Anders and I got a lot of great work done at this rehearsal. We're definitely seeing incremental improvements each time we play together. Anders brought a small mixer and a couple of studio microphones, and I went out and bought a couple of boom stands, and we recorded on real equipment this time, and the difference was huge.

I'm still not completely happy with my intonation, that's something I'm really going to have to concentrate on, by doing scales and intervals with double-stops with every practice. Elke has said it took her two years to iron that out. Ouch. I also feel, from listening to the recordings that I'm too staccato; there's that instant of "dead" at the bow change. Philippe has commented on this, but I always assumed it was my "Scottish" style leaking in, but upon listening to the recordings, it's more than even the Scottish styles should allow. I don't do this on slow airs so much, I suspect, since I'm thinking about smoothness. So Elke is going to have me do bowing exercises with wrist and fingers, then practicing bow direction changes, and then playing the faster tunes at air tempos. That's a good idea, it'll help me integrate more ornamentation into the tunes. When I play an air, or a slow strathspey, I naturally throw in a lot of ornaments. But when I speed things up before becoming comfortable with the ornaments, I just skip them. So this exercise will give me two improvements for the price of one.

But our execution otherwise is tightening up, and Anders is increasingly happy with the ideas he's coming up with. The music I'm exposing him to, and fiddle club, are helping, it's really giving him a sense of what Scottish music is, as opposed to other idioms.

He was really blown away by Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas on Sunday night. But then, so was I, and I'd seen them together several times already.

In April, we start working on songs.