I was asked to do some arranging on the Johnny Borrell ( Razorlight ) track ‘Carrickfurgus’ which was in the demo stage at the time. Nick had the files which were in a pretty basic state with some loops and a vocal track and a rough sketch of the chords.

We eventually decided to re-record the entire track and just keep the vocal and ended up co-producing the track together. Nick took care of the engineering and mixing duties and I arranged the music and eventually ended up playing or programming all the instrumentation!

The whole thing was done in one day from start to finish in Studio 2 at Air.

It was only the fact I saw the track in my inbox that I remembered it. I went on iTunes and sure enough there it was. The album features tracks from KT Tunstall, Yusif Islam, Hot Chip, The Go! Team and Will.i.am to name a few. It’s called Amazon Tribe – Songs for Survival and is available from all good music retailers.

On a guitar note, I used my fantastic Atkin ‘Dreadnought’ for the acoustics ( and percussion! ) and my Telecaster though an old Vox AC30 with a Custom Audio Electronics boost pedal by MXR for the electrics.

Go out and buy it, it’s for a good cause! Did I mention we all did it for free!

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m super excited about my lovely shiny(matte) Mac Pro. With it’s lovely 8 core processor and more RAM than I need. But my god it’s been a trial. Lost serial numbers, mislaid installer CD’s, intaller patches, plugin wrappers, Logic validation issues and tranferring and testing 700 gigs of sample library has left me feeling a bit brain dead! I must of put my administrator password in about 200 times too!

I’ve acquired a lot of software since i got my old G5 about 5 years ago so I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. My much hammered Power Mac ended up with about 25meg of free hard disk and i thought it might be a good idea to upgrade. Also software has become more and more processor intensive and the old PPC 1.8 dual chip just wasn’t happy any more. I’d made a conscious decision to wait this time for things to get ironed out as it took a good year of problems going to OSX Tiger. But it seems I was wrong. Fantastic though the Intel chip is it’s been problematic getting some things to work, still!

Spectrasonics Trilogy for example now has to be wrapped and lauched outside of Logic! Amplitube (which i use all the time) just won’t pass Logic’s peculiar AU validater, even though the same version works perfectly on my Intel Macbook Pro.

I have to say Native Instruments were brilliant. I phoned to say I’d lost my Reaktor 5 installation CD. Within 1 minute of varifying my details a link appeared in my mail box to a download link for the installer CD. Can’t live without Reaktor! I love NI!

The thing I’ve been most impressed by is Toontracks DFH Superior 2. I’ve always used Toontracks stuff for drums but this is totally awesome. Those room mics sound killer. If your going to buy a software drum program you’ve got to consider this the only choice! Sounds like i work for them!

So with only a few more things to go hopefully tomorrow I can set about actually doing some music!

……and finish this website!