Peter Chatterton sent the pic of me miming with his WX7 which I must foreward to Mark, out of honesty I suppose - I would be much better off a hidden presence I suspect.

Everyone here - in the diary club - seems to be very busy pushing ahead with important. I cant wait to hear more of Robin's archive - I really think we can get a lot out of applying today's technology to old recordings.

Yesterday was a rather HR day (not hormone replacement)- I did a workshop for colleagues and managed to work in one of my favourite tropes about the theory of exchange/utilities and the subjective basis of value. I am always surprised how counter-intuitive this is. And I had an interesting discussion with Steve Turner about senior manager psychological profiles in the Department - the links between Myers-Briggs which they have heavily bought into and team effectiveness. I also managed to get rid of an Invitation To Tender which I generously wrote at the weekend. Having been so unusually productive I had no qualms about downloading CrusherX onto the office PC.

I need to keep this short as I have to set off to Birmingham any second in the little Fiesta they seem to have forgotten that I have. That reminds me - my son James passed his driving test yesterday - which means we have to take a lot more care of the little AX he is going to be using. He went solo for the first time last night.

The big news is CrusherX though. Having had more time to play I have been able to load up whole WAVS into it - including the Bagatelle. As it runs in real time I can hit the random buttons at the bottom and start modulations morphing into the track, then reverse them function by function - while throwing in guitar fills in the gaps.

I am surprised at myself plugging away at guitar - maybe its being on the site. The rig is quite elaborate - the dirty channel on the Fender amp into the desk with a compressor on insert then a gated reverb on top of the amp reverb, then an enhancer. Charlie Alexander doesn't use FX on principle because he believes they put a distance between the musician and the music. Despite all this processing this rig feels responsive and alive. Maybe this is because the amp feed disables the speaker and it means I can run it high without worrying about cheesing people off.

There is also a new approach (for me) to the instrument - to do with not hitting the strings so hard with my finger tips (I dont use nails - strangely I think the finger pad is the most intimate connection with the strings) - but also to do with getting a wider range of sounds out - I think this comes from listening to Cage prepared piano. Also from the 60s jazz interest is the idea of both using blues and a fairly free atonality. Oh by the way - this months Wire has a long article/interview with Alice Coltrane. I think like Ono she has suffered rather because she is seen as drawing "the hero" away from his classic territory.

It transpires she comes from Detroit - having made my own US jazz debut there this year this is a good start with me. Also that she studied be-bop and can do Monk-style standards - although she won't record this. While Trane was taking a break from the Miles quintet he did a six month residency with Monk in Greenwich Village which is apparently one of the most extraordianry periods of live improvisation ever. He famously said that when you started a solo with Monk's band it was like stepping out into a liftshaft.