Last month I had a major reorganisation in my home office/studio. I moved my MacBook Pro to the downstair office and swapped my Windows PC to my upstairs alcove studio. I had always used my MacBook as my primary recording platform, but the upstair studio was becoming too hot and noisy and we had just installed a brand new air conditioner in the downstairs office that I wanted to take advantage of.

Over on the left for work, over on the right for play!

So this is the first recording in the new space, and I like to say that it was MUCH more enjoyable in the cool and (relative) quiet compared to the old space. Still need to do some work on reducing reflections etc., but overall, I think it is positive.

I still need to bring my KRK studio monitors and set them up downstairs, so at the moment I am doing all mixing and mastering using my Sennheiser HD 25-SPII headphones, which is not ideal, but all I have to work with at the moment.

My fancy stereo ribbon mic still hasn't been used in anger yet - not at least until I get a 4 channel audio interface, so I used my trusty Rode NT1-A mic blended with the internal AP5 pickup in my venerable old Maton guitar.

This piece is called 'Dandelion' and is by Masaaki Kishibe. I've actually been playing it for a couple of years now, and it turns out to be my wife's favourite of all the instrumental pieces I play. It is a fairly simple song, but to capture that lilting feel is a bit tricky. I don't think I have mastered it yet, but will keep working on it. It doesn't help that I haven't played fingerstyle guitar for so long that my fingers are still not as nimble as I would like.

I mastered this track using the Slate Virtual Mix Rack plugins - nice, but a bit of a drain on the resources on my 7 year old MacBook. I am not completely happy with it as I think the final results are still to strident. I need to reduce some of the high frequency and bring in more bass without making it too boomy or woofy. It is all a learning process, and I think once I have my KRK monitors set up for mastering work, I can improve on it.