Minor Adjustments: The title holds many meanings for me. It’s about my children, it’s a reference to the whole album production process, it’s about surfing, a nod to a lifestyle change and a wink to the shift from instrumentals to singing. This album is a result of pouring everything I knew about recording and playing and mixing and producing at that time, into a bunch of songs that I can’t even remember writing, such was my state of mind at the time. OK, sure yes I remember laying the tracks down and spending HOURS mixing them on my Akai 16 track HDD, but composing? I can’t read or write music so composing is the wrong word. Jotting ideas onto my 16 track as they occurred is more like it. Nearly every song on here was started and finished within a day, with no thoughts on structure, chords, content, meaning, lyrics or anything else. If it was in time, in tune and sounded half interesting then it stayed. I wrote and recorded the lead vocals as they come out. Write a line, think of a decent melody, hit record, then get the next line to rhyme, write it down, figure out the matching melody, press record. Then comp them onto a single track and start with the backing vocals. Quick, thoughtless and fun. If anyone says they like my song writing or compositions I feel really bad. They just come out. I don’t have much say. It’s the singular beauty of a multi-tracker. People like me with a modicum of talent can eke out a whole song just by laying stuff down for hours on end and if it don’t fit?...UNDO!. But eventually I end up with a song and eventually I end up with enough to make an album. I used a lot of samples on this album, mainly drum loops and synth pads but there is also a huge amount of guitars, bass, slide, Spanish, electric, acoustic as well as lots of synths, piano, percussion and piano. And of course, lots of vocals. I don’t profess to be a singer, but I like singing and back in 2008 I didn’t really care about anyone’s opinions on my voice. I just hit record and lay down backing track after backing track and it was really fun. It’s a new instrument and I wanted to see how it worked. When faced with adversity and trauma, I always sought solace in music, so why not do it again and this time, grab anything within recording range and stick it in the mix too. So this album, my favourite of all, is me pulling out every trick in the book and trying like hell to not sound like it was all recorded on a single mic, with cheap guitars, ancient synths, stunningly inexpensive effects and a good old fashioned 16 track hard disc. No pro tools or macs in sight. Just a lot of time and a lot of overdubbing and a lot of UNDO! I’m glad I have this reminder of an instrument laden time as a year after finishing this I lost most of my gear to the recession and downsizing. The effects of that stripping down are heard on Downtime from 2010 but this is a reminder of a time when I went full tilt on a big production. Albeit in a tiny bedroom. Enjoy. I wrote(?) recorded, mixed and produced this album by piecing it all together on an AKAI DPS16 with an SE2000a mic. I used Strat, Jackson, and Ibanez guitars along with two old Korg and Roland synths and a 20 year old Roland R5. A whole host of drum loops were stitched together on the HDD, no PC, and the bass was either my synth or my 25yr old Hohner. Cheap and ancient and mostly half-working Zoom and Alesis outboard effects were used and then promptly died from exhaustion. If it has errors or bum notes it's because I'm not that good and the punch in / out function was broken. Renegade recording as someone once called it. I hope you like it.