I SPEND the morning setting up the PA in the studio live room and tweaking the patches on the Quad Cortex.

It all sounded good on Saturday’s show, but there’s a few improvements that might make it even better. Once done, I get Margaret over to sit in the live room, listen and give me some feedback. We’re happy with the results although the plugged-in banjo needs some more attention.

Maggi arrived for a coffee then we have lunch and I go back to the studio. Although the banjo has. magnetic pickup and impulse responses (IRs) are meant to work more with piezo pickups I decide to give it a try and create a set of IRs using the banjo and upload them to the Quad Cortex. The result is good!

I’d asked a contact down south to look at a power supply for the Quad Cortex and my wireless transmitter so I don’t have to lug around ‘wall warts’ and find two available power outlets…his quote is quite expensive and the planned hardware is gonna be too bulky for my compact pedalboard. I duo some research and find for not much more outlay I can use a Cioks DC7 and a set of jumper cables to combine power outputs to do the job…plus there’s more outputs to spare as well as a USB socket. I email the guy and suggest him trying to squeeze his work into a smaller box may be a little more trouble than it’s worth.

None of the MIDI stuff in the studio has been working properly sinceI copied everything over to the new Mac Mini. I decide to delete all instances of software instruments, drivers and libraries and start afresh. There’s a lot of downloading and re-installing…and it’s looking promising.

I nip to the local pub to catch the last of my pal Tom Urie’s evening set…and at £6 for an alcohol-free beer I’m not unhappy to have been a little later than usual!

Back home Margaret’s got dinner ready and we chill and watch some telly for the rest of the night.