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It's the last day of February, and the FAWM website will stop accepting new songs in just over 24 hours (at noon UTC on March 1st, when it stops being February anywhere in the world). The madness will be over for another year and I will get round to doing the non-musical stuff that I've been ignoring for the past four weeks. But today I am still very much in full-on producer mode, so despite the fact that it's bright and sunny outside—there isn't a cloud in the sky and it's cold and crisp out there with a heavy frost after the temperature plummeted to -4°C (25°F) last night—I will be spending the rest of the day in my home studio.

I surprised myself this week by being far more prolific than I intended. Right now I've got 26 songs finished and uploaded on my FAWM profile. That's rather better than the 21 songs I'd set myself as a target in last week's blog post and it means I only have to write and record two songs today to achieve a double FAWM (writing one song a day for the whole month). Considering the fact that I recorded three songs yesterday, I should be able to manage that without too much difficulty. It's a couple of songs down on last year's very prolific 30 songs, but it's still a good showing for me and I'd be extremely happy with the music I've made this month even if I was in perfect health; given how ill I am at the moment, being able to do what I've done so far feels nothing short of miraculous.

A lot of this has to do with the rampant enthusiasm of my pals in the FAWM chat on Slack, who have been a constant source of entertainment, glee, and sheer unmitigated joy. I wasn't kidding when I wrote in my last blog post about how important the community is to successfully negotiating the FAWM challenge. Who amongst you could listen to a masterpiece like Carlybaer and Sapient's Song Hamster and not feel inspired? The fact that the song came about after the two of them discovered what is quite possibly the most disturbing animated GIF you will ever find on the Internet is a perfect illustration of how the minds of my fellow FAWMers work, by the way.

People have been knocking stuff out of the frickin' park this year, as evidenced by such absolute bangers as One Last Midnight by FAWMers AEye and Rosiebans. I mean—wow. Seriously.

FAWM is a continuum. It doesn't matter where you sit on it. If you find yourself at the point where you just recite your work a capella or accompany yourself with a kazoo or a ukulele, you mustn't listen to the songs in those links above and feel at all inadequate. Instead, be happy! You're in the very privileged position of starting out on a choose-your-own-adventure journey that will take you every bit as far as you want. And then, if you let it, it will take you further than you thought was possible. That's not hyperbole. It's what happened to me after I signed up all those years ago.

But my coffee has been consumed and I'm thoroughly encaffeinated. The blog has been posted. The studio awaits, and those remaining songs aren't going to write themselves...

Yesterday I walked to the Co-op to get a pint of milk and some crumpets and by the time I got home again, I was shattered. I'd had another rough night the night before but even so, I was shocked by just how tired I felt. It feels like I'm running on fumes. After I had dinner I ended up taking a nap for an hour just so I could recover enough energy to last out until bedtime.

The tiredness is understandable, I guess. My song tally this year is not an accurate reflection of the amount of work I've been putting in up in my home studio. I've been driving myself as hard as I can. I've actually surprised myself with how much lyric-writing and singing I've been doing as a result of having my favourite microphones all set up and ready to use. This has encouraged me to use my voice a lot more, even if you'll never hear me describing myself as an accomplished singer. I can get by enough to get the idea of the song across, and that will have to do. Add in the instrumentals I've done as I play with my increasingly convoluted effects chains for ambient work, and I've got 20 songs finished so far. I think I'm going to spend this morning listening to more songs by other FAWMers and leaving comments. I've already heard lots of amazing work so far this month, so I know there are more absolute bangers out there (as the saying goes. Or used to go, back when I was much younger, anyway; do the kids still say that?)

But I don't think it's just me feeling like this. The state of the world seems to be getting everybody down. Talking with the other mods over at FAWM, I learned this week that the amount of comments that people are leaving on the site is down by 10% on previous years; the general consensus is that people just don't have the mental fortitude necessary for the prolonged bouts of concentration and analysis that leaving an intelligent and helpful comment requires. I know I don't. Usually at this stage of the challenge I've listened to, and left comments on, more than 300 songs written by other FAWMers. As of right now, I haven't even made it to 200. That's worrying.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I will repeat myself once again: commenting is the lifeblood of a community like FAWM. If people don't bother supporting each other's work by doing so any more, the community will die. Receiving comments provides the hit of endorphins that acts as a counterbalance to the spam, the occasional rambling basket case posting long, incomprehensible messages in the forums, the self-entitled whining, and the misguided self-aggrandisement by one or two folk who just don't get what FAWM is really about and treat it as a way to advertise their non-FAWM activities for free.

Having someone comment on one of your songs is important. It lets you know that someone has paid attention to the work you're doing. These days, being a musician can often feel like you're just screaming into the void. Getting a single piece of feedback on your work might make the difference between giving up or carrying on to eventual success. Getting a nice remark on your work also lets you know that it hasn't been completely buried by the increasing deluge of songs submitted by people who have handed off most or all of their creative effort to the automatic plagiarism machines that are marketed as AI these days (and such people almost always pretend that they're doing nothing of the sort, even when it's pretty bleedin' obvious to everyone else). But nice comments can only go so far.

Keeping things sane and civil on the site is hard work, and doing so is becoming harder for all sorts of reasons that are completely outside the moderators' control. As 50/90 drew to a close last summer, I remarked here on the blog about how the joy had been sucked out of the experience for me, and it turned out that the organizers felt much the same way: 50/90 will be taking a break this summer. And as I said in that blog entry from last year, my comments here are entirely my personal thoughts on the matter and they are not intended to represent the opinions or attitudes of the organizers or other moderators in any way whatsoever. This is just how I feel as a result of my involvement over the past year.

The announcement of this summer's hiatus prompted expressions of outrage from some quarters. I'm going to share one example with you, because it provides an apt illustration of just why the mods might all be feeling so burned out this year: one FAWMer (who shall remain nameless) started a new thread in the forum with a title that framed the hiatus as a "problem" (so that's really going to get the mods on their side, for a start), then posted a message, the gist of which was "I don't know anything about computers or running a community website but how hard can it be? I'll chip in twenty bucks to get some student interns in" before hitting us with the zinger: "All these new mods, and they can't keep the site running?"

You can probably guess how that made this particular mod feel. It not only demonstrated that the poster didn't understand that the mod team have a different set of roles and responsibilities to the dev team, but it also shows utter cluelessness about what the actual work of keeping a website like FAWM on the rails entails (keeping the code working demands less than 15% of the total effort that's put in to the site). And don't get me started on the sheer amount of entitlement that's showing here.

With this level of gratitude on display, is it any wonder that the mods and organisers want to take a break?

I'm sick of it. And I'm tired. So, so tired.

I try and work on songs with other people at least once during FAWM each year, and the first of those, which I did with my buddy Peter, has been added to our profile pages on the site. It's called The Cosmic Void Has One Or Two Suggestions and it's about false vacuum decay, because we're both science nerds and who doesn't love a good song about an existential threat that could wipe out the entire universe before you could even blink?

Yesterday I worked on another piece with my pal Alex (again, we've worked on several songs together over the years) that I hope will take us in a different direction. This one gave me an opportunity to try out Spitfire Audio's new BBC Radiophonic Workshop plugin, although this resulted in me filing a bug report with Spitfire Audio after I discovered sticking notes on one sample...

I'm also waiting to take my turn in one of the many exquisite corpse collaborations that take place during the challenge. That'll take me to 19 songs completed, so I guess I'd better head back upstairs and write some more music and boost my song count. I think my target this year is going to be a paltry 21 songs, or a FAWM-and-a-half. Checking my records from previous years, that's all I managed in 2020 and 2023, so if I can beat that, I'll be happy.

But my hands are sore. I've been playing my Fender Jazz Bass a lot over the last three months and although I can hear a marked improvement in the fluency and consistency of my playing that is intensely satisfying, it's taken quite a toll on my fingers. I think I'm going to be scaling back the amount of music I make quite significantly for the first couple of weeks of March to see if they recover.

Last night I felt like I needed to be self-indulgent, so I made some kedgeree, opened a bottle of pinot grigio, and vegged out on the couch in front of the TV for an hour or two and then went back into the studio for one of Markus Reuter's BandCamp listening parties.

I actually felt myself beginning to relax for the first time in what seems like months. It was nice.

And last night I got a sleep score of 100. That's more like it.

Yesterday I posted my fourteenth song to the FAWM website, so I've achieved my goal of writing fourteen songs in twenty-eight days well ahead of schedule. Sunday ended up being a complete write-off because by mid-afternoon all I was capable of doing was sprawling on the couch so I didn't quite manage to sustain the rate of writing one song each day that I'd aspired to, but I wasn't far off.

I will keep going, of course. My goal for the year is to take my tally of songs written to 1,500 and as of right now, I have 50 to go. Thanks to a couple of decent nights' sleep (my scores have returned to the mid-nineties), I don't feel quite as wretched as I did at the weekend so I intend being as productive as I can for the rest of the month. I don't think I'm imagining things; I really can hear an improvement in the quality of music I've made over the last couple of days and I'm hoping that this promising trend will continue. I'm going to be taking as much advantage of it as I can while it's happening.

Targets and statistics are nice to see but they're secondary to the work itself. I'd still be making music if they didn't exist, because it's what I love doing and I wouldn't be exaggerating things at all to say that it's what keeps me going; that's simply the truth.

As an antidote to the ego-boosting posts I made earlier in the month about how good I've got at this home recording lark, let me share with you something that happened this week which should demonstrate that I can still be just as much of an idiot as any newbie.

I spent half an hour online at the weekend searching for a replacement hardware vocal processor, because the Mk1 TC Helicon Mic Mechanic that I've used for the last ten years had started to make horrible squealing noises every time I turned the gain up beyond -40 dB or so. It was adding a horrible, metallic ring to the sound, too. Doing a factory reset on it didn't help. Nor did connecting it to the studio PC and using its VoiceLive software to tweak its settings. I was quite convinced that it had failed on me.

Until I looked at the mixer, and realised that when I'd reorganised all its inputs back in January, I'd moved the Mic Mechanic to a different channel and while I'd changed which submix busses it was routed to, I'd forgotten to check how its new channel fed its signal out to the FX bus—specifically, the FX bus that I use to route mic signals out to the Mic Mechanic.

You've probably already guessed that the Mic Mechanic was sending its output signal to... The Mic Mechanic. The horrid noises I was hearing were because it was feeding back. Turning off the FX send stopped them cold, and it's now back to working exactly as it should do. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it at all.

An interesting discussion on the FAWM forums took place last week when one of the other mods tried to reassure new sign-ups that they didn't need to obsess over production values for their recordings and just hitting record on the voice memo app on their phone was quite sufficient. As Tim said, not everybody who takes part in the challenge is interested in the production side of things. Not everyone is as much of a studio nerd as I undoubtedly am.

But I was pleasantly surprised to see that quite a few other members of the FAWM community then chimed in to explain how they treated the production process as a compositional tool in its own right. I was not alone in having a philosophy that the recording studio can be used as an instrument, just like a piano or a guitar.

And as an example of this, that fourteenth song I wrote yesterday happened because I'd been playing with the ancient Yamaha digital reverb unit which is connected to the mixer I use for all my synths (it's this one—yes Lins, it's still in daily use!) and decided I'd switch it to one of its plate reverb settings. When I played my Korg M3 through it, I was so taken by the gorgeous return of sound that the reverb added to the lush piano patch I'd picked that I sat down and wrote the piano part of the song on the spot in all of ten minutes. If I'd just been playing piano, rather than piano-and-studio, that would never have happened. And it's those little moments of discovery and creation which make spending the day in my bedroom studio so endlessly fascinating and stimulating.

I am knackered. I have no idea what my sleep score was on Friday night because my tracker crashed and I had to resort to unpairing it with my phone and carrying out a factory reset on the thing before I could get it working again, but eventually I was successful and this morning it had awarded me a woeful score of 50.

Oops.

One reason why my score was so low is that I didn't get to bed until 3am. I was off doing another of my front-of-house gigs with Function 246 at the Great Western Air Ambulance Charity Supporters' Ball at Tortworth Court. Crikey, has it really only been just over a year since I took my first ever sound engineer gig at the 2024 ball? It was a pretty intense night last night, particularly as one member of the band had to rush off stage part-way through the first number and throw up in the toilets (!) but after that they were totally fine and the audience were on their feet dancing away like maniacs until well after midnight.

The night before I'd been in Bristol to catch up with Robin and his pal, the materials scientist Mark Miodownik at the Watershed. Robin was punching different varieties of melons (and some other common household vegetables) and Mark was explaining what the difference was between strength and toughness and why some melons went splat and others disintegrated in a more genteel manner. You had to be there; but I was glad of the plastic poncho I'd been given because I was sitting on the front row, well inside the splash zone. The venue was taking no chances, as the floor was covered in plastic sheeting.

It was a very physical gig; Robin and Mark approached Blue Man Group levels of messiness. But the resulting debris was all put to good, environmentally friendly use, I hasten to add: it was all collected up to be given to some local pigs for breakfast.

It's always fun to catch up with Robin and when I got home, discovered (and removed) the few melon pips that had somehow made it past the poncho, I realised that despite all my aches and pains I'd had a thoroughly good time. And I very much needed that.

But my FAWM progress has slowed down. Right now I've got thirteen songs finished and another two in progress, including one collaboration. I haven't decided whether I'm going to head off to my bedroom studio now and do a bit more work on them, or just return to bed and have a nap. Believe me, option 2 feels very tempting right now.

What's your hearing like? Even though I've been wearing earplugs at gigs since the early 1980s, my hearing is not what it used to be. In my teens I could hear the calls of bats in the back garden at my parents' house in West Wickham. Those days are long gone, but I still try to look after my ears because being able to judge whether a song has a decent tonal balance or not is an important skill for a sound engineer—whether they're working in the recording studio or looking after a live band, and I do both—and it's also a valuable skill for a producer, for that matter. When I hear recordings that have been posted on BandCamp or elsewhere where the mix is woefully out of balance, I find it painful to keep listening. When I hear this in a song posted on the FAWM website, sometimes I'll just skip it and move on to another piece without leaving a comment.

And that makes me anxious, because I wouldn't want anyone to do that to one of my songs. In recent years, I've been using a piece of software made by iZotope called Tonal Balance Control 2 as an extra check that what I'm doing will sound all right. It displays the "target curve" across the range of frequencies of human hearing that a piece of music in a particular genre should contain as a blue band; the sound of the piece of music being analysed is overlaid on this as a thin white line.

I've been recording things for a while now. In fact I'm closing in on having recorded 1,500 pieces of music in my bedroom studio (as of right now, the total stands at 1,447). I have been pleasantly surprised over the last month or so to discover that, even before I begin tweaking the equalisation, adding compression, or starting the mastering process, when I open the Tonal Balance Control 2 plugin in my DAW, my mixes all look like this:

Aside from a very slight dip at around 5kHz, there are no nasty peaks or other excursions to be seen at all—and I'm in the zone all the way from 20 Hz to 20kHz. Is it being nerdy when I say just how incredibly satisfying it is to see this sort of thing happening in my own work?

And that's a perfect example of the reason I'm so enthused about taking part in the February Album Writing Month challenge. You shouldn't need a "how to do it" YouTube video or an old guy like me grumbling in their blog to tell you that the fastest way to improve your talents in any form of creative work is to do as much of it as you possibly can. The idea behind FAWM is to encourage musicians to drop any concerns about quality, style, accessibility, or marketability and just sit down and write something. Anything. Because each piece you write will have an incremental effect on your creative skill set. It doesn't matter how small each individual increment is; they mount up. And if the body of work that results from doing this runs to four figures, then you're going to notice a significant improvement. I never thought I'd ever be competent enough at mixing to be able to judge what was going on by ear, but that is where I'm at today. Levelling up like this isn't just exciting, it's amazing.

And that's what's driving me to push hard this February and why so far this month I've got eleven songs posted on my profile page (yes, I've been rather busy over the last couple of days). After a few days of struggling to get going, I think I'm back in the creative swing of things again.

Because if you want to get better at something, you have to do the work.

I follow a number of home recording hashtags on Mastodon and elsewhere and I've noticed that while there are a lot of talented artists out there doing good things and posting about them on social media afterwards (with plenty of corroborating evidence that sounds really good), there have always been the wannabes who act like they're in the same league. You probably know the sort: they post an awful lot about the fabulous work that they're going to do, any minute now, but somehow, the work never gets done. Some characters do this regularly enough that I've been able to follow their musical development over the years, and I suspect that you won't be at all surprised when I tell you that they haven't made any visible progress in what they're doing. They like the idea of being good at what they do, but they aren't prepared to do the work to get there, and it shows.

(As an aside, after doing FAWM for sixteen years I've also noticed that if someone signs up for FAWM and writes their bio in the third person like it was a press release written by their public relations specialist, it's highly unlikely that they're going to actually stick around and post anything. They might actually be good at what they do, but with no evidence to prove otherwise I just assume that they're another fantasist/wannabe who enjoys play-acting more than doing the work.)

And even though I'm writing on social media about doing something right now rather than actually doing the things I'm writing about, you can depend on me to have actually gone off and done them shortly afterwards. You've seen the number of albums I've made and released on Bandcamp over the last decade or so by now. That's how you make progress. You have to do the work.

And no, using AI as part of your creative endeavours does not count as doing the work. In fact, as a recent study showed (and it was funded by Microsoft, who are one of the worst offenders for pushing AI into every last aspect of their business portfolio), it will have exactly the opposite effect. Don't fall for it. And I note in that report that the authors appear to have confused the word "inaction" (not doing the thing that is required) with its opposite, "enaction" (the act of making something come to be). How ironic; did they get help from ChatGPT?

After getting a rare sleep score of 100 on Sunday night, last night was utterly miserable. I didn't help matters by messing up the controls on the central heating system before I went to bed and I set it to its "stay on until the regular timer switches everything off" setting instead of the "just run for the next hour, then switch off" boost that I'd intended. As a result I woke up at 04:30 this morning wondering why the bedroom was so hot. After lying in bed for an hour sweating, I got up to investigate and discovered what had happened. Switching the heating off didn't help. Nor did taking a couple of paracetamol; I didn't really get back to sleep again.

My aches and pains have aches and pains today. I think I may have been overdoing the bass playing, because the knuckles of my right hand are really painful at the moment. The gall stones are really giving me gyp. And even with my arthritic foot strapped up in its support brace, I couldn't get comfortable last night. Every time I turned over in bad, the resulting pain jarred me awake again.

I know I keep banging on about this. Unfortunately it's not something that I can ignore, and venting about it here is how I'm attempting to come to terms with the many ways in which my life presently falls well short of expectations.

FAWM's been under way for a week and as of lunchtime today, I've got seven songs uploaded to my profile page, so with three weeks left I'm already half-way to the challenge goal of writing 14 songs in 28 days. Yesterday I was going to take the day off from making music (and pretty much everything else) because I'm feeling very under the weather at the moment, but instead I ended up writing a song called Take The Day Off because that is what FAWM does to you.

I was extremely flattered when it made the recommendations thread in the FAWM forums. It's been a while since I managed to write something that did that.

I'm still struggling, though. I'm in a lot of pain, and I'm still waking up in the middle of the night every night. If you've never experienced a protracted phase of this happening to you—and for me this has been going on since before Christmas—it's impossible to convey just how debilitating it is. So I'm practising some self-care this weekend. I've got a pork joint roasting in the oven right now, which I will be smothering with gravy made with red wine before I consume it all together with a large selection of vegetables and what's left of the wine. Right now I'm slowly working my way through a gin and tonic while I write up the blog and the latest book I've read for my books page. Hopefully this will have the restorative effect I'm looking for.

We're now six days in to FAWM, and as you can see on my profile page there, I currently have five songs under my belt. That's more than double the total number of songs that I produced in the first two years I took part in the challenge put together, but somehow I feel like I can't get any creative traction this year at all.

I'm totally happy with the music I have managed to create, and perhaps that's what the problem is: I'm not bashing things out in a couple of hours any more. I could, but instead it took me three days to get track number 5 to the point where I could say to myself, "That'll do." It's not just that I'm putting in far more work on the production than I need to; that's been my thing for far more than a decade now (and I was gratified when a recent commenter complimented me on how cut-down and open it sounded when the thing was put together using a grand total of twenty-five separate instrument tracks, all of which were recorded in stereo—yes, it's a stripped-back job as far as I'm concerned, but way more than most FAWMers need to get the idea of what they're trying to do across) I think I've become more picky about deeming what I'm doing to be good enough to be let out into the wild. And that's really not what FAWM is about at all. At its heart, FAWM is about the process of converting ideas into music, and that's it. That's all it needs to be.

So, do I change my approach? Do I pump out a couple of frantic punk numbers, "three chords and the truth" style, to silence my inner editor and get my creative engines firing on all cylinders again? This year, surprisingly, I think the answer is probably not. The bottom line with FAWM for me is to celebrate and simply enjoy the process of songwriting. And I really enjoy the production, mixing, and mastering side of things just as much as the craft of writing. Probably more so, to be honest.

Unfortunately, ill-health is also having a much greater influence on the levels of creative energy I have available this year. On my levels of energy of any kind, in fact. For the past week I've been waking up in the small hours of the morning and then struggling to get back to sleep. I've been getting another two or three hours of rest between 7am and 10am but that really eats in to my day. Today it's already noon and here I am, still sitting in the living room after finishing a late breakfast. I have a bunch of ironing to do, too, so I won't be firing up the gear in the studio for a good hour or two yet. When I do, I'll be fighting the brain fog which seems to linger until early evening, because I am living in a constant state of exhaustion. I know it's better than the alternative, but getting old is no fun at all. At the moment it really sucks. And this is the root cause of why I feel like I'm not making headway this month.

But after buying a bunch of storage crates and other whatnot this week, the studio is looking much tidier than it has done in about a year and the bed in my guest bedroom is no longer buried a foot deep in piles of instrument and microphone cables, flight cases, and cardboard boxes; it could actually be used for the purpose for which it's intended, although the likelihood of that happening at any point in the near future is exceedingly slim. My social life is practically non-existent. The upside of this is that there are few things in my life which are likely to tempt me away from working on music. Some days I can almost convince myself that this is a good thing.

I went for a walk this morning to see if the work I was told would be happening "soon" when I moved here thirty years ago had finally started. It's been so long that I'd become somewhat sceptical that anything would ever come about, but I can confirm that it has; the road is closed, the excavators have moved in, and the air is filled with the sound of chainsaws. The first phase of work to support the reopening of Charfield Station in spring 2027 is well under way.

The downside of all this is that the easiest route from where I live to the main road out of the village has been fenced off for safety reasons. It will be closed for the next five months (which is a pain, because the alternative route entails weaving through a slalom created by dozens of parked vehicles, some of which are parked on bends). I think I'll be staying in unless I absolutely can't avoid having to leave the house.

A hearty "Well done!" to the gang at Real World Studios who picked up two Grammys last night for their work on Peter Gabriel's latest album i/o. All richly deserved and it was very satisfying to hear that they'd won!

Some of my fellow Fawmers have already written their fourteen songs and will no doubt keep on going for the next four weeks, but I seem to be working at a much slower pace than I've managed in previous years. I can't seem to build up any creative momentum at all until the end of the afternoon. Nevertheless I've written two songs so far for FAWM, so I'm a little bit ahead of schedule. And they are my usual, full production numbers with multiple tracks of guitars and synthesisers both real and virtual, because I like working that way.

I'll be back in my bedroom studio again this afternoon to work on song number three, but it's already past noon; see what I mean about me not getting going?

Yes, it's February again. I've buffed up my profile page on the FAWM website and this afternoon I'll start to write new music which you'll be able to listen to there until the site closes again on March 15th (the site goes in to hibernation for most of the year because February is special, but also because it stops moderators like me having to weed out all the bogus accounts that are created by forum scammers, which has become a real problem in the past few years).

My game plan isn't particularly focused and I have no idea if I'm going to end up with material that's tied together by any sort of overarching concept; I certainly haven't got one in mind at the moment. Instead, I'm simply going to attempt to create as many tracks as I can over the next four weeks.

I'm going to be taking things slowly today, though. Not only do I have some guitar repairs to carry out (see below) I'm also recovering from last night's front-of-house gig. It was a resounding success, but the nearest parking spaces were a good couple of hundred metres from the venue and when you're as old as I am and carrying a PA cabinet, that's a long way...

I really should know better than to make a stupid assertion that "I'm pretty much ready" on these pages. When I restrung the Squier Strat yesterday afternoon I discovered that two of its machine heads were knackered. Tightening the nuts on them with my socket set had the opposite effect, and the G string wouldn't hold tension any higher than D, which is not helpful when you're planning to lay down some tasteful guitar solos with it.

In contrast, restringing the Parker Fly was a breeze, because it has Sperzel locking heads where you thread the string through the machine head, twist a knob to lock it in place, and tune it knowing that the string is not going to be able to slip out of the peg at all. My Warr guitar has them as well.

So an emergency order of a set of Fender locking machine heads was duly placed. I'm currently sitting downstairs and anxiously waiting for the postie to deliver them. I'm hoping that replacing them should be a simple job of swapping out old for new, but given my luck these days I'm not counting on that being the case. I'll let you know what happens.

Update: The new machine heads have been delivered, and I've successfully fitted them (a certain amount of drilling was involved because of course they used two pegs to key in to the wood instead of just the one on the old parts. But the Strat is now staying in tune. And I think it's fairly safe to say I know why it was going out of tune, looking at the old machine head here:

The sleeve that holds the string peg in place on the headstock had completely sheared off at the base.