This one is a lap steel slide, a Gretsch G9220 Bobtail Round-Neck Resonator to be precise. It's a good guitar, well made, sweet tone, as metallic as you'd expect but there's enough wood in the sound as well. It projects well, is  comfortable and responsive to play. It records well. I haven't used the internal pickup much but it seems adequate. I don't know how it compares to the very expensive models but I can't imagine they's be much better than this Gretsch. You can hear it on my acoustic albums Honeyfield Road and Broken Landscapes over on Bandcamp. 

​One day I'll buy a Weissenborn because there's no imitating the sound of that wonderful instrument.

This is the Gretsch 9221 Bobtail, a straight up resonator, all metal. It plays as well as the 9220, reliable and a clean sound. I bought this used and had to take off the front to make some adjustments to the resonator. To get the steel sound you need to play a little more towards the bridge. Internal pickup - seems fine. It's a good one for trying out different tunings, free improvisation or straight up Appalachian tune-making. I play some tunes on my acoustic albums as well as on Outside, my album of free improvisations for acoustic guitars, again on Bandcamp.

I'm a bit slow in the visual arts department. For a start I don't have the time to do my primary projects and establish a practice in other things that require my full attention. But over the years I've managed to get to grips with some aspects of collage, photography, book folding and linocut.

Recently I went to a printing workshop with the very wonderful Georgie Fay. https://georgiefay.com/ where I met some other  artists involved in printing and bookmaking. Georgie's idea is to establish a club that meets regularly and eventually to set up a proper print workshop in Earlston. For this session we met at the Little Art Hub in Galashiels https://www.littlearthub.org/, a white space paid for by multi-year finding from various bodies. Jedburgh has nothing like this and the way things go in this cold, cold town is unlikely to see such a hub in my lifetime.

Anyway, I've always wanted to print, mainly to generate artwork for albums and posters and maybe zines and folded books so when a dear artist friend Sue Higginson-Bell recommended this workshop I snapped up a place and had the time of my life. I'd do this at home but you really need a large space to set out all the different clean, dirty and wet areas and of course you need a press. A good one is expensive and takes up yet more space. I won't go into the details but what I love about printing is the uncertainty. It's like wet darkroom developing when the print emerges from the tank like a fish you've just dragged up from the depths of the ocean. You're never sure what you're going to get. Then there's the repeat processes where your original print is modified and reprinted in different ways. It's similar in spirit to some of the recording techniques I use in building up a musical composition. Not to forget the amazing power of colour, nuanced by all the subtle textures that find themselves on to the print. I'm hooked. Here are some of my efforts with all the usual beginner's mistakes - thumbprints, smudges, light bands where I didn't pull the print evenly through the press, letters back to front and everything the wrong way round (some of these were happy accidents in the end). 

I can't play saxophone but I am fascinated by the music of John Coltrane. I was watching some footage of his 'Last Performance at Newport 1966' and apart from being mesmerised by the wall of sound he produced, which Hendrix managed to do as well, I was struck by how physical the whole performance was. He was a big strong man and he laid into that microphone like it was his last sacrifice to the Gods of Music. Sonny Rollins was the same. They're not pretending to be something else. That';s the way you have to play those instruments. It must be in the nature of saxophones, the way you hold them and point them away from you towards heaven or wherever. I've never managed to warm to playing guitar like that. You either end up gyrating around with an electric like a dodgy rock star or if it's an acoustic you end up rocking about with that orgasm face they put on to squeeze some kind of emotion out of the moment. Nah!

There's something I wanted to mention briefly and it concerns the performer's awareness of musical time which is obviously different from that of the listener. I know - the performer is a listener too but the listener isn't a performer, at least not in the same way as I might be if I'm playing a concert to people.

It's this. When I'm playing a pre-composed piece that I've committed to memory or am reading from a score, say a classical study, or a piece I know by heart, my attention is on the present and the future, broadly speaking. I don't think much about what's just happened, unless I've made a complete horse's arse of a section but that requires the application of experience and diligence to ignore. If I'm improvising with little more than a few abstract ideas or even less, my attention will roam between past, present and future. I need to have in mind what I've just done to make some kind of musical sense (yes, I still believe in that) as I go forward through time. I also need to be aware of what I'm actually playing and I have to attention on what's to come. How this works is complex. Maybe it's something like what computers do when they're multithreading.