Andy makes a public address

Andy makes a few comments to camera.

Backs are important too (as well as Backups)

We have been hard at work for nearly 4 weeks (very intense) and the strain is starting to tell. Vince is having trouble with his lower back, he was really in pain today, poor boy. Not that he makes a fuss, he is a tough cookie, but you can tell. Anyway he shares the problem with us, of course. I know what he is talkin about - I had many years of severe sciatic pain, which I was finally able to cure with the help of my Alexander Technique teacher and my Pilates teacher, both of whom I thank from my heart for freeing me from pain. Of course I work hard at being pain free too. I take the responsibility of Lessons and Classes. When I am in London I try to have one Alexander Lesson a week and 3 or 4 hours of Pilates. And I use my Aeron chair. These things all help me. Those who know me and my working habits know how I obsess about getting the right table and the right chair for my work, and these things have not been perfect here. I cannot over emphasise the importance of posture and "good use", especially for the computer users amongst us. Get it right as early in life as possible, and this will help avoid problems later. Love to all.

So much done, so much to do.

I am at that stage in the project where we have done SO much, and yet suddenly it seems as if there is till even more to do than when we first started (which is clearly impossible!). I guess the main body of the work is inked out, the scafoold is built, and now there are so many details that we want to take care of, and all of these details take time. Of course there is a sense in which the detail goes infinitely small, forever folded inside itself, fractal-like. So it is clearly important to retain the big picture (that'll be my job!) and focus on the important things. We do not have an infinite amount of time to complete the record, and the songs and the record would no be better if we spent an infinite time. Of course we still have a long way to go, but today somehow I was daunted by the responsibility and by the size of the mountain still ahead of us. Time to draw breath, re-assess, gather our forces and begin the next phase of the assault. We have reached the base camp, we know which mountain we are climbing, (and we have scaled similar peaks before) now we have to choose the final route and pray for fair weather. My responsibility is to get us to the summit and down again safely. May the force be with us.

Good Morning. BackUp is very important

Everyone knows this and I just want to encourage everyone with valuable data to back it up! I have 2 onsite hard drive backups and an offsite hard drive backup. (Joe keeps it with him and brings it in every evening at the end of the vocal session.) Also I have a DVD backup of everything. I started my day by completing one of the DVD backups as I listened to the work from last night and started putting rough mixes together. We have also been filming on mini DV (tape 7 so far) - and Joe has been dong a lot of this, so I backup the tapes into iMovie (what a great program!). Today I loaded in tapes 5 & 6. And I played with Native Instruments Reaktor Travelizer. It was a rainy morning and so I didn't go out on the bike. Suddenly Vince arrived (at the usual time it has to be said) and I am siting at the computer unshaven and unshowered. Gross! So he takes over on the current track and I dive in the shower.

Today we picked up the pace

Vince wants to get the the gym tomorrow so we planned to work on 3 tracks today, in order to win a bit more time tomorrow. This made it a fairly full-on day, almost hectic. But it was an enjoyable challenge, and I feel good now it's over. :-) Andy also had loads of energy and sung all 3 songs really well in my opinion. I'm now extremely tired, so it's goodnight.

Disco Problem

It seems like Oscar doesn't like Disco - perhaps we will have to redo the whole record now? :-)

Daniel Noack keeps up his Genius Artwork