No change there then...

So, we had our family holiday break in August. A fun fortnight of camping in the rain. We managed to pitch our tents(s) in Orkney, Durness and Arisaig before settling down in Arran where we caught up with the usual suspects. Big shout outs (or whatever the current expression for 'Hello' is) to Si and Sue, Bomber and Sharon, John, Pete, Dave and Hilary and all the other folkies who turned up.

Finally we returned to our sweet domestic chaos. I fired up the iMac with a new enthusiasm for the 50th Anniversary Edition as soon as the rest of the family retired to bed, and the hard disk crashed.

Same problem as the last time (when the motherboard, hard disk et al were replaced) except that this time the machine was out of warranty.

Still, the iMac is also my works machine when I'm not in the office, so it was a fairly painless operation to persuade the company to replace it. The office now rejoices in a 24" glossy Intel iMac, and the previous office G5 is sitting in the corner of my studio with its nine fans wheezing away trying to keep the dual processor cool in the face of my white hot creativity.

Good News, Bad News

So the good news is that I've now got a much faster machine to power the studio, and the bad news is that it doesn't quite seem to understand what I was doing before and keeps complaining that it can't keep audio and midi in sync.

But the best news of all is that Fergus and I are close to finally cracking the muffled guitar issue. As you will remember, we entered the Clarity and Sparkle Show only to be thrown out with boos and hisses.

I rewired Fergus (that's my James Bisset 50th Anniversary Strat - stop talking at the back please) with the traditional Fender wiring but including the star grounding just to see what would happen, and all the clarity and sparkle was right back where it should be.

I've written to the Clarity and Sparkle Show asking for a re-match.

Fingers crossed.