On The Road

"Amateurs wait until they feel like it; Pros just turn up every day and get on with it.”

The War of Art - Steven Pressfield

It's all gone a bit quiet at Blague Central this month; lots of work travel which sadly means not much music production.

I’ve spent the year so far attempting to consistently live life “The Artist’s Way”, despite all the usual real life getting in the way. I added in “Dry January”; a concept containing enough power to easily carry me through a month of abstinence and beyond (the Dry Drinker shopful of 0% name-beers is a great help!).

The resulting better sleep, if nothing else, has led to brighter days of occasionally feverish activity across all fronts, musical and otherwise, from early morning into late-evening, (traditionally non-productive time where any alcohol is involved.)

Knowing vacuum-abhorring nature the way I do I took the opportunity this extra energy provided, to crack TWO nuts which had beaten me for the past thirty years of on-the-road living.

I’ve long-frequented the various hotel gyms I find on my travels and skipped evening bar sessions to jam in a run along unfamiliar streets. Time is always tight and whilst others would more sensibly be out and at it at 6am, I had NEVER managed it before dusk! (I found myself shuffling past The Parthenon in Athens as the sun set last night.) From waking I seemed to need a day of decreasing lethargy/increasing guilt to drive me into shorts and trainers. Well it’s all change now, let me tell you!

Idly searching the app store last month for a simple workout-log, I stumbled across what seems to be the perfect personalised exercise app: 8FIT. I was clearly ready to make this small leap into near-daily High Intensity Interval Training (thank you Dr Michael Mosley) and this little pestering, phone-based reminder is all I needed to push me over the edge with minimum extra effort. I now find myself tipping out of bed, straight into P.E. kit and performing timed repeats of press-ups or "mountain climbers" (who knew?). Under fifteen minutes later, hot, wiped-out and smug-as-a-cyclist, the day has a new face. In case it hasn’t been said enough times already, if the positive effect exercise has on your mind and energy levels were available in pill-form, it would sell by the billion.

So. Clear-headed, time to burn and even my non-existent abdominals in danger of tightening, if not Living THE Dream, I was certainly Living A Dream. Yet there was still one thing missing.

After decades of attempts to take my songwriting and production with me on the road, one evening in a hotel room in Abu Dhabi a couple of weeks ago, I think I may have finally cracked it, in the most obvious way. 

Since my studio now revolves around a big iMac, it takes mere seconds to save a Logic song folder to a memory stick and load it up on my old Macbook Pro, thus allowing me to take my entire studio multitrack masters (as I might once have called them) away with me, in my rucksack! Back in that room on my first free evening I set up Blague Central Mobile on a corner of the desk. With earphones and the AKAI Professional LPK25 keyboard I’d remembered to pack, I spent a couple of blissful hours recording melodies I’d previously hummed or whistled into my phone.

Once home of course I can transfer this new file to the studio Mac and simply carry on recording tracks. I’d like to think for most people reading this, such behaviour is very old hat indeed, but for me, twenty-five years after I first threw a recording Walkman and a gig-bagged Strat in the back of the van, on the off-chance I’d be inspired one free evening, this is a game-changing, soul-saving, habit-forming, life-affirming technical wonder of the modern age!