If you’re cooking a recipe. You need just the right amount of ingredients. Too much of one thing can upset the balance of the whole.

Very often, when we our creating art, the temptation is to fall into the trap of adding layers and layers without letting the work we do breathe. Or on the contrary, we do too little and then don’t consider the levels of detail we can add to bring a level of sophistication to our work.

Depending on the intent, finding the sweet spot matters. Adding harmony shouldn’t be just done because it can be done. It should be done because it feels right to do so.

It’s hard to know when to do this.

If you’re finding it difficult to make decisions, it’s probably the right time. If you can’t see woods for trees and your thought patterns shift towards negativity in the creative process, sometimes the most advisable thing you can do is take a step back to allow yourself to breathe, and come back to it with a fresher perspective.

We can be desperate and full of desire to see things through, but sometimes this requires us letting those things breathe before we go through the final steps to ensure our work is done.

But that’s how the government treats it.

The posters of Fatima still remain a coarse image of the undervalued perception that the Tories have of Ballet dancers, and musicians and all creators.

Art is essential. If you’re looking to contradict that, then ask yourself if you’ve managed a day without visualising something that is artistic let alone spending your time engaging with it. It’s what we do to understand things better, ourselves and the world around us.

And when art is marginalised in education, the wider society suffers for it.

All children and young people should be able to engage and pursue their art further and be given the opportunity to do so with support and a sense of serious ambition.

Unfortunately, I fear that many people continue to be squeezed out because of their lack of money or privilege.

Music, I always hold dear to my heart, and for all the ambitions I hold personally, I know how powerful music can be socially and within community.

Art is much more than a luxury, it’s at the essence of life itself.

And those in power should give opportunities for art, not take them away.

Recently, I’ve doing some teaching to age groups I had never dealt with before. Both younger years and older years.

At times, it has been an initial sense of dread at the prospect of dealing with a situation I’m not used to. What tone do I use? How do I approach the lesson to get the best approach.

What has occurred is the realisation that I’m adapting and learning in these new environments myself and it’s a privilege to see a wider scope, and that is how learning takes place across a wider range and context and in doing so, helps me appreciate and connect everything with that bit more clarity.

Sometimes, the deep end is really uncomfortable, but the reward of learning new things means it’s worth that temporary discomfort.

Tonight, we experienced an outage of Facebook and in turn, Instagram and WhatsApp.

It was a peaceful evening. I did however take to Twitter and was amused by the Bottas meme that Mercedes posted.

What was missing was the ease of connectivity that can exist from group chats and whatsapp.

And that what social media is about, the ability to connect. That’s also how Facebook sells itself.

But Facebook as turned a blind eye for so long to that which divides us and profiteering from misinformation and fuelling hatred.

The disdain expressed for Facebook was apparent this evening but we are not moving away from this world, because we are social beings that seek to find easy ways to connect.

But the people running these need to carefully reflect on what their products are for and how they can make things better not worse.

Imagine being part of a project for the best part of 5 years, pouring your heart and soul into it, and then having it come to an end.

One of my favourite parts of the appendix is watching the actors during their final takes, just because you get to see the emotional release involved with people so personally invested in something for such a long time.

A lot of us spend time working wanting to do the minimum amount in a fixed period of time and that’s part of life. But when we do art, we never want to do less, we always want and strive to do more.

I wish everyone the privilege of finding things you want to give your all too, and would struggle to let go of. That creativity is an essential part of us elevating ourselves

I genuinely find the experience of buying tickets infuriating at times.

And it’s remarkable how squeezed out of tickets you are if you are not with the 02 network. They have a dominance over the U.K. live music scene.

So Tool are coming to the U.K. and I knew this was going to be a hot ticket so I had my laptop ready at 9am to order.

So, the ‘buy tickets’ opened at 9:03am and I was put into a queue of about 2500 people, it took about ten minutes to get through. When I finally got through, I had to deal with a poor website page that told me seats were available when they weren’t.

It took me 20 attempts and that point, I thought I had missed out. So I changed venues and that did the trick. I finally secured tickets.

The whole process though was unnecessarily stressful due to the website being completely lacking in user friendliness and reliability.

Others weren’t so lucky and the page crashed on them.

And then before long, you see Viagogo promoting tickets for a extortionate multiple of the original ticket price! It’s completely unethical and shouldn’t be allowed to happen.

So there are a myriad of obstacles to deal with when buying tickets and it’s situations like this where the customer is on the back foot.

So Live Nation and Ticketmaster need to figure out how to make their pages work when dealing with high volumes. If they are the two main players, there shouldn’t be excuses.

And Viagogo and secondary ticket touts need to be cracked down on. How many times does the news have to discuss it and acts have to tweet not to use this service before it dies a death?

I rewatched the extended edition of Lord of the Rings recently.

I make the tradition of watching it every year because I utterly adore these films, and they are my favourite franchise from me being a child. They also make up some of my most visceral memories of being absolutely struck with awe when I went to the cinema.

And to this day, they still hold firm in their look, aesthetic and artistic execution. In fact, they set a benchmark that overrides so many films released today. Purely because Peter Jackson and his team were willing to put hours of work in where others would just stick it into CGI, especially these days.

So usually when I watch the films, I get the middle earth bug and do a bit more digging, I read the books, I look up YouTube videos exploring the films and this time round, I watched the appendices through from start to finish.

It is honestly astonishing to see these documentary films unravel the process of making the films in such a generously informative way. The time, years and personnel that was involved is remarkable and so many people around Peter Jackson put their heart and soul into this project.

I’ve learnt about costume and sculpture design, script writing, camera work, sound design and effects. I also was fascinated by Howard Shore’s approach to writing the music and having a live feed between Abbey Road and New Zealand shows that these guys knew how to work remotely decades before COVID ran amok!

Having watched the series, I’ve been inspired to attempt to give to my creative projects, the same energy, desire and passion that these people did. I also learnt that so much of what makes the films so good is the willingness for happy accidents to occur, or the desire to push each other to go that one bit further.

Watch it and you’ll learn so much about different worlds of work within the filming industry. You’ll also crave for more films that have departments dedicated to bigatures as well!

Just an hour up the A470 in Cardiff is the National park, the Brecon Beacons. One of three national parks here in Wales and it’s worth getting out of the urban areas to realise just how extraordinarily beautiful the country is.

I cycle regularly around a 80km radius and going to and from Cardiff is in itself lovely courtesy of the Taff trail, but go to the vale and you are in countryside territory. Where I’m based, I have the Garth virtually on my doorstep and then the taff trail can take you all the way up to Brecon where there are mountains and all sorts of other routes to take.

This weekend, I decided to make the most of the weather and head to the beacons to do the famous waterfall trail there. It was a popular choice last Saturday. It wasn’t too busy thankfully but certainly vibrant.

So near Penderyn (know for their whisky) is waterfall country on the river hepste where there are a series of four absolutely stunning waterfalls. Probably the most noteworthy is Sgwd yr Eira (the fall of snow) where you are able to walk underneath the waterfall.

There are steady parts of the walk, but there are also steep climbs to access some parts so having good footwear and knowing what your capable of is strongly advisable, but there is an opportunity to experience extraordinary natural beauty here and I’m glad I got to see it all again.

I absolutely love building a pedal board. It’s part of the fun of being an electric guitar player!

It’s quite common place for some guitarists to use all encompassing effects units like Kemper and Helix, which are amazing options but I do love the old school approach of putting individual pedals together and running them through an amp.

And my board needed desperate upgrading, since we are going to be gigging again soon. So I decided to invest in new power and a new board.

There are lots of options out there and here’s how I made my approach.

1. The power

I decided what my essential pedals were and what I needed power for to get through a set. I lined them up together, took note of their power requirements. 1 was 12v, 1 was 9v 300ma but the others were straight forward 9dc. 9 pedals altogether, so I needed a relatively big power supply and wanted one that could provide space for future purchases.

I decided to get the Truetone 1spot. It is mega high end but isn’t as expensive as the Mondo or Strymon. Their YouTube tutorials were super helpful and they also sell the thing with mount brackets. the power is all isolated and my rig has never sounded so beautifully quiet!

2. The board

I used tape measure and cross checked it with board sizes. Also with the consideration that I may add to my board in future. The pedaltrain Novo 24 was the one, with a fight case to ensure full protection on the road. The tape is super robust so all my pedals are well truly stuck on and ready to carry about.

So today was a fun creative day building my board and I really look forward to taking it out at my gigs with Kinky Wizzards.