Spirit of the Glen

From 2009 until 2012 Offbeat's Iain McKinna was asked by Universal Music Group to assist in the making of a series of albums by The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards which was produced by Jon Cohen.

Iain had previously recorded three high selling albums for rock piper Jimi McRae and had been pioneering crossovers from rock/world and experimental electronic music with the pipes due to Jimi's versatility on the big pipes , border pipes and arabic pipes in different tunings.

Iain chose Heartbeat Studios as a studio venue big enough to accommodate all the pipers and drummers for the recording stage of the albums. They were recorded on his Mac Pro using Metric Halo Convertors.

Jon arranged all the midi parts for the strings on Logic and each part of the pipes were recorded in segments using mainly a pair of Neumann U87 microphones.

After the recording sessions the midi parts were replaced by orchestral parts performed by the Czech Film Orchestra in Prague prior to Jon mixing in London.

The first album was no1 in the Classical charts and the album Journey won a Classical Brit award for best album in 2009.