bought NotateMe by Neuratron for the Nexus 7. This is a music handwriting recognition app and translates handwritten notes into a score. I can then upload these to Google Drive as music .xml files and then open them in Sibelius on the MacBook. It all works very well, but I need to get a better stylus as the response on the screen of the Nexus 7 is a bit quirky. This reminded me that I have a copy of Neuratron's Photoscore, which can scan in scores and 'read' them to produce a score on the computer which can be imported into Sibelius. I had a quick go on it with limited success, but I now have a better scanner, so I'll give it a whirl.

The trouble is that I really like writing with pencil and paper and would love to be able to write like this and then get scores into Sibelius without having to transcribe them note by note into Sibelius. A bit more experimenting to do!!!

I don't think I've mentioned my new website on this blog...It's HERE ...Thanks to Timo at W2-S.

It's been a busy few weeks...I've written three albums for Artful, prepping scores for a future orchestral recording and coming up with ideas for my Danish publisher. The garden has really sprung into life and the lawn seems to need mowing once a week. Our first year of wild meadow looks good, if a bit scrappy. Not surprising as it needs to be cut a few times to get an even grass distribution. There are quite a few species of wildflower in there too. Some need to be weeded out (buttercups, mallow) as they're taking over from the grass. It'll soon be time to buy a scythe!!!

TX dates...

Highland Airline is showing on Sky 1 and 2 and TV3 in Ireland.