Aah, that was good. It’s been what must be a year since I was granted permission by my increasingly penny-pinching employer to travel on business. I don’t know if this journey to Manchester is a sign of improving commercial fortunes or a recognition that some meetings — a training event in fact — can’t be satisfactorily conducted on the telephone or squinting at a flickering Webcast. I won’t hold my breath waiting for a positive trend as I don’t think anyone will be doing business the way they did even as recently as two years ago. Certainly, I don’t expect to have a silver frequent flyer card without a commensurate increase in responsibility.
Anyway back to the reason for my ejaculation of pleasure at the outset of this post: A splendid meal of sea Bass and brown shrimp followed by panna cotta. The portions were a bit haute cuisine – a smidgen on the small portion size – but they made up for their reduced plate coverage by being intensely flavoursome.
It struck me while enjoying the courses that there is a certain craft to creating a balanced dish…matching complementary flavours and textures…it’s not surprising that all the restaurant critics use the simile ‘flavour notes’ in their prognostications and pronouncements. That line of thought lead me to think about why I’ve been labouring to record music for my Digital Audio evening class. Ideally I should have had a tune recorded on my PC in order to learn the black art of mixing to produce a final product. I fear that until I learn the craft all my recordings will sound like a mismatched melange of ideas and textures that skirt dissonance.
The solution is obvious: where complexity clouds progress, it’s best to take a step or two back and embrace simplicity. I’ll record the instruments I know well — guitars and basses — before trying to learn about synthesis and sample-based virtual instruments. Of course, this does mean having to learn how to play keyboards, but this is on my long list of things to do.
Anyway, I’m tired and have a busy day of training and travel tomorrow. I may even make it in time for the next episode of the evening class as long as the gods of rail scheduling get me back to Edinburgh in good time. The journey will be a chance to let me structure the training that I, in turn, will need to deliver.
Avanti!
J
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