Happy New Year and what a great start to the year I am having. Loads of exciting things going on, working on new and exciting projects.

Tonight is the first gig of the year for The Sacred Woods. We have had quite a bit of time off with our last gig being way back in November, so we are looking forward to getting back into it. We return to a venue we have played quite a few times before so it should be a nice gentle easing back to the stage. We have a number of gigs lined up for the next few months so should be a good start to the year.

Kittyhawk ended the year strong with quite a few Christmas gigs. This year is looking a little sparse at the moment though with not much in the calendar. We do have a ceilidh booked for next week for Burns Night so that will be our first of the year. It is strange but in yeas gone by it would not be unusual for us to have 3 or 4 burns night gigs, same with St Patricks later in the year but we just don’t seem to be able to find venues looking for ceilidh music this year. Perhaps it is  just our time for a bit of a dry spell!

My solo work under the name Jules Roberts has seen me finally getting around to recording 2 of my tracks. I am pleased with the results but I need much more practice at the recording process to speed up my work flow. I found that I did not check the individual recorded tracks sufficiently before moving on to adding new tracks and errors in the recordings only came to light much later when mixing. This resulted in me having to tinker around cleaning up mistakes in the recordings. In future I need to focus much more on the individual track quality and not listen to the thing as a complete piece until each track is clean and tidy. February will see me taking part in FAWM (February Album Writing Month) again this year.  I have been doing this about 6 years or so I think and have always managed to write at least the 14 songs expected during the month. As usual there is a lot going on this February so I wont be aiming to achieve the 14 but want to get good quality solo tunes done. I have not decided on the format yet, I may just stick with doing acoustic guitar stuff and try to get some really good up beat tunes done again like last year, or I may try keys instead as I have never written that way before. Still time to decide and it always turns up some great surprises.

My experimental writing took a bit of focus during the last few weeks and I wrote my 3rd album in the series “A Collection of Notes’ and started a new series looking at music for yoga, mediation and relaxation. This resulted in 2 tracks both of album length (2 hours) focused at being used during a yoga class. I have sent one of them to my yoga teacher and we are hoping that they will be tested out on her classes this month. I am looking forward to hearing how they sound in the studio as it is a very different environment to the one in my recording studio and I am not sure which bits might be lost in the noise of the yoga studio. I need to see whether some of the harmonics and ‘interesting’ bits will stand up to the environment or be lost. Feedback will be gained and used to inform the next experiments in the series.

Finally, I have been working on putting together a bid for some Arts Council funding for a project this year. I have never done anything like this before. The whole funding thing is new to me, as is the workshop type thing that I am proposing. I am getting some help and support in putting this together which is great so we shall see what happens. It will be a challenge but could lead on to some great things. Watch this space!

Onwards and upwards.