Making musical instruments isn’t something you’ll learn over night.  I probably should’ve guessed that!  I look back on ten years work and wonder where all the time has gone.  Continuing at the same rate of progress I’d have 2 lifetimes work here.  The fact is that the fundamental faith you have in your idea(s), and the optimism required to keep you going when things aren’t working out quite right, is exactly what gets in the way when questioning yourself and your methods – stubborness can be a great asset as well a troublesome affliction!  But on an even more basic level, you can’t be close to something – up to your eyeballs problem solving, scoring music, making things or whatever, and maintain the perspective you need to make good decisions, that’s a fact.

One method I’ve tried to adopt, which I’ve dubbed the ‘Shitstorm‘,  is to take some time out to pull things apart and be overly critical.  It’s like imagining a shit storm and working out where the shit is going to get it in – hence finding where weaknesses are.  With bigger teams someone might fulfil this task naturally (the person disagrees with everyone or shouts down ideas may not be useful when bouncing ideas around in a Brainstorm but can be massively helpful when full-proofing ideas and adding a reality check).  To do it to yourself, with your own ideas, isn’t an easy thing, but completely necessary.   I’m sure great artists, musicians, scientists or whatever, all have this quality: asking ‘Is there a better way to do this’ or ‘can I do it differently?’ if not, they’d stagnate.

So I’ve made some decisions, will discontinue making some models of Mk whistles, and I’ll have a whole lot more time to work on new ideas – a decision that should’ve been made about 5 years ago, but better late than never!

It would be fair to say that the last few years have been a battle.  The recovery process for myself from an illness like M.E. has certainly not been fast.  The main challenge following on from this has been to be able to make more instruments to send to people, without loosing any of the quality I worked very hard to develop in the first place.   We’ve pretty much got to the end of that process and infact been able to improve the quality through the new methods we’ve developed.  Achieving this has however sucked all our resouces, and as a result we’ve been taken away from the creative side of things – developing new designs for music instruments.  I can now feel the tide turning and the burning creative zone, which keeps us up working manically late at night, is once again approaching.  I’ll be doing my best to post news on all but the most covert of operations, so watch this space!