No news in the last couple of days because the cold had me lying on the couch. Much better now though. My nose still looks a bit like Rudolph the Reindeer’s and I’ve got a croaky voice, but that’ll subside in the next days. On the upside… I watched some great movies I’ve had on my list for a while now. I’ve begun reading Salman Rushdie‘s ‘Shalimar the Clown’ and his language is so beautiful it’s always inspiring. Reading one of his books triggered the way I wrote the lyrics for ‘Unspoken’.
Today was the first day I felt like working again. Still taking it slow since I’m not that fit yet. Nevertheless I finally hooked up the borrowed audio-interface and after downloading the appropriate driver for my system it seems to work smoothly. I went through all the presets that come with Ableton Live and made notes about which ones could be good for our live set. Had a lot of fun actually playing around and it made me want to start preparing my new songs for gigs. First things first though. I’m writing and recording my songs on a Windows XP setup, but recently bought a Macbook Pro for playing live. I’ve collected some great VST plugins and instruments over the years, but unfortunately most of them don’t work for Mac OS X. So I started recording the sounds that I then edit and chuck into the Live Sampler. That works really well, but preparing each instrument takes about half an hour. I guess if it didn’t come in handy for my own solo gigs I wouldn’t make such a big fuss for the project with Bobby Starrr. Especially since it’s much more about broad strokes than with my own songs. Of course I completely underestimated the amount of time it takes, but when if not now? It’s pretty dull work, but exactly right when you’re still feeling a bit under the weather. I also searched the internet today for great plugins for OS X and am happy to report I found some really interesting ones.
Tomorrow will probably be all about preparations for the gig and hopefully some rehearsing, too. I’d like to wrap the whole thing up till wednesday night. It might be too optimistic a schedule I’m afraid. I’m anxious to get back to writing and recording again. While playing around with sounds I came up with a nice little melody already. Not sure what it’s gonna end up as. Maybe just a little instrumental piece. Who knows though? Anyway it sounds a bit like a nursery rhyme.
Really gotta go to bed now. It’s far too late already.
x
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