The Lowden is a superb British-made guitar (by George Lowden), famously used by Richard Thompson, Pierre Bensusan and Nick Harper among many others. My particular model is the O-12 original. Its responsiveness to my fairly aggressive playing style and its evenness of clarity across the range makes it my favourite of those I've ever played. Of course, with all the sounds on this album being unamplified, a good acoustic sound was particularly important, whereas at gigs and on other albums I've mostly used the Lowden through an AER amplifier. The Lowden played fingerstyle sounds something like this. By the way, the clips on this page are taken from the album tracks but with the vocals and effects removed. This particular example is from track 1, Given Time, but the Lowden/fingers combination can also be heard on the Sparks cover, This Town.... Sparks captured my musical imagination early on with that song, which even has a bit of odd time, or at least some cross-rhythm accents across the vocal in most of the "...heartbeat, increasing heartbeat..." bits. Of course, in my version I have to take the key down (to E) to reach the high note at the end.

As well as playing fingerstyle, I have a number of songs where I play the Lowden with a pick. This is how four songs on the album were played: More Or Less (as in the example), Vigil, I Said What I Said and Exuberessence. Playing Vigil was a killer on the heavy bass strings I used to use (in fact I think I was still using them for the recording), so I now give myself an easier time with normal guage 6th and 5th strings, just heavy treble strings. Preserving my left wrist seems a good idea considering that live performance is my best hope for becoming better known and having a career in music when I grow up.

So that takes care of the Lowden tracks. Another five songs were done on my 12-string, which is a Taylor 355. For some reason, I always play this guitar with my fingers, though as with the Lowden that can often mean using a strumming style very similar in sound to strumming with a pick, but using the nails of the index, middle and ring fingers. Being plectrum-free means I can switch back and forth between strumming and classical styles from one bar to the next, if required. A couple of the songs, Move On and Should I Stay or Should I Go were done entirely using the arpeggiated fingerstyle method typical of classical guitar music. And, while on the subject of Should I Stay... yes, I do think three chords is a perfectly good number for a song, but if you're going to do a cover you might as well be different and throw something of yourself into it. I plan to write my first three-chord song at the age of about 60, by which time I should have learnt that the simple songs are the best. I use some ping-pong delay on some of the vocals on this version, which just about falls within my self-imposed rule for the album of having strictly one guitar and one vocal per song, aided by different treatments for different mic positions and the occasional prominent reverb or delay effect. In case any guitarists are wondering, this is another song with the capo at the fifth fret. Other songs using a capo are: More or Less (1st fret), Three of a Perfect Pair (5th), I Said What I Said (1st), Feet Hit The Ground (2nd), Grapevine (see below), Exuberessence (4th) and Move On (3rd).

The other guitar used is my Picado classical, which has only appeared on a handful of previous album tracks (such as Virgin Soul from Wake The Lion, Last One To Know from Doublethink and a section of the track Your Good Self). I play a little classical at gigs sometimes, using a Takamine EG522SC, mainly on songs like Sting's Shape of My Heart, but you can't beat the unamplified sound of the Picado. I spend a lot of my time writing solo and ensemble instrumentals for the classical guitar, and try to keep up a decent repertoire of Spanish guitar classics, but rarely get the chance to perform them. This example is I Heard It Through The Grapevine, without the vocals, once again - the karaoke version! The capo is at the second fret here, with the sixth string tuned down to D, which was the only retuning required for these songs.

I didn't use headphones at all on this album, as I find it much easier to give a natural vocal performance without them. This fits in neatly with my preferred mic for recording vocals these days, which is nothing more elaborate than a Shure Beta58A, which is really designed for live use. As long as you're careful with its positioning, spillage from the speakers can be kept to a manageable level.

As for reverbs, there's a fair bit of Alesis QuadraVerb and Zoom Studio 1204, and a bit of reverb from my live mixer, the StudioMaster C3X. The Alesis DEQ230 graphic equaliser was used to reduce hiss and enhance the 'electric guitar' effect on some of the close mics. The mixes, like those for Your Good Self, went through the excellent Focusrite Platinum MixMaster, with its multi-band compressors.

I wasn't planning to do an album this soon after Your Good Self (18 months can fly past in no time if you're a one-man operation as I have been recently), but partly thanks to a chance conversation with fellow singer/songwriter Simon Godfrey, I realised the importance of frequent album releases, despite the unpaid hours that inevitably go into such a project. Keeping it acoustic made a 2006 release possible. When I eventually came to record 20 songs in October 2005, I included a lot of cover versions without actually expecting to put them on an album. After contacting MCPS, I found that including a few covers and paying royalties on them can be quite affordable. I saw no point in releasing cover versions that added little to the familiar version, but I do play quite a few covers live, and this is supposed to be as close to a live album as you can get without an audience, so in came the King Crimson, Clash, Sparks and Marvin Gaye songs.

Deciding what to leave out can be one of the hardest stages of producing an album. Early casualties were versions of previously released songs Sooner Later Never and Falling To The Surface, because the basic performances weren't good enough. An unfortunate song called Everything At Once made it all the way to last hurdle, but missed out for the second album in a row! The acoustic Only Together, the full version of which is on the Your Good Self album, was edged out by the new material. A number of other perfectly good cover versions were in the running, but I decided to go with the more unusual versions rather than the more faithful ones, so out went Shape of My Heart, God Only Knows, Wish You Were Here and If I Ever Lose My Faith in You.

There were a few last-minute panics. Exuberessence is a piece I haven't played live, but it started to come together in January 2006, so I quickly nipped over to Hampshire to record it. My friendly reviewers pointed out that I could do better on the Move On vocal, so I scrapped it and did (I hope) a much better second take. Most of the songs had a bit of a remix during February. Since I use a Fostex D2424 hard disk recorder and Mackie CR1604-VLZ mixing desk, every mix is like a performance that has to be perfect in every respect, which obviously takes longer than would automating any changes on a PC-based system.