This month feels as if it is going to be unsettling. Although it�s the same every year � the length of the days changes most dramatically between now and the end of October. It�s the natural cycle � and many year�s it�s a process which has harmonised with my outlook. But this year it doesn�t. At least not so far. A particular effort was required to get me into the office today.

I went to the Committee Meeting of the Guildford United Reformed Church Music Society tonight � I am a not very active member of the society. Except I have played a lot of music at the recital they traditionally give at the end of each AGM - Bach, Handel, Boismoitier, Ravel, Debussy and Drake. Anyway my next task is to promote Cleveland Williams� concert for AIDS/HIV work in the Highveld which starts at 8.00pm on 9 November at the Guildford URC church on Portsmouth Rd. That will keep me out of mischief (possibly). I have to design a poster which will give me a chance to us Picture It in earnest.

In my comfort zone � I am wondering about trading in my El Maya early 70s Les Paul copy (made in Osaka) for a Danelectro U2 revival. Here�s one of the few reviews about El Maya I have ever unearthed:

�Features: 10

El Maya guitars are high quality Japanes made instruments. The models offered include Strats, Teles, Les Pauls and originals. The Maya Strats are extremely true to the Fender recipe. In fact, Most post '60s Fenders don't measure up to them. Same with Teles. When it comes to Les Pauls they offered both the bolt-on and set-ins.These Pauls were quite a bit lighter than most '70s copies and sounded and played a whole lot better! Attention to details was great. The original El Maya body style is by far the most valuable gem this company had to offer and is my very favorite instrument ever!

The company ceased to exist before making a commercial mark.Unlike the copy models that were in features true to the originals,

Sound: 10

The sound of these guitars is, plain and simple, phenomenal! The strats sound like Hendrix/Blackmore recordings, the Teles like Buchanan/Burton signature tones. LesPauls are BASSY, but not muddy. When it comes to the original model, things get a bit scarry. First of all, this guitar sounds beautiful ACOUSTICALLY! Very loud. The acoustic EQ is balanced nicely and notes ring CRISP. When plugged in, everything just gets amplified. Pardon the pun..On the neck pickup, although a humbucker, you'll get a Strat sound. The middle position provides a very nice rhythm tone with lots of punch and bass. Also great for Hendrix style licks. Without the hum. The bridge pickup has tons of output without sounding shrill. It is quite PAF Gibsonish by nature with a touch of DiMarzio Metal. When added, distortion sounds like full metal assault by violins! The hum canceling works in all three positions. Putting better pickups in is OK, but in my opinion needless. If you like squeals and harmonics, shred friendly bass and mids,nicely balanced and eye catching guitars, this bad boy's for you! It's obvious that on top of great machine work on the factory line, a lot of hand sanding and detailing has been done. Very pleasing work. No finish flaws apart from chipping when abused

I've been a studio gun for hire for a long time and a performing "shred-dude" with various bands since dawn of man... I've had countless guitars throughout my playing life. Primarily, I am a luthier, mostly guitar builder and repairperson. When it comes down to ElMaya instruments, my favorite one is their original model because it represents everything I would expect a guitar to do and be! I'm a very, very critical and detail obsessed individual and my Mayas are in every way satisfactory. �

(There�s also a review by someone who swapped to PRS Humbuckers on his El Maya Les Paul - mine is a natural wood finish and I probably got hooked on its natural sound)

Errrmmm � maybe I am about to make a big mistake � I got my El Maya in Birmingham as an impulse purchase for under �100. I have been reading the reviews of the Korean U2 replica. The U2 came out in 1956 and has a wide range of classic single coil tones � easily controlled by two rather unusual dual concentric controls and a three piece switch. The rosewood �chip� on the bridge is authentic and apparently follows some pre War Gibsons. Reviewers find it a very satisfying replica whereas original U2s cost a fortune and they look so camp that many end up as sculpture. Maybe El Mayas are just too obscure to hold on to - they will only get less and less well known. One gets these strange ideas about ones destinty - I feel mine lies in two single coil solids. But this could be a limitation too far.

There seems to be a bossa-nova revival going on. The Begel Gilberto album Tanto Tempo which I bought a couple of years ago is being promoted as if it�s a new release. It�s a great album � a modern revision incorporating electronica within the spirit of the original genre � a very cunning trick to pull off. There�s also a duo - Tom and Joyce - whose album is being promoted as one of the great bossa albums of all time. Last night on the radio I heard a Brazilian remix of a classic Astrid Gilberto track � which sounded great on first hearing. I suppose I can take comfort in the thought that the first tune I ever performed to a computerised backing track was Corcavado. For a while bossa was the bi-word in naff restaurant music. I suppose the originals are so strong as compositions that they can survive all kinds of abuse and the rhythms themselves have never been easy to do properly.

I have come to this conclusion partly as a result of listening to Jazz FM driving two and from work. This station plays a great deal of smooth jazz. I have decided that one of the main roles of smooth jazz is to facilitate driving through urban congestion without getting to stressed.

Robin�s material about song-writing ties in with a parallel observation that has struck me this week. It struck me that Robin articulates her material � and she wants this articulation to be clear. I can see why this is an important value. But what came to me was that my interest in making music lies at ninety degrees to that � so that in some sense what I want to do is to subvert articulation. I find that the vocal element that she provided me with for Fifths is something that inspires me to transform it. My urge is to subject it to a lot of processes � cutting, jumbling, cycling � which push its overt meaning into unknown or unsuspected areas. Have I always wanted to work like this? I think maybe its an impulse that has gradually grown over the last decade.

Welcome back Mark and family - sounds like you had a brilliant time..

I may be off the radar for a day - there is a think-thing going on at the infamous Seldson Hotel near Croydon. Anyway to keep everyone going (to sleep?) here' something I have half prepared earlier..

MUSICAL IDEAS

HORN UNDER WATER

Track 8 on Highveld Easter Plundafonix, this piece takes its name and some of its musical content from the short instrumental which appears of Nick Drake�s third album Pink Moon � a piece which I played as a flute duet with Andrew Keeling at the memorial concert in Leyland in November 1999. We started with the simple arrangement from the original � a drone and theme � but then moved off into free atonality and the exploration of semitone relationships � an important feature of the theme.

The version we peformed at Leyland reminded me a lot of the approach taken by the band HORN which I started with Steve Pheasant in 1968 at Cambridge in my first year which featured two wind or horn players, bass and drums playing free and modal jazz. About 18 months after the Leyland performance I began to experiment with the elements of the Nick�s fune HORN.

DRONE MUSIC.

Nick�s piece uses the open bottom string of the guitar as a drone. One form of experimental music played in the 1960s on the New York loft scene involved drones � sustained tones � sometimes generated by oscillators and sometimes by musicians and conventional instruments. John Cale�s viola on the Velvet Underground�s Venus in Furs is a well-known example of this approach. Cale used guitar strings amplification plus the mild distortion caused by valve amplification to create a distinctive frequency mix

Cale talks about how he refined this approach in his autobiography � in particular in long rehearsal sessions with musical innovator Lamont Young and the circle of musicians out of which the Velvet Underground eventually formed. He says that as far as he is aware the music made in these groups was unlike any music ever played in the history of the world. Any scepticism I might have had on this score was dispelled when I heard Young�s ensemble � 4 cellos and 4 muted trumpets - at the Barbican about four years ago. Very few notes were played but the sensation was completely novel and utterly absorbing.

Many have discovered the power of the drone. Here�s an extract from www.musicoftheheart.com about some drone music organised by Howard Moses:

The Drone is a recording of a "C" and a "G" played simultaneously. This pair of notes is described musically as the interval of the Perfect Fifth, represented as a "P5". The P5 is the most stable of all musical intervals and always measures five note names apart (example: C-d-e-f-G, A-b-c-d-E, etc.) Much has been written regarding the Perfect Fifth from musical, scientific and spiritual perspectives. Lao Tzu described the Perfect Fifth as "...the sound of the harmony of the Universe." In classical music from India, the drone (usually played on one or more tambouras) begins and ends all pieces, and is described as "the Breath of God." The Perfect Fifth is an 'open interval,' meaning it is neither major or minor, augmented or diminished. The Perfect Fifth can be thought of as a musical canvas, upon which all other notes and collections of notes can combine to paint their colors, shapes and textures in a variety of choral structures.

When you listen to this tape, you will hear many more notes than the C and the G. These other notes are the result of overtones - a natural sonic occurrence in which vibrations arrange themselves in a predictable and consistent pattern of pitches over the foundation tone. Also referred to as harmonics, the overtones are not 'played' by the instrument, rather they result from tones that are being played. All tones create overtones, which are more or less audible depending on the construction of the instrument and the method by which the sound is produced. Bells, drums, violins, flutes, trumpets, horns, all produce overtones. In fact, simply modifying the amount of air pressure in a brass instrument will result in a change of pitch as the instrument responds to the natural overtone series. (The military tune Taps, which utilizes the natural harmonic overtone series of the bugle, can be played without the use of any finger valves...) When the interval of the Perfect Fifth is sustained for a period of time, the overtones characteristic of each of the foundation tones will align with one another, creating a harmonic overtone array. Your recording of The Drone allows you to hear these arrays, and the resulting 'dance ' that occurs as overtones align with one another.

EXPERIMENTS

I began to experiment with building up drone recordings on a single pitch � C � a note with a good minimalist heritage � different instruments and different ambiences. The HORN seemed an obvious theme to use over these drone sounds. But I also began to explore playing the theme in different keys with the drone fixed in C � a kind of polytonality. Eventually I realised that an especially interesting set of relationships could be created by bringing together the notes from the theme of HORN in three equidistant keys � C , E and Ab:

C E F G B

E G# A B D#

Ab C Eb. G

The resulting scale is:

C C# D# E F G G# A B

A nine note scale which as far as I am aware has been very little used.

And it is this scale which is used in HORN UNDER WATER

I realised after a while that you could get the majority of the HORN UNDER WATER SCALE from just three intervals of a fifth:

C-G E-B and G#-D#

And furthermore that these 6 notes described a set of three major seventh chords:

C maj 7 E maj 7 and Abmaj 7

PURE FIFTHS

In the extract quoted above there is a reference made to the pure fifth where the ratio between the notes making up the interval is three to two. On a piano that has just been tuned the ratio of frequencies will be slightly different. For example if middle C is tuned to 440 Hz then a piano tuner will tune the next G to 659.26 Hz rather than 660 Hz. The unusual effects that Lamont Young achieves in the performance of his ensemble come from the reinforcement of overtones which Moses refers to when the frequencies of the two notes are in precise whole number relations � the dance of alignment. But how to secure intervals of a pure fifth?

I realised that my 1980s Casio synthesizer � a CZ101 could help with this � you can easily control the interval between two tones � using either the piano tuners scale � or subdivisions of that in sixtieths. The gap between the piano tuner�s fifth and the pure fifth is approximately one of these subdivisions. Another set of controls on this machine is the rate at which overtones are added to the basic pitch. If pure overtones create an acoustic dance it seemed to me that it might be good if those were added slowly.

I was now in a position both to play some harmonies made of pure(ish) fifths and to change those harmonies. I could say more about the selection of harmonies available and their relationship to the ideas of the famous jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. Lets just say that I had reason to think that those harmonies and those special acoustics might be good to work with. I also liked the way that the structure was an extension of drone theory and the first set of experiments I had done with it which led to HORN UNDER WATER.