My blog entries have been conspicuous by their absence for the last 2 months - so here goes.........

There has been no positive movement on my wishlist since I last wrote here, but I fear that the Fernandes guitar will remain just that - a wish. I already have 4 guitars, and can't really justify the expense.

Right now I have the following list:-

1) keyboard stand (this will happen in the next few days)
2) TC Ditto X2
3) Focusrite 2i4 (I think I need the PAD switch)
4) ACE or Bazille - I can't decide

I recently completed my first new full-length beat-driven piece for 14 months (Tang Dynasty). It was quite a lot of work (about 30 hours - 7 hours per week for 4 weeks this year and a couple of hours sketching out the Chinese section last October), but that was everything - selecting/modifying sounds, writing, mixing and mastering. The routing for this track was much more complicated than anything I had attempted previously, so the mixing process took that much longer. It wasn't helped by the fact that I didn't have much time available to do this, and had to repeatedly break away from and then return to the track.

EnergyXT recently released the final 2.7 version. It seems to be stable. I completed the TD project with it. My only worry is the fact that it is still only a 32-bit program, and I was very close to maxing out 1 core during the final mixing stages. A 64-bit, multicore version would be very welcome although I would then have to use some sort of bridging mechanism for subsequent projects.

I've had a lot of fun playing with the AD plugins, Replicant, Axon and Eos. These plugins are great and I've had a lot of success using them with percussion instruments to create some interesting patterns and treatments. More on that later.