There are days when you need to remember to show up. And days when you need to show up to do the right thing.

After some fine advice by a friend, I’ve installed a nice bit of software on the Mac to fix one of my quandaries from about ten days ago. Blue Cat Audio’s Patchwork allows me to get a whole load of old-skool music plugins working within my rather more modern Pro Tools setup. For less than a hundred quid, my PT setup was reunited with ImpOSCaR, Oddity and the Korg Legacy Collection. The first two of these are particular favourites as they are a bit weird and so you get taken in a different direction from Native Instruments’ Kontakt or Arturia’s Jupiter-8V, which loads of people already have.

But then I got thinking.

What about my Waldorf Collection DVD up in the loft? The one with the PPG Wave virtual instrument? Wouldn’t it be great to get that up and running – having the amazing sounds of Propaganda and Frankie (and yes I’m looking at you too Roisin Murphy!) back under my fingertips.

[fade to black, the bits about 32-bit compatibility and java updates and licensing rabbit holes never made the final cut. I was there and they were boring for me, even with the dopamine rush.]

Suffice to say, I pulled away from this challenge after less than an hour – without having spent any more money or installed any new operating systems. I went to play with Milo instead.

I nearly fell down the rabbit-hole again this evening, but somehow managed to pull back after about twenty minutes.

Instead of yet more displacement activity, there was some tentative progress. A new sound led to some poking around with a new effect, that led to a little exercise in how to play around that sound’s challenges, which sort of led to some interesting chords…

There are always more yaks to shave. And sometimes that’s fine – you can only be nearby the things you’re supposed to be doing, because you’re really not ready to actually start. But it’s also good to know that – just occasionally – you can Do The Work as well.