Click track

...In the end I went to bed at 3.15am. I was at least able to fall asleep with a sense of achievement, having managed to wrestle my computer into shape.

I'm currently walking down a very windy street in Hove. It's spitting with rain, which at least means it's not as icy cold as it was in London when I left this morning.

It appears to have snowed very heavily in Wales. At least, I think it must have snowed heavily, based on a photograph Brother Tim posted on Facebook this afternoon. I can find no evidence of the fact on the BBC website, which rather bails out his theory that if it's weather, and it ain't happening in London, it ain't news.

I am now so shattered that I can barely put one foot in front of the other. I've been in PK's cozy attic all day today prepping files for Brass; selecting the keyboard sounds that will underpin the real instruments we'll be recording in January, and painstakingly creating tempo maps so that all the elements that we record separately in the studio are spot on in time. The most important tool is the click track: a sort of metronome, which everyone will hear through headphones as they perform. A click works really well for pop music, where the very essence of the genre relies on precision and regularity of tempo. Dramatic music, however, is all about the ebb and flow, so one of the things Nathan and I were trying to do last night was emulate the tempi and phrasing that Ben Holder and the cast and musicians developed in performance, whilst simultaneously remembering that an audio-only experience is very different to one which comes with visuals, and tends to be slower and more emotionally indulgent! It's a complicated jigsaw alright!