I’ve been a traceur for a few months now and parkour is coming a bit more easily to me these days. When you train in Manchester’s concrete playgrounds, you are never sure if you can carry off the techniques you’ve been shown. It really HURTS when it all goes wrong and you bail. One or two incidents like that and you tend to lose your nerve and your focus. (As well as some skin and a bit of blood. :s )

Today it was absolutely chucking it down – not good conditions for training outdoors. Paul finally managed to get access to the gym in Stockport. I’m not fully au fait with the arrangements, which seem a little dodgy, but we have a key and an alarm code to use the gym afterhours. It’s on an industrial estate in Stockport in the middle of nowhere. But it certainly is well equipped. This is where people train to do proper mat work, vaults, pommel horses and tumbles. We have more matresses than you can shake a big stick at, trampolines and springboards.

All eight of us got to try stupid things that we’d never even consider if there was concrete underneath our feet. And it shows you just what you can do when you remove the fear element from it. I just hope I can transfer my newly found skills to the real world. I can now back-flip – but I won’t be trying it outside of a gym just yet!

Got a mint group picture, too – it’s in my gallery – go look and comment!

We all need it. In fact pretty much every sentient organism cannot survive without it. Humans need on average seven and a half hours shut-eye a night to function normally. Believe it or not, dolphins sleep with half of their brain at a time so that they can continue to surface regularly to breathe.

In the past few years, I have had so many things on the boil at once that I was just never capable of getting the sleep that I needed. I have always been a night owl. I could be knackered all day, stagger home from work, yet when I get in late – BINGO! – wide-a-fuckin’-wake again. I’d nod off at 3am, be forced to get up stupidly early for work, and the whole cycle would start again.

I stopped drinking coffee and cut down my alcohol, started taking more regular exercise, basically tried every trick in the book except medication and nothing seemed to sort out my sleeping patterns.

I can run marathons, scale buildings (not quite in a single bound just yet) and bite my own toe-nails but the hardest thing I seem to do on a regular basis is get out of bed. I hate it. Having to force the fug from my head and stumble around getting ready to spend an hour and a half travelling to a job that bores me senseless – I’d much rather pull the duvet over my head and have five more minutes!

Lately, however, I seem to have sussed it. I think my body has given up trying to mess me around. Years spent in the army have left me with a built-in ability to grab sleep wherever and whenever I can. I get my four hours a night, I have a 20min snooze on the bus to work and grab a 20min top-up schlarf at lunchtime.

Life is too busy and hectic to spend it unconscious, tempting though that might be. If you’re going to burn the candle at both ends, and scrape the wax off in the middle and set fire to that bit too, then you have to compromise somewhere.

Vive la siesta!

Sunday gone, for the princely fee of a slab of beer to be arranged on some future date, my mate Bill and I agreed to record some tracks for an up-and-coming Manchester band called The Void. There might have been three engineers on the job but Gaz was a casualty to the St Patrick’s Day celebrations. Just as well he didn’t come along – it was cosy enough in the studio without having to deal with toxic fumes from his night out.
Recording a track is a lot trickier than it looks. You have to set up a complex studio, manage the band and keep your wits about you. The drums come first. You have to set them up in a dead-room (No echoes – imagine the sound in a wardrobe full of clothes and you’re not far away.) Then you have to mic up each drum in such a way as to capture the right sound. This means selecting the right mics for the job and angling and routing them so that they doesn’t impede the drummer’s playing style. Not so easy – have you ever seen a drummer flail around? You give the drummer a set of headphones and play him a click track, which keeps him in time, while recording all of the mics through the mixing desk and into Pro Tools (a hard-drive recording system). You do take after take ad nauseam until you get it right!
When this is done, you get the next musician in and repeat the process. So the bass player replaces the drummer, and plays his pieces while listening to the drum track we’d just recorded. Then the guitars, and finally the vocals.
We spent ten hours solid in the studio and managed to get everything but the vocals done. It was a hard day for the musicians and even harder for the engineers – when they went home, we carried on the work in our own studios, processing and cleaning up the audio ready to do some mixing down (the process of turning the individual tracks into a coherent song).
Bill and I are still working on the audio and probably will be for a week or so. The vocals will be bagged next Sunday in one of the better studios and with some really nice microphones.
Sound Engineering is very cerebral work. Months of training are coming together nicely and everything kind of just slots into place when you’re at the controls. Although, just as with most skills, anyone can learn engineering if they want to, to be a good engineer you have to have a fundamental and deep-rooted understanding of the principles of sound and a trained ear. The former requires a sharp brain, and the second lots of experience. We’re working on the latter. )