Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-05-30 - 10:12 a.m.

Oh dear I have just lost a pagefull of ramblings about the new reshuffle - a lucky escape for any reader. I love reshuffles - the switchback of politics and this one is a classic. The miraculous resurrection of Punching Prescott, the new Cabinet Secretary creates a power base at the centre of Government to counter the Treasury - a lovely irony as that is his old Department. The disintegration of the Dept of Transport is another interesting trajectory.

There is also some good long range anslysis of the economics of transport eg from Anton K in the Times. I was at seminar which he ran about a year ago on the Treasury's role in policy making which taught me a lot of useful stuff - but maybe this is not th time and place.

Mandarin Richard Mottram finds himself in yet another new Department too. He tried to sack me about 10 years ago - but I don't bear a grudge.

Meanwhile in the cloistered world of Cubasis functionality I stumbled on an important part of the architecture. Normally the MIDI mixer is separate from the audio mixer but in Cubasis four audio channels are dedicated to the plug-in synth that comes with it. There is a little box which enables you to route MIDI channels to audio channels. This means you can use plug-in EQ, insert effects, global effects and panning from Cubasis audio on the synth in four groups - in addition to the rather rudimentary effects included in the GMsynth anyway - this explains why the integrated softsynth doesnt have XG or GS. It makes the MIDI side of Cubasis much more attractive.

I immediately started to remix a piece based on one of Webern's Bagatelles - including the addition of digital audio recorded guitar elements fed in through a Korg multi-effects. I found myself moving away from the presets into parameters eg on distortion. This spurred me to buy a guitar-freaks mag to read on the train. A good interview with R McGuinn and his current interest on the 1950s folk scene whee he started. He has been round to the pioneers recording them in their homes for a new CD - sounds like a brilliant project.

Mark has written to me about plug-ins and highlighted vast areas of my ignorance - I will try and reply today.

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