random… very random

It’s been months since I published anything to my blog. This, I guess is because I’ve been busy doing other things - getting sidetracked by photography, working, playing in a new band, getting ready to get married etc…

Anyway, I thought it was time to get my shit in order and as Diablo (my poor little Ubuntu server) is looking a bit cronky at the moment, not to say how unreliable the ADSL has been for hosting recently (strangely since they “upgraded” my bandwidth), I finally bit the bullet and paid for proper hosting for the first time in about ten years.

I’m in the process of migrating all the stuff from the various places I keep content, ukchill.com, Wordpress etc… which will keep me busy for a few weeks, and I also have a couple of new things to put up so “watch this space”!

Every time I have a bit of a break from work I take the opportunity to clear out the studio and move things around a bit to improve my workflow. It’s something I would recommend to anyone writing music - if you find things are getting a bit stale, or you are lacking in inspiration.

This time, however, I went a bit further than usual and completely unwired the studio and pulled everything out of the room! Working like a thing possessed, it took several hours but eventually all the gear was out of the way and all the cables were organised and neatly stacked.

When I started plugging everything back in, I spent a bit of time playing with each bit of kit in isolation. What surprised me though is how much fun I had just fiddling around with the synths when they weren’t all routed through the computer - without a tempo lock or a bank of presets to play with I got some pretty good sounds and grooves going. A much more “back to basics” approach seems to work pretty well when you are lacking in inspiration.

I even plugged the sampler back in (yes a real hardware device) and recorded a few arpeggios from the Nova through it - it all seemed so limiting in comparison to software based devices, but it took almost no time to get something that sounded great! Not only that, but the patches just seemed so much more playable…

Time to get the guitars out.

A rebuild in progress - there’s nothing like a spring clean and move around to get the creative spirit flowing.

I’ve just spent some time offline - a pretty unusual experience for me!

Yve booked me a white water rafting experience in Snowdonia for my birthday last year, but I’ve been too busy at work to take the trip until now.

For most of the trip I had bugger all signal on my mobile, and with no access to the net (Yve wouldn’t let me take my laptop for some reason) I actually had a pretty cool and relaxing time.

I’ve never been to North Wales before and I would definitely recommend it as a getaway. The people there were all incredibly friendly and the local beer was great. We spent some time in the forests and up the mountains and I feel a whole lot more relaxed than I did before we went. I might even get around to writing some new music now!

Me and a bunch of strangers bouncing down a mountain river in Snowdonia.