Have a look at the three sections in my dashboard screenshot below.

In the middle is my delay time calculator which I knocked up a few years ago. This is an essential tool for converting an agreed number of beats per minute into a range of possible delay times, except I have not been able to make extensive use of it at gigs because it's been a while since I used a delay unit that let you dial in the delay time down to the nearest millisecond. I've been using some pretty remedial audio delay solutions in the last few years, but really I wanted something ultra simple. A pure delay. Put audio in, get audio out n milliseconds later, nothing else. I can do feedback via a mixing desk, with other effects inserted in the loop if I want. It struck me that an elementary delay should be available very cheaply. I already had one in the shape of an Alesis Microverb, but that tool is noisy and has poor delay time granularity (to the nearest 20ms). I never found one and gave up looking long ago.

So I wrote one. Introducing the Improvizone Command Line Delay, the section on the left of my dashboard. Observant technically aware readers will see it's a java application, to which you provide a delay time in milliseconds, and that's it. All it does is copy the input sound buffer to the output, delayed by the specified interval. The input comes from a pre-fade aux send on the mixing desk. The output goes to one of the regular inputs. This gives me all the control I expect from a normal feedback delay unit using knobs on the mixer.

Given the delay unit is running on a Windows laptop, and such machines have a habit of wondering off for a few moments and spending most of their CPU on something of no interest to their users, I need to build self-compensating behaviour into the unit for it to run reliably. Initially it takes the timing difference between the input and output audio buffer positions, and introduces the necessary delay as it copies a chunk of audio from one to the other. All being well it should then just copy samples directly, however it continually monitors the input to output latency. If I suddenly launch a greedy piece of software that steals too much CPU from the audio processing, the unit compensates by revoking a little of the delay it originally introduced. You can just about see that happening in the screenshot. It starts with the 577ms delay I entered, but later needs to pull back at little when, for no good reason, I launch Firefox.

That leaves the section on the right. By the looks of things it's a web page with two graphs of sinewaves at different frequencies. Those are actually animations. The waves move off to the left at frequencies determined by the vertical sliders and indicated above the graphs. The current value is where the line meets the right hand vertical axis, and is updated every second or so. The page sends each new value to a special web server running on the laptop. When the web server receives these values, it converts them to expression controller values and sends them via MIDI to my SPD-S drum module. These MIDI signals then modify, for example, the frequency and depth of a pitch shift effect on the SPD-S, or whatever effect I have set up for the current patch. I was very excited to get this working, and it proved to be awesome.

About the evening itself, there were a couple of new happenings. Firstly we welcomed our seventh live bassplayer, Jordan Muscatello, seated in front of me with his Orange amp and meshing seamlessly with our hypnotic ambient pulses. With him were regulars Mike and Os. Mike used his new Hughes and Kettner TubeMeister 18 amp, with ideally suited XLR DI connection. Os, despite making the journey on foot, brought pretty much everything he usually uses except a keyboard.

Secondly we made ourselves comfortable on the smallish stage of a new venue, The Alleycat Bar on Denmark St. Anticipating having to save space, I set up my kit in a narrower and more vertical arrangement than usual, with the SPD-S uppermost and the TD-6 pads underneath. It more or less worked, although I continued to find the SPD-S is much more suited to supplying subtle and unidentifiable-sounding beats than the TD-6, which is trying too hard to sound like real drums. I also have the balance wrong on the TD-6. Most of the sounds are at the right level, but all the snare drum sounds blow me off the stool. Maybe it's just my amp because I didn't notice it in the days before.

I may need to think of some better names for my new software tools. Command Line Delay collapses nicely into CLiDe, which I quite like, and the other one I'm thinking is the Midifier. I was expecting CLiDe to work out fine with no surprises. I was pretty thrilled to have tried the Midifier, because although I'm just using simple sinewaves here on two controllers, it feels like my first step towards generative electronic drum sounds. Sounds that change themselves, because I'm too busy.

My next bit of development for CLiDe is to introduce some mess into the delayed signal. I'm thinking some kind of distortion, or ring modulation, which sounds great with drums. Development on the Midifier involves extending it to send system exclusive messages to my other drum module, the Roland TD-6, and possibly to another drum sound module. Hopefully that will get me using that half of the kit more.

Meanwhile I have the audio from this session to work through and turn into downloads. If I'm as quick with this lot as I was with the last, we should all find ourselves enjoying the material for the first time well into 2014.

I can put the period into a rough timeline beginning at 12.15am on 24 June 2010, when I had finished packing up after a musically mediocre evening an hour out of London to which nobody came. As I slammed the car boot shut, I knew I wanted to give the gigs a rest for a while. In fact I stopped everything for a couple of months, had my acoustic kit refurbished ready to sell (I kept it), worked on using some C++ to animate pictures of my eyeballs (we used them for a Darkroom gig the following year) and ate a lot of apples.

By autumn 2010 I was ready to play again. I knew we should be heading for Central London, but in the interests of a quick win I went for the Plough again. Many of our gigs there had required a single phone call to book. This time calls went unreturned, the venue announced its closure at the end of the year, and away went the single good relationship we had built up with a venue. Os and Mike recorded me for their forthcoming Darkroom album, and I set the drums up in an empty rented house for a month or so. I even considered holding an Improvizone recording session in there.

January 2011 came, I made a list of Central London venue candidates and hit the phones. Practically everyone who took the call directed me to an email address, and thus to the death of the prospect. By the end of February I couldn't be bothered with any more. I drip-fed mp3s to the downloads page, but otherwise retired to work on my acoustic drumming, work on my video material for a trip to Germany with Darkroom, and finding interesting places to take my son at the weekends.

Darkroom did their one gig in April 2011. No-Man did the Burning Shed 10th anniversary gig in October, and are releasing the live recording Love And Endings through Burning Shed next month. Both gigs were ones that I didn't have to arrange, playing to audiences that I didn't have to find, two things I had forgotten I used to undertake routinely and willingly for Improvizone. Amongst other contributors, the Burning Shed gig featured The Resonance Association playing a set in the upstairs bar alongside album cover prints by photographer Carl Glover. Daniel from TRA contacted me a few weeks later and offered me drum duties for his next project The Enemy Game, for which he sent me some mp3s. Carl recommended me to progressive rock band Sanguine Hum after the departure of their original drummer.

The year ended, and in January 2012 I resolved I would re-boot my activities from a year before and either find somewhere for Improvizone to play or bin the whole thing for good. All we needed was one venue to play at on a regular basis. Such were my thoughts while enjoying listening to the material Daniel had sent me. To get out of the house I considered taking him up on his offer of doing some playing. He suggested we talk about it in a pub off the Charing Cross Road. As I walked there down Denmark St, my gig venue recognition lobes flickered into activity as I passed the Alleycat Bar. I added it to my list, phoned, visited, phoned, re-phoned and phoned again, and an evening was ours.

It's a pretty good location, so if we can make a success of it I'll be trying for a regular date. Making a success of it largely having people turn up, and that means remembering how I used to do promotion. Luckily I blogged volumninously on that subject when I got stuck in for the Imbibe gigs. It's mildly fascinating reading material now. I've already been through my list of promotion channels and issued a bunch of listings details. I've stuck stickers on most of my remaining copies of mainly noisier or busier stuff for dispersal in any local record shops that haven't closed down. I'm working on a little poster to pin up in all the places I once pinned up little posters for Imbibe. As many that aren't now restaurants or private offices, anyway.

And so time to resume, though not exactly from where we left off. For example, we won't be arriving with four car-loads of gear like before. Gear will either start its journey to the venue from my house, requiring it to fit in my car, or it will be carried on trains or taxis, or it will be staying in its cupboards. Instead we will have a little bit of new software and a little bit of new blood.

By that I mean someone we haven't played with before. Lest in our absence you were thinking we had turned into vampires.

The first advantage of recording in a house is that the musicians are immediately disposed to sitting around in the kitchen chatting. We discussed the possibility of releasing the October gig recording, and this has since become reality. You can get hold of it directly from Burning Shed at http://www.burningshed.com/store/noman/multiproduct/271/2780/, except for the double-vinyl version, which sold out in the first couple of days.

The second advantage of the day was that of the two sound engineers, both UEA music degree students, one was also a drummer. Once I had set up, I could defer all the soundchecking to him, while I sat with the others in the kitchen drinking tea. We subsequently clocked up quite a few hours of sedentary non-music-making, because in technical respects the session did not go well. Eschewing anything so has-been as a mixing desk, we were recording and monitoring entirely through laptop-controlled audio interfaces. We got started, then stopped again and again after hearing mysterious clicks in the foldback - were they or weren't they going to disk? Worse, we seemed to have unlearned the zeroth commandment of hard disk recording, lasered into all our psyches for at least two decades, that thou shalt monitor with zero latency and no higher. Not when there's a drummer around, anyway. 10ms may sound insignificant, but if I try and play a beat when I can only hear the effect 10ms later, it is completely debilitating. Totally impossible to keep time. Everything slows down. With the monitoring resolved, finally we were able to knuckle down to some serious recording at about 7pm. Mike and I had arrived at 10am.

That said, I had a good session. Having not played acoustic drums since the Leamington gig, I had cleverly booked myself into a drum practice room the previous week for an hour a day to get back into shape for a day-long recording.

Whatever my state of practice, so often in a recording studio I have been horrified to sit behind the kit, once familiar in whatever lively drum room I had grown used to, now alien in the acoustic black hole of the recording booth, mics poking everywhere. Not this time. The drums went up in Steve's study, and it turned out to be a really nice familiar-sounding room to play in, as if I had been established in there for weeks. Some combination of hardwood floor under a good thick rug, a sofa and a glass display containing two live snakes seemed exactly the sauce for a comfortable playing environment.

For these recordings I used almost the same kit as the Leamington gig, with a few minor differences, firstly in the cymbals. The splash has now moved straight in front of me. I'm not even sure I hit it on anything that we recorded. Also I brought my cheap and nasty china cymbal. This really is a denied-entry-level specimen, though I find it quirky and therefore useful as brushed ride. Another setup difference is that the roto-tom to the left of the rack tom is now a 10", and I have inserted the 8" roto-tom between the lower toms. According to conventional order this is wrong, it should go somewhere above the hi-hat, but I thought this might suit one of the pieces we were recording, which involved mainly a tom rhythm throughout. Plus it looks fun. Finally, I'm back to using a single bass drum pedal here. I realise that although practice is important, it is not to be confused with performance. I pointlessly included the double pedal in the Leamington gig setup because I had been using nothing else for the 18 months beforehand, but after a couple of months off, I wanted to see if I could go back to enjoying the Pearl pedal I've had for over a decade.

No trouble re-adjusting to it. In fact I think my right foot prefers it. Having nothing for my left foot to do except play the hi-hat made me realise I should be learning to use it properly. In the tom-heavy pattern I developed for one the new tracks, one thing I wanted to do was alternately splash and choke the hi-hat, all with the foot. Maybe by the time we come to play it live I will have mastered that. At the going No-Man rate, that should give me plenty of time to learn it, forget it, re-learn it, retire and recover in time for their fiftieth anniversary.

In order to use this extra roto-tom, I had to spend some time in the shed. A while ago I allocated myself the task of mounting my four hand-playable roto-toms in a consistent way that would encourage me to use them in a kit. Roto-toms are typically sold in 2s or 3s. Each is mounted on the end of a long M12 bolt, and these are tightened onto a long aluminium C-beam. As I lamented before, the trouble with mounting even two drums on a C-beam in this way is that they are not in a comfortably playable arc. I long time ago I sawed a 10cm length off my C-beam for mounting a single roto-tom, which pretty much set the other drums up for compromise or neglect ever since.

You can buy small square pieces of metal with two holes, one for the roto-tom bolt, the other for a smaller bolt for attaching to a cymbal stand instead of the cymbal bolt. I was not keen on this, but have since decided I can spare some 20 year-old cymbal stands for experiments. Rather than do any more shopping, I drilled a hole in another sawn-off C-beam, this time making a diagonal so that the bolt into the cymbal stand could tightened properly. I have always shied away from metalwork on account of fairly sucking at it. However, an ordinary disc of sandpaper on the end of an ordinary power drill can render even my scruffy work convincing and presentable. It almost looks like I got somebody else to do it.

Practice and amateur metalwork combined, I was for once reasonably cheery at how an acoustic drum recording session had turned out, more so when I listened back to the raw material a few days later. It may surprise some of his audience to know that Tim is partial to some mild goofing around. Earlier he had recounted a recent holiday to France where he bought a book on birds in French for his son, and that he was doing quite well learning them himself. Later, with the tape rolling, we were jamming an introduction to one of the tracks with a jazzy feel, light brushes on the drums. Just as Stephen is about to land a downbeat on the piano, Tim announces Les Oiseaux in his deadpan voice-over.

Un... Le Cuckoo

Deux... Le Rossignol

A nature documentary for six-year-olds? A euphemistic enumeration of new positions to try during le jiggi-jiggi? Two months later I'm still chuckling at how he pitched it perfectly between the two.

• My Revenge On Seattle
• Time Travel In Texas
• All The Blue Changes
• Pretty Genius
• Lighthouse
• Beaten By Love
• Wherever There Is Light
• Mixtaped
• Things Change (encore)

Looking back on a gig, I like to settle back in my anorak and focus on the practicalities of being a contributing member, rather than the aesthetic experiences of the consuming audience. Especially as by this point I seemed to have forgotten how to do a gig. Boringly I tell you that I arrived at 12:15, second only to Jason the stage technician, however, on arrival at the stage door, one finds a lift immediately to the left, via which all the gear can be raised in a single elevation to the foot of stage right by a bunch of very obliging stage technicians. I think I may have lifted one bag out my car. You're supposed to pay for that in hotels.

Meanwhile to the right, a green room the size of an ideal Improvizone venue, within which a spacious bling mirrored caravan occupies one side. They must have installed the caravan first, then breeze-blocked the room around it. A stainless steel picket fence encloses a seating area in front, a Dalek guards one end of the trailer.

As any task tends to fill whatever period is available, sure enough I took my sweet leisurely time setting up the kit, and was still moving cymbals into position when the last of us had arrived. The heads on the two toms were sounding suspiciously dud, so I changed them and couldn't believe the difference. Hours passed, eventually it came to soundchecking the drums. I have not done this for a long, long time. Thud thud thud thud thud thud on the bass drum. Whack whack whack whack whack whack on the snare. And so on, until we got to the floor tom. Ian the sound man said it needed tuning, to get rid of the ring. No sound man I have worked with has ever made it to the end of his checks and calibrations without telling me one or other of the drums has a ring to it that needs removing. Never. I twiddled the drum key and tapped for a few minutes. The moment passed, attention moved on to to Pete's bass guitar, and the drum was left alone.

Meanwhile Ben the stage monitor sub-mix engineer asked me what mix I would like for my monitor. I'm not sure I've ever been asked this question before. Consequently, for two lengthy seconds, I had no clue, and after that I could only apply logic in lieu of experience. Bass drum, lead vocals, both essential. Plus Mike, as he was off to the side of the stage with a 30W amp and we had two or three songs to begin together. Plus my own backing vocals. Nothing else. Years of recording Improvizone gigs have taught me to forget trying to have a representative balanced band sound on stage. Beautifully mixed recordings will be available later. Right now I need to know when the chorus is.

At the beginning of the week the plan had been for No-Man to fit in a complete run-through of the set in the afternoon. In the end there was time for only three or four songs. I'm usually wary of a good soundcheck. Just as well it demonstrated I had forgotten the material. It was also very important to get used to the sound of a big room. Most of my playing experience has been in small ones. Recently most of my live experience has involved playing to a click and I'm now well accustomed to it, so that apart from My Revenge On Seattle, which I didn't start, I used a metronome for every track. I used the Simple Metronome android app on my phone, using no special in ear monitoring, just a pair of old mobile phone earplugs with one of them stuffed down my shirt and the other either in my ear or dangling after I've ripped it out. This happens when the drums have gone too quiet for people to follow and the band's timing has drifted.

For the first time ever I took a practice pad for warming up in the dressing room. Actually I wanted to take a spare rack tom stand in case the one I was using collapsed, and in fact I just used one of my Roland PD-8 electronic drum pads. As people retired for some quality hanging about, there was plenty of time for around two hours of metronomic warmup tapping. I'm still trying to decide how much difference it made. Some, but not much. During the opening acts, SW had retreated to a dressing room for an hour or so of peace and quiet. He told me he didn't mind when I invading for another round of click sticking, but I kept the noise down anyway. Good practice when you're in a band with Tim.

Up on the boards, a lot of the songs went very well. Tim was brilliant. I've never heard a lead vocal so loud in a monitor mix, all the more staggering that it was the normally dulcet-toned Tim Bowness blasting over all the other instruments. Any concerns over whether he would survive an acoustic drum kit were squished. My own backing vocals went OK when I remembered them, except perhaps for Things Change, where they might just have been absolutely dire. I don't think I want to know.

If I had my least favourites, they would be All The Blue Changes and Pretty Genius. The latter because I'm just not very good at that kind of slow funk. More flunk than funk, though with focused practice I could be fine. All The Blue Changes was a surprise hit with band and audience alike during the 2008 shows, when the planar construction of the record first achieved a modest live crescendo with three or four lead instruments all having to find things to do. This time we cranked the crescendo up to eleven, and I had my first taste of antipathy to what this piece should do. In rehearsals we noticed a lot of the songs started from nothing, grew a big crescendo, then quickly dropped down to a final quiet coda. The arrangement we ended up with for Beaten By Love was a deliberate attempt not to do that, but All The Blue Changes took the formula to max. Other drummers know how to make a huge amount of noise sound be not quite so boring. I don't. One of the things I love about a lot Improvizone output is how pieces can be interesting from beginning to end without having to get louder. Often the reverse in fact, that they get better as they reduce in intensity. In our latest version of All The Blue Changes I felt I and it were beating ourselves to death.

Rapid kit teardown requirements meant I did nearly zero mingling with audience peoples afterwards, but I did consume a couple of complimentary remarks about the sound of the kit and my accuracy in playing it. Maybe the practice pad did make a difference, or maybe it was simply the metronome keeping me steady for a range of slow tempos. Changing the heads, which I believe the greater drumming populace refer to as skins, on the toms was clearly a good idea, but I'm going right off my snare. The snare mechanism is poked. I can either have tight snare that I can't turn off, or one that is loose at best. Maybe I need to break the inhibition of a lifetime and buy another one.

As I was packing away, I realised I could do with another five of these gigs to really figure out how to play this set. There is so much virtuoso drumming in the world, all accessible from youTube, that it can be a bit of a personal battle to cast that aside and do your best for the music instead of feeling you need to compete with whatever new global percussive hotness you've just been watching. On the electronic drums this was never a consideration for me. They are there to do what I want with them. But I realise that what the experts are up to on acoustic drums has been influencing me a lot. Playing a gig with No-Man reminds me that it should not.

• Tim Bowness (vocals)
• Steven Wilson (guitar)
• Steve Bingham (electric violin)
• Stephen Bennett (keyboards)
• Michael Bearpark (guitar)
• Pete Morgan (bass)
• Andrew Booker (drums)

We'll be playing for about 45-50 minutes, maybe more, for which we have rehearsed for four days, though only two with the full lineup. I recounted the first rehearsal recently. The other three began last weekend, and I kept a few notes about how we got on. In case you're reading this and are going to the gig, I've reduced the song titles to their initials to try not to spoil the surprise, though if you're a long time No-Man fan you'll probably guess them anyway.

Saturday
We drift in and slowly set up. Mike arrives having spent the morning assembling, stepping back in complete surprise, a pedal board. Thanks to a cancellation we are in the same room as three years ago, an airy high-ceilinged chamber with windows all the way along one side. I set up enough of the kit for today and begin my eight-hour fruit and nut intake. By the time we are all ready to play, a kiddie band has begun blasting through their material directly behind me in the vocal booth. It is oppressive, even for a drummer. I ask if anyone happens to have a spare piece of double glazing on them. We begin with BBL, a piece we built up from next to nothing in Norwich, and labour over it for the next hour. The youngsters are still walloping away next door. I exit the building for some much needed silence.

We start on MROS. We had a bit of difficulty with this in Norwich and ended up with a version that was half speed throughout. I has compared Mike's rehearsal recording with the original and felt depressed, so this time I put back the fast four-on-the-floor, still playing the snare in half time. A couple of Yee-haw Dublin!s out of the way and we all seem comfortable with reinstating the original pace, and the quieter final chorus is sounding good again.

L was a highlight of the set three years ago, but was unimpressive in Norwich. Tim was worried about the loudness of the drums during the opening vocal sections. I try to assure him this will be rectified by my use of thin hotrods, which are bunches of thin dowel rather than sticks of solid wood. It works, Tim is much happier, and so is the song generally. In the second run-through, Steve The Maestro Bingham loops his 7-note cyclical phrase. The drums are only stabbing on the downbeat here, and his loop does a great job of keeping this section time. Until the rest of the band back in, of course, after which we're all over the place.

So far, three songs that were either completely new to us last time, or did not go well. M did not fare well either, but we handle it much better this time round. Although not playing to a click, I check my metronome before and after and we're near as matters, which is pleasing considering this one is a dead-slow 47bpm. We then try a couple that actually went well in Norwich, TTIT and PG. Turns out they weren't a fluke, as we have no problems with those, not today at least. They clearly benefit from acoustic drums.

On to ATBC, another 2008 highlight found recently to be troubled. This time around I actually listened carefully to the percussion on the orginal, and am trying at least to recreate the cymbal pattern. I put my metronome headphones in for the first time today, at exactly 60bpm, as this one has a tendancy to run away with itself. I tried to do that in 2008, but the electronic drums soon got lost in the noise, whereupon everything sped up, and all I could do was follow. The acoustic drums have much more clout, so I've been trying to clamp the speed down on this one. That may be one reason it's suffering. We all quietly hope that the addition of SW will cure it.

We didn't even try TC in Norwich, but it goes surprisingly well the first time round, give or take a few ambiguous transistions, and keeps getting better. When we played it in Shepherds Bush back in 2008, original No-Man violinist Ben Coleman, who was guesting that night, had learned his original solo exactly. I had not, so I had to count the exact number of bars before bringing the section to a close. With Binksy we have no such constraints, and do what we like for as long as we like. I love improvisation.

Finally, something else we hadn't thought of doing in Norwich, WTIL from the Schoolyard Ghosts album. I forget that I played on this in the 2008 shows, assume this is a tacet number for me, take a few pictures and sit on the floor while the others try out the opening bars. Tim eventually wonders when I'm going to go back to the kit. Turns out I had the tempo written in my notebook, so I must have played it. Memory equals seive.

Back round BBL, now sounding convincing. Whether or not it survives the Wilson treatment is a question for tomorrow.

I drive home with an aching right knee, as ever.

Sunday
My knee still hurts and the car exhaust has a hole in it. On arrival at the rehearsal room in Cambridge, I have plenty of time to take the car to be fixed, as SW is not expected until 1pm. We spend more time on BBLand MROS. Only the work on one turns out to be worthwhile.

SW arrives and we go through every track. Three years ago this was a slow meticulous process. This time around, a lot more has fallen into place, and some of the tracks require only one or two runs through before we work on the set in order tomorrow. A couple of quiet sections are lifted back up to principal volume at Tim's expense, for example the end of MROS, which now has the drums dropping down a bit, otherwise pretty much the same. We try this first of all, and I break a stick before we get to the end. ATBC finally requires me to step out of the pattern I had worked carefully to reproduce, and play loudly like normal indie kids. I have very little idea what to do. L is fine, although the middle arpegiated bits speed up as before. I use a click until the big blast. M, TC, WTIL and PG are all fine, except for a couple of minor adjustments to the bassline to improve funkiness. TTIT is also fine, except we lose one of the two near-identical solo jams to avoid repetition.

That leaves the one flying spoiler of ointments, BBL. We have formed it and rehearsed it extensively as a six-piece, we have neglected to leave any space for Steven. He complains the drums are too happy jazzy for such a downbeat theme, the section with the ascending bassline is boring and overall the whole thing is too long. We discard hours of sunk rehearsal time and ditch the entire second section, and cut back the drums to a sombre funereal pulse with soft mallets. It is saved from being dropped completely, and we call it a day with a running order ready for tomorrow.

I stay behind and mend my snare, which has been getting looser with every hit. I'm feeling very comfortable with the acoustic drums, more than I have in a very long time. Shame I don't know the arrangements yet. I'm getting better with playing the kit through the different sections, with cymbal rolls and damping, swapping sticks, but there are 24 hours left before I stop being able to get away with fluffs and flunked playing. The holiday is nearly over.

Monday
I drive via Harlow, stopping for some splurgitive shopping. Two new cymbal stands (the others rattle when I do a roll with soft mallets), new heads for the toms and the snare, some spare light hotrods (the ones I have are looking frayed and they are a vital tool in this gig), and to pick up the front head that I asked them to put a hole in. I arrive early at the studio, but I warm up while no-one's around rather than change heads or stands. Gear adjustments can wait for when people are brewing tea.

The knee seems to be adapting, although I'm scared of pushing the right foot too hard. No matter, a lot of this music is slow enough that the left foot can do the work instead. Obviously I can't play nearly as well, but it's only a rehearsal, right. We run through the whole set, without stopping between tracks for analysis. The aim is to work on transitions and find out which ones need a gap in which Tim can tell a joke. By now we've pretty much got it, though minor adjustments are made here and there.

On the second runthrough I try backing vocals on MROS, TTIT, ATBC and TC. Some simplification, or complete dumbing-down, of the drum part is necessary. Shame I can't superimpose vocals over my TTIT pattern, which I really like. Maybe a bit of practice will do it. I'm so annoyed with the buzz on my rack tom I take the head off after the second runthrough. I find a small hexagonal nut loose inside. Bastard thing's probably been there a year.

The knee gets better, and I'm feeling more comfortable with the kit than at any time since Pulse Engine, and I realise it's a result of having basically spent the last year practicing. I can play slowly to a metronome. I can get an even four on the floor with either foot without thinking about it - I've only just realised this has been causing me no trouble at all, whereas in the past it would be the kind of simple thing I would fall down over. That said, accuracy diminishes over the course of the day. We do a runthrough of TC and I realise I have to count the bars after all. Naturally I miscount them. Sometimes I think music with no repetition would be much easier to remember.

I stay behind at the end and replace the bass drum front head and the snare head. I decide to stick with the tom heads as they seem to be behaving for now. As I drive home with a headache that has been building since this morning, I realise I have no idea whether we did three complete runthroughs or only two. Memory equals seive.