The first advantage of recording in a house is that the musicians are immediately disposed to sitting around in the kitchen chatting. We discussed the possibility of releasing the October gig recording, and this has since become reality. You can get hold of it directly from Burning Shed at http://www.burningshed.com/store/noman/multiproduct/271/2780/, except for the double-vinyl version, which sold out in the first couple of days.

The second advantage of the day was that of the two sound engineers, both UEA music degree students, one was also a drummer. Once I had set up, I could defer all the soundchecking to him, while I sat with the others in the kitchen drinking tea. We subsequently clocked up quite a few hours of sedentary non-music-making, because in technical respects the session did not go well. Eschewing anything so has-been as a mixing desk, we were recording and monitoring entirely through laptop-controlled audio interfaces. We got started, then stopped again and again after hearing mysterious clicks in the foldback - were they or weren't they going to disk? Worse, we seemed to have unlearned the zeroth commandment of hard disk recording, lasered into all our psyches for at least two decades, that thou shalt monitor with zero latency and no higher. Not when there's a drummer around, anyway. 10ms may sound insignificant, but if I try and play a beat when I can only hear the effect 10ms later, it is completely debilitating. Totally impossible to keep time. Everything slows down. With the monitoring resolved, finally we were able to knuckle down to some serious recording at about 7pm. Mike and I had arrived at 10am.

That said, I had a good session. Having not played acoustic drums since the Leamington gig, I had cleverly booked myself into a drum practice room the previous week for an hour a day to get back into shape for a day-long recording.

Whatever my state of practice, so often in a recording studio I have been horrified to sit behind the kit, once familiar in whatever lively drum room I had grown used to, now alien in the acoustic black hole of the recording booth, mics poking everywhere. Not this time. The drums went up in Steve's study, and it turned out to be a really nice familiar-sounding room to play in, as if I had been established in there for weeks. Some combination of hardwood floor under a good thick rug, a sofa and a glass display containing two live snakes seemed exactly the sauce for a comfortable playing environment.

For these recordings I used almost the same kit as the Leamington gig, with a few minor differences, firstly in the cymbals. The splash has now moved straight in front of me. I'm not even sure I hit it on anything that we recorded. Also I brought my cheap and nasty china cymbal. This really is a denied-entry-level specimen, though I find it quirky and therefore useful as brushed ride. Another setup difference is that the roto-tom to the left of the rack tom is now a 10", and I have inserted the 8" roto-tom between the lower toms. According to conventional order this is wrong, it should go somewhere above the hi-hat, but I thought this might suit one of the pieces we were recording, which involved mainly a tom rhythm throughout. Plus it looks fun. Finally, I'm back to using a single bass drum pedal here. I realise that although practice is important, it is not to be confused with performance. I pointlessly included the double pedal in the Leamington gig setup because I had been using nothing else for the 18 months beforehand, but after a couple of months off, I wanted to see if I could go back to enjoying the Pearl pedal I've had for over a decade.

No trouble re-adjusting to it. In fact I think my right foot prefers it. Having nothing for my left foot to do except play the hi-hat made me realise I should be learning to use it properly. In the tom-heavy pattern I developed for one the new tracks, one thing I wanted to do was alternately splash and choke the hi-hat, all with the foot. Maybe by the time we come to play it live I will have mastered that. At the going No-Man rate, that should give me plenty of time to learn it, forget it, re-learn it, retire and recover in time for their fiftieth anniversary.

In order to use this extra roto-tom, I had to spend some time in the shed. A while ago I allocated myself the task of mounting my four hand-playable roto-toms in a consistent way that would encourage me to use them in a kit. Roto-toms are typically sold in 2s or 3s. Each is mounted on the end of a long M12 bolt, and these are tightened onto a long aluminium C-beam. As I lamented before, the trouble with mounting even two drums on a C-beam in this way is that they are not in a comfortably playable arc. I long time ago I sawed a 10cm length off my C-beam for mounting a single roto-tom, which pretty much set the other drums up for compromise or neglect ever since.

You can buy small square pieces of metal with two holes, one for the roto-tom bolt, the other for a smaller bolt for attaching to a cymbal stand instead of the cymbal bolt. I was not keen on this, but have since decided I can spare some 20 year-old cymbal stands for experiments. Rather than do any more shopping, I drilled a hole in another sawn-off C-beam, this time making a diagonal so that the bolt into the cymbal stand could tightened properly. I have always shied away from metalwork on account of fairly sucking at it. However, an ordinary disc of sandpaper on the end of an ordinary power drill can render even my scruffy work convincing and presentable. It almost looks like I got somebody else to do it.

Practice and amateur metalwork combined, I was for once reasonably cheery at how an acoustic drum recording session had turned out, more so when I listened back to the raw material a few days later. It may surprise some of his audience to know that Tim is partial to some mild goofing around. Earlier he had recounted a recent holiday to France where he bought a book on birds in French for his son, and that he was doing quite well learning them himself. Later, with the tape rolling, we were jamming an introduction to one of the tracks with a jazzy feel, light brushes on the drums. Just as Stephen is about to land a downbeat on the piano, Tim announces Les Oiseaux in his deadpan voice-over.

Un... Le Cuckoo

Deux... Le Rossignol

A nature documentary for six-year-olds? A euphemistic enumeration of new positions to try during le jiggi-jiggi? Two months later I'm still chuckling at how he pitched it perfectly between the two.

• My Revenge On Seattle
• Time Travel In Texas
• All The Blue Changes
• Pretty Genius
• Lighthouse
• Beaten By Love
• Wherever There Is Light
• Mixtaped
• Things Change (encore)

Looking back on a gig, I like to settle back in my anorak and focus on the practicalities of being a contributing member, rather than the aesthetic experiences of the consuming audience. Especially as by this point I seemed to have forgotten how to do a gig. Boringly I tell you that I arrived at 12:15, second only to Jason the stage technician, however, on arrival at the stage door, one finds a lift immediately to the left, via which all the gear can be raised in a single elevation to the foot of stage right by a bunch of very obliging stage technicians. I think I may have lifted one bag out my car. You're supposed to pay for that in hotels.

Meanwhile to the right, a green room the size of an ideal Improvizone venue, within which a spacious bling mirrored caravan occupies one side. They must have installed the caravan first, then breeze-blocked the room around it. A stainless steel picket fence encloses a seating area in front, a Dalek guards one end of the trailer.

As any task tends to fill whatever period is available, sure enough I took my sweet leisurely time setting up the kit, and was still moving cymbals into position when the last of us had arrived. The heads on the two toms were sounding suspiciously dud, so I changed them and couldn't believe the difference. Hours passed, eventually it came to soundchecking the drums. I have not done this for a long, long time. Thud thud thud thud thud thud on the bass drum. Whack whack whack whack whack whack on the snare. And so on, until we got to the floor tom. Ian the sound man said it needed tuning, to get rid of the ring. No sound man I have worked with has ever made it to the end of his checks and calibrations without telling me one or other of the drums has a ring to it that needs removing. Never. I twiddled the drum key and tapped for a few minutes. The moment passed, attention moved on to to Pete's bass guitar, and the drum was left alone.

Meanwhile Ben the stage monitor sub-mix engineer asked me what mix I would like for my monitor. I'm not sure I've ever been asked this question before. Consequently, for two lengthy seconds, I had no clue, and after that I could only apply logic in lieu of experience. Bass drum, lead vocals, both essential. Plus Mike, as he was off to the side of the stage with a 30W amp and we had two or three songs to begin together. Plus my own backing vocals. Nothing else. Years of recording Improvizone gigs have taught me to forget trying to have a representative balanced band sound on stage. Beautifully mixed recordings will be available later. Right now I need to know when the chorus is.

At the beginning of the week the plan had been for No-Man to fit in a complete run-through of the set in the afternoon. In the end there was time for only three or four songs. I'm usually wary of a good soundcheck. Just as well it demonstrated I had forgotten the material. It was also very important to get used to the sound of a big room. Most of my playing experience has been in small ones. Recently most of my live experience has involved playing to a click and I'm now well accustomed to it, so that apart from My Revenge On Seattle, which I didn't start, I used a metronome for every track. I used the Simple Metronome android app on my phone, using no special in ear monitoring, just a pair of old mobile phone earplugs with one of them stuffed down my shirt and the other either in my ear or dangling after I've ripped it out. This happens when the drums have gone too quiet for people to follow and the band's timing has drifted.

For the first time ever I took a practice pad for warming up in the dressing room. Actually I wanted to take a spare rack tom stand in case the one I was using collapsed, and in fact I just used one of my Roland PD-8 electronic drum pads. As people retired for some quality hanging about, there was plenty of time for around two hours of metronomic warmup tapping. I'm still trying to decide how much difference it made. Some, but not much. During the opening acts, SW had retreated to a dressing room for an hour or so of peace and quiet. He told me he didn't mind when I invading for another round of click sticking, but I kept the noise down anyway. Good practice when you're in a band with Tim.

Up on the boards, a lot of the songs went very well. Tim was brilliant. I've never heard a lead vocal so loud in a monitor mix, all the more staggering that it was the normally dulcet-toned Tim Bowness blasting over all the other instruments. Any concerns over whether he would survive an acoustic drum kit were squished. My own backing vocals went OK when I remembered them, except perhaps for Things Change, where they might just have been absolutely dire. I don't think I want to know.

If I had my least favourites, they would be All The Blue Changes and Pretty Genius. The latter because I'm just not very good at that kind of slow funk. More flunk than funk, though with focused practice I could be fine. All The Blue Changes was a surprise hit with band and audience alike during the 2008 shows, when the planar construction of the record first achieved a modest live crescendo with three or four lead instruments all having to find things to do. This time we cranked the crescendo up to eleven, and I had my first taste of antipathy to what this piece should do. In rehearsals we noticed a lot of the songs started from nothing, grew a big crescendo, then quickly dropped down to a final quiet coda. The arrangement we ended up with for Beaten By Love was a deliberate attempt not to do that, but All The Blue Changes took the formula to max. Other drummers know how to make a huge amount of noise sound be not quite so boring. I don't. One of the things I love about a lot Improvizone output is how pieces can be interesting from beginning to end without having to get louder. Often the reverse in fact, that they get better as they reduce in intensity. In our latest version of All The Blue Changes I felt I and it were beating ourselves to death.

Rapid kit teardown requirements meant I did nearly zero mingling with audience peoples afterwards, but I did consume a couple of complimentary remarks about the sound of the kit and my accuracy in playing it. Maybe the practice pad did make a difference, or maybe it was simply the metronome keeping me steady for a range of slow tempos. Changing the heads, which I believe the greater drumming populace refer to as skins, on the toms was clearly a good idea, but I'm going right off my snare. The snare mechanism is poked. I can either have tight snare that I can't turn off, or one that is loose at best. Maybe I need to break the inhibition of a lifetime and buy another one.

As I was packing away, I realised I could do with another five of these gigs to really figure out how to play this set. There is so much virtuoso drumming in the world, all accessible from youTube, that it can be a bit of a personal battle to cast that aside and do your best for the music instead of feeling you need to compete with whatever new global percussive hotness you've just been watching. On the electronic drums this was never a consideration for me. They are there to do what I want with them. But I realise that what the experts are up to on acoustic drums has been influencing me a lot. Playing a gig with No-Man reminds me that it should not.

• Tim Bowness (vocals)
• Steven Wilson (guitar)
• Steve Bingham (electric violin)
• Stephen Bennett (keyboards)
• Michael Bearpark (guitar)
• Pete Morgan (bass)
• Andrew Booker (drums)

We'll be playing for about 45-50 minutes, maybe more, for which we have rehearsed for four days, though only two with the full lineup. I recounted the first rehearsal recently. The other three began last weekend, and I kept a few notes about how we got on. In case you're reading this and are going to the gig, I've reduced the song titles to their initials to try not to spoil the surprise, though if you're a long time No-Man fan you'll probably guess them anyway.

Saturday
We drift in and slowly set up. Mike arrives having spent the morning assembling, stepping back in complete surprise, a pedal board. Thanks to a cancellation we are in the same room as three years ago, an airy high-ceilinged chamber with windows all the way along one side. I set up enough of the kit for today and begin my eight-hour fruit and nut intake. By the time we are all ready to play, a kiddie band has begun blasting through their material directly behind me in the vocal booth. It is oppressive, even for a drummer. I ask if anyone happens to have a spare piece of double glazing on them. We begin with BBL, a piece we built up from next to nothing in Norwich, and labour over it for the next hour. The youngsters are still walloping away next door. I exit the building for some much needed silence.

We start on MROS. We had a bit of difficulty with this in Norwich and ended up with a version that was half speed throughout. I has compared Mike's rehearsal recording with the original and felt depressed, so this time I put back the fast four-on-the-floor, still playing the snare in half time. A couple of Yee-haw Dublin!s out of the way and we all seem comfortable with reinstating the original pace, and the quieter final chorus is sounding good again.

L was a highlight of the set three years ago, but was unimpressive in Norwich. Tim was worried about the loudness of the drums during the opening vocal sections. I try to assure him this will be rectified by my use of thin hotrods, which are bunches of thin dowel rather than sticks of solid wood. It works, Tim is much happier, and so is the song generally. In the second run-through, Steve The Maestro Bingham loops his 7-note cyclical phrase. The drums are only stabbing on the downbeat here, and his loop does a great job of keeping this section time. Until the rest of the band back in, of course, after which we're all over the place.

So far, three songs that were either completely new to us last time, or did not go well. M did not fare well either, but we handle it much better this time round. Although not playing to a click, I check my metronome before and after and we're near as matters, which is pleasing considering this one is a dead-slow 47bpm. We then try a couple that actually went well in Norwich, TTIT and PG. Turns out they weren't a fluke, as we have no problems with those, not today at least. They clearly benefit from acoustic drums.

On to ATBC, another 2008 highlight found recently to be troubled. This time around I actually listened carefully to the percussion on the orginal, and am trying at least to recreate the cymbal pattern. I put my metronome headphones in for the first time today, at exactly 60bpm, as this one has a tendancy to run away with itself. I tried to do that in 2008, but the electronic drums soon got lost in the noise, whereupon everything sped up, and all I could do was follow. The acoustic drums have much more clout, so I've been trying to clamp the speed down on this one. That may be one reason it's suffering. We all quietly hope that the addition of SW will cure it.

We didn't even try TC in Norwich, but it goes surprisingly well the first time round, give or take a few ambiguous transistions, and keeps getting better. When we played it in Shepherds Bush back in 2008, original No-Man violinist Ben Coleman, who was guesting that night, had learned his original solo exactly. I had not, so I had to count the exact number of bars before bringing the section to a close. With Binksy we have no such constraints, and do what we like for as long as we like. I love improvisation.

Finally, something else we hadn't thought of doing in Norwich, WTIL from the Schoolyard Ghosts album. I forget that I played on this in the 2008 shows, assume this is a tacet number for me, take a few pictures and sit on the floor while the others try out the opening bars. Tim eventually wonders when I'm going to go back to the kit. Turns out I had the tempo written in my notebook, so I must have played it. Memory equals seive.

Back round BBL, now sounding convincing. Whether or not it survives the Wilson treatment is a question for tomorrow.

I drive home with an aching right knee, as ever.

Sunday
My knee still hurts and the car exhaust has a hole in it. On arrival at the rehearsal room in Cambridge, I have plenty of time to take the car to be fixed, as SW is not expected until 1pm. We spend more time on BBLand MROS. Only the work on one turns out to be worthwhile.

SW arrives and we go through every track. Three years ago this was a slow meticulous process. This time around, a lot more has fallen into place, and some of the tracks require only one or two runs through before we work on the set in order tomorrow. A couple of quiet sections are lifted back up to principal volume at Tim's expense, for example the end of MROS, which now has the drums dropping down a bit, otherwise pretty much the same. We try this first of all, and I break a stick before we get to the end. ATBC finally requires me to step out of the pattern I had worked carefully to reproduce, and play loudly like normal indie kids. I have very little idea what to do. L is fine, although the middle arpegiated bits speed up as before. I use a click until the big blast. M, TC, WTIL and PG are all fine, except for a couple of minor adjustments to the bassline to improve funkiness. TTIT is also fine, except we lose one of the two near-identical solo jams to avoid repetition.

That leaves the one flying spoiler of ointments, BBL. We have formed it and rehearsed it extensively as a six-piece, we have neglected to leave any space for Steven. He complains the drums are too happy jazzy for such a downbeat theme, the section with the ascending bassline is boring and overall the whole thing is too long. We discard hours of sunk rehearsal time and ditch the entire second section, and cut back the drums to a sombre funereal pulse with soft mallets. It is saved from being dropped completely, and we call it a day with a running order ready for tomorrow.

I stay behind and mend my snare, which has been getting looser with every hit. I'm feeling very comfortable with the acoustic drums, more than I have in a very long time. Shame I don't know the arrangements yet. I'm getting better with playing the kit through the different sections, with cymbal rolls and damping, swapping sticks, but there are 24 hours left before I stop being able to get away with fluffs and flunked playing. The holiday is nearly over.

Monday
I drive via Harlow, stopping for some splurgitive shopping. Two new cymbal stands (the others rattle when I do a roll with soft mallets), new heads for the toms and the snare, some spare light hotrods (the ones I have are looking frayed and they are a vital tool in this gig), and to pick up the front head that I asked them to put a hole in. I arrive early at the studio, but I warm up while no-one's around rather than change heads or stands. Gear adjustments can wait for when people are brewing tea.

The knee seems to be adapting, although I'm scared of pushing the right foot too hard. No matter, a lot of this music is slow enough that the left foot can do the work instead. Obviously I can't play nearly as well, but it's only a rehearsal, right. We run through the whole set, without stopping between tracks for analysis. The aim is to work on transitions and find out which ones need a gap in which Tim can tell a joke. By now we've pretty much got it, though minor adjustments are made here and there.

On the second runthrough I try backing vocals on MROS, TTIT, ATBC and TC. Some simplification, or complete dumbing-down, of the drum part is necessary. Shame I can't superimpose vocals over my TTIT pattern, which I really like. Maybe a bit of practice will do it. I'm so annoyed with the buzz on my rack tom I take the head off after the second runthrough. I find a small hexagonal nut loose inside. Bastard thing's probably been there a year.

The knee gets better, and I'm feeling more comfortable with the kit than at any time since Pulse Engine, and I realise it's a result of having basically spent the last year practicing. I can play slowly to a metronome. I can get an even four on the floor with either foot without thinking about it - I've only just realised this has been causing me no trouble at all, whereas in the past it would be the kind of simple thing I would fall down over. That said, accuracy diminishes over the course of the day. We do a runthrough of TC and I realise I have to count the bars after all. Naturally I miscount them. Sometimes I think music with no repetition would be much easier to remember.

I stay behind at the end and replace the bass drum front head and the snare head. I decide to stick with the tom heads as they seem to be behaving for now. As I drive home with a headache that has been building since this morning, I realise I have no idea whether we did three complete runthroughs or only two. Memory equals seive.

More on the rehearsals later in the week perhaps. Meanwhile, I have been reflecting on my utterly slack schedule of two gigs per year for 2011, and I realise I never even said anything about the first. It was back in April, when Os, Mike and I headed off to Germany to appear as Darkroom at the International Cologne Livelooping Festival organised by Michael Peters.

Michael's was an excellent gathering. Considering I'm not a massive fan of some uses of looping I enjoyed the evening a great deal, and the trip as whole. I even drove the Osmobile part of the way back. And when we got to Calais I stopped the Osmobile. I've never achieved or experienced braking quite like that. Three mph to zero in a fingersnap is quite a shock in a large vehicle full of gear.

Musically from Darkroom's perspective there is little to add beyond the complete video documentation you can find on the Darkroom blog. Except maybe one interesting departure from our normal operations, which is that we did two rehearsals. We were only going to get half an hour to summon convincing musics, much less than the two or three hours we would usually take over an Improvizone gig.

On the other hand, in the weeks beforehand I was devoting all my attention to generating backdrop video for our set. Every act was supposed to supply its own video, and inevitably my catalogue of Improvizone backdrop-making ensured this task be allocated to me. There would be nine other sets of half-hour video ideas. How would they compare to mine? Would my visuals show me up as the naive dated amateur I truly am?

First, everything needed to be done to a higher spec than my output thus far. 800 by 600 pixels instead of 640 by 480, at 30 frames per second instead of 25. If that means nothing to you, to me it meant exactly the following. Do everything again.

Any original material I had captured using the webcam was 800 by 600 already, so naturally I wanted to compile my new video directly from that stock rather than scale back up my existing compressed and reduced videos. For the abstract stuff taken on phone cameras I didn't care, as they were supposed to look blurry and poor quality. In addition, for the first time, I included some of my very first home made animations. The rest of the CGI world may be 30 years ahead of me on this stuff, but it was a personal achievement, and I included three snippets, each showing three items moving at different random speeds across the screen. Three signifying, obviously, the three members of Darkroom for this gig.

In the end I think I mis-selected some of the material. For the first half I used abstract forms that sat comfortably with our up-tempo opening piece. But for the second half, I used the entire length of my round trip to Antwerp, shot the last time the Darkroom trio travelled to Europe. It is visually spectacular, if unoriginal, and I'm hugely proud of it, but it grated against Os and Mike's opening drone, and fared no better when the music developed into, at most, a mid-tempo rhythmic plod. Looking back I would have used slow-moving abstract imagery throughout.

Otherwise our video stood up reasonably well compared to the rest. Throughout the evening there was a lot of slow-motion, a lot of inverted imagery (photographic negative), a bit of traffic, and a bit of mirror-imaging horizontally or vertically. These are all places I have been by now, and so I left the gig with the resolution to come up with some new ideas for video that I could manage and would make sense in my cottage-industrial backwardness, rather than look like they were trying to compete even with a modern screensaver.

In terms of technicals that's pretty much how I filled in the next three or four months. I experimented with masking each video frame into hexagonal or circular components that slowly oscillated in size. If I updated each shape at a time to the next frame, I realised I had a good way of slowing down the video, of stretching out a five-second abstract clip into two or three minutes of very handsome and calming imagery. I could have taken this work a lot further, but I reached a suitable stopping point and moved onto timelapse video. My latest goal on this area has been to start using old smartphones as timelapse capture devices. I'm talking specifically about the Nokia N95, of which we have two spare in this household. This is how I generally like to work. Have equipment, will figure out how to do something with it. Let the rest of the world spend their whole lives shopping.

The camera on the N95 is pretty good, certainly the Carl Zeiss lens is exceptional, and the operating system supports applications written in java. Given that is a language I use to earn a living, I figured I should not be afraid to tackle this. I soon came up with an app that takes one frame every so often and saves it to the memory card. The trouble begins here. You are not allowed to do anything on the N95 without permission. For every frame it takes, my app asks for permission three times. Once to use the camera, once to read the memory chip and once to write to it. In order to get round this I have to tell the phone it can trust my application, which I believe is the process of signing the compiled software. Around the middle of the summer I got stuck in a continuous loop of nearly getting somewhere with this. Just as abandoning a bad novel can put me off reading for six months, so this setback left me paralysed. The problem has been waiting for me to solve it since July, and I've done hardly anything on it or anything else since.

The venue was an airy University of East Anglia Music Department seminar room, one side of which was windows looking out into empty parkland down to the lake, far away from the stale-smelling windowless rehearsal boxes I'm used to in London. Cutely, all the rooms in the department are numbered, all less than one. After a three hour journey, followed by lugging acoustic and electronic drums through concrete corridors into room 0.19, one could sidle off to freshen up in room 0.24, room 0.23 remaining unused since there were no ladies amongst us, then maybe stick the kettle on later for a brew up in room 0.22.

Well spotted there. I took acoustic drums to this session. Thus far I have used electronic drums for gigs with Tim as the singer. They were very helpful in the early days of his live My Hotel Band, facilitating a quiet rehearsal volume over which his vocals hardly had to compete. They carried on being helpful when we morphed into the No-Man live outfit, and were additionally valuable for their note-playing capability in songs like Truenorth, All Sweet Things and Returning Jesus. But as the rehearsals progressed, and guitarist Steven Wilson joined us, they quickly sank beneath the surging decibels of Lighthouse, Mixtaped and Things Change. Although I could still enjoy the gigs using them, I was totally underwhelmed when the recordings surfaced. I feel a sad irony that the tool that helped make the live band possible is the reason I cannot listen to the live No-Man recordings (whereas I listen to Improvizone all the time). Looking back, I would probably have allocated more time to making interesting sounds. The lifeless, unimaginative and feeble noise that introduced Time Travel in Texas certainly begs improvement, but it was disappearing behind the Wilson wall of sound that made me not want to use the electronic kit again with this band, given another chance.

The chance came up again this year, and I checked with Tim whether he'd be OK trying out the acoustic drums this time. Packing them in the car along with the SPD-S sampling pads and an amp, I set off to chez Bearpark. On arrival, I took the floor tom out of the car and left it in Mike's basement, to make room for his new Hughes and Kettner TubeMeister 18 amp head and 16 Ohm 50W speaker cab. A German designed valve amp made in China, with a balanced DI for trouble-free recording, not only does this equipment glow a handsome radiant blue when operational, it is easily liftable. Last time round, Mike used his Rivera, which is so heavy you can practically feel its gravitational pull.

As to how we got on that afternoon, it goes without saying that acoustic drums change the game a bit. We were fine going over some of the songs from the previous set. Some of these beatier, beefier pieces are sounding more genuine than they did three years ago. If audiences were pleasantly surprised by the hard edge to the band then, they've got it in spades this time round. On the other hand, we have to introduce ups and downs in the dynamics to give Tim spaces to sing in. There are many quiet dips where I drop down to rim clicks on the back beat. I must have played more rim clicks last Sunday than in the whole of the last decade. I also have to deploy different kinds of sticks for quiet sections. And this is where my lack of practice is measured to be its most extreme. I never do this. If I want other sounds on the electronic drums, push a button and there they are. I have absolutely no capability of changing sticks or turning on the snare in the space of half a beat. Lots of work needed.

When it came to learning things we'd never played before, we got quite a bit bogged down, with several opinionated personages each having to express their suggestions or countermands to how an arrangement should take shape. Loud drums do not work in our favour here either. It's easier to be rational when you can turn everything down.

Even so, I didn't take long in deciding to leave the electronics at home for the next rehearsals. Both these No-Man engagements have reaffirmed that making electronic and sampled sounds work in a live rock band is hard to do, and I've given up for now. In the complete sonic control of the studio everything can be put in its correct position in the mix. But electronic noises, particularly with as little dynamic range as my drum sounds, are very hard to place at the correct volume. They're either too loud for the character of the song, too quiet to be monitored adequately by the player, or they're disappearing completely as the rest of the band gets louder. Plus, electronic sounds rarely stand up well to being played through stage speakers. At one point in the afternoon I had the SPD-S pads playing samples of my own kit, the very kit I was sat behind for real. Utterly different noises.

No-Man will be back rehearsing next month somewhere around Cambridge. That means I can look forward to getting home before midnight. We will then be playing a one-off show at The Leamington Spa Assembly on Friday 14 Oct 2011.