After a more relaxed day at work, I look at the recording I did last night. Instead of doing a whole track I just quickly improvised five parts for about the length of a verse. My intention was to sample the best bits – a strum here, a flourish there – and assemble the structure of the song using them. I’ve never worked this way before but this being a ‘groove’ song with very few chords I thought it would be a good place to experiment. After a little while, I had to ask Plague a question about FL Studio. This led to an hour’s digression where he showed me lots of wonderful things it could do. I wondered whether I’d exceeded the retention capacity of working memory (supposedly seven plus or minus two items) and would recall any the next day, when Plague went off into another digression and started trying to teach me to use Reason. So two hours later I hadn’t made any progress on the song, had several new directions to charge off in all at once, and was having a better relationship with my son, after a few days of tension.
