Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-10-18 - 10:05 a.m.

Today was the last day of the course � much better weather driving to and from Studley Catle showed the Autumn Warwickshire landscape off well. The course members reacted well to the Real Time Worskshop and gave very positive feedback. I made lots of helpful suggestions about how the course assessment process could be extended. The final workshop trial didn�t quite work to plan which brought everyone down a step but it proved that working to Toyota style disciplines focused attention on the process features that had to be improved. It also showed the point that process improvement is a hard mistress to get alongside. I am pretty sure that this training experience has a profound effect on those who go through it. I was really tired at the end of the course and slept on my sofa for three hours.

The good thing about a course is that it�s a little isolated world for those who go through it � you hand your life over to the process of being on the course and leave everything else on hold. But then the course finishes and you have to resume the rest of the stuff. In my case there�s one day in the office and then back to Gfd where there are various commitments I must engage with � partly to do with Cleveland�s recital and partly to do with a gig on 2 November which is fairly seriously unorganised.

An unusual thing happened in terms of piece construction. I decided I really must get round to the Dhorn parts on BBC 500 � so I set up a regime where whereby Mark�s master could play and I would record the dHorn into Cubase without any of the original track getting onto the recording. I start each recording by playing a few bars of four beats to help with the sync. The aim is that the Dhorn tracks should be a quarry for cut and paste rather than continuous parts. Anyway I put the Dhorn into the Casio CZ101 and mixed some patches and then mixed the patches with the onboard tone. Then I put down three parallel tracks � the aim was not that they should be played in parallel. But I did that just to see what happened � you guessed there is the basis of a post BBC500 piece there � probably with Gilbert�s gtr added. One hesitates for a second about whether to exploit chance thus but only for a second.

I also did some more mixing on one Gilbert�s versions of DayIn DayOut � even within the framework of a fixed recorded gtr part and a fixed MIDI backing there is an enormous variety in how the resulting track can be mixed.

I tidied up one of the Minidiscs. I mustn�t forget that at the moment my standard process goes through a MD mastering stage.

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