Iain Cameron's Diary
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2002-11-10 - 6:08 a.m.

Gibson guitars - there's the Nighthawk and there' also the Blueshawk. I saw the latter instrument in Guildford yesterday morning when I dropped into Anderton's to get some leads. At first I thought it was a Nighthawk - which I tried in Leantown but the Blueshawk has F holes and P90 pickups whereas the Nighthawk is solid and has humbuckers. But they both look very attractive,

I got a longer SPDIF cable and proved the link between the DVD and the Pioneer CD recorder which means that I can do digital CD to CD recording.

I bought the Naxos recording of Satie's Parade - I was really impressed with it.

Peter and I set up at 5.00pm in the URC church. We projected the Mandela/Parkinson vid running through Windows Media onto a white wall in an alcove and ran the sound into the little Roland 20 watt guitar amp which I generally use with the flute. The delivery was very clear - its amazing that you can such quality these days off a portable. Peter had a stereo pair of mikes running into his MD recorder plus a another pair into his SONY professional analogue recorder. There was also his video cam on a tripod. Derek Ridgers shot a roll of film too.

Cleveland's performance was very compelling because he is able to put so much of himself into his art. I particularly enjoyed the Schubert because of the intesity of the connection between the voice and the piano part. I am not sure I would get anything like the same response from a recording - its the performance thats the thing.

The second half of the recital included three spirituals and some Broadway songs. Maybe its a cliche but Cleveland's delivery of the spirituals was very easy to relate to.

We showed the video in the interval just as people were coing back from their coffee and it really seemed to grab people's attention - partly because there was a sense in which they had been softened up by the performance.

I feel a kind of frustration that we couldnt pull in a bigger audience - and that some of the measures that I had put in place to push the tickets hadnt been more successful - the audience was 60 and came from a number of different channels. On the other hand I think Gillian and Jean thought this was quite a decent audience in terms of the URC Society as it included a fair proportion of the new faces.

The next stem of course is to assess what we have got on film, tape and disc and to work out how we can leverage that.

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