The site alistairjohnston.com showcases the music of Alistair Johnston, a budding composer whose day job is IT management consultancy. Alistair was born in Manchester, United Kingdom in 1970 and brought up in Arnside - a small fishing village in the English Lake District on the Cumbria/Lancashire border.

Today, Alistair lives on the other side of the Irish Sea working for Fujitsu in Dublin, Ireland. His professional profile can be viewed on LinkedIn.

Alistair took piano lessons as a youngster but taught himself composing in the late 1980's with the help of a BBC Microcomputer hooked up to Hybrid Technology's Music 5000 synthesizer (see demo). He was part of a small community of amateur musicians sharing music on a bulletin board. Through this connection Alistair was commissioned to write the theme tune for the BBC Software Show.

For the next 20 years Alistair put his musical interests on the back burner as he studied Artificial Intelligence at Middlesex University and built a career in Information Technology management and consultancy. Today, Alistair continues to build upon his IT career while also making a bit more time for creating and publishing music.

The inspiration behind Alistair's music largely derives from film and TV scores, and as the short clip below demonstrates, one can get a bit too much inspiration sometimes!

The site alistairjohnston.com is built using Freeway 5 Pro. The music is created using a USB piano keyboard (M-Audio Keystation 61es) sequenced with Logic Express 8 on an Apple MacBook. The early compositions used instruments that are included in Logic Express 8 and GarageBand '08. The more recent pieces feature the Authorized Steinway Virtual Concert Grand Piano by Garritan and orchestral instruments from Garritan Personal Orchestra v4.0.

The scrolling scores are generated by Logic Express 8; recorded using iShowU HD; edited with iMovie '08, and converted into Flash animations using Wasp. And many of the photographs on the site (and the album cover artwork) were taken by Alistair's wife, Marianne.

A selection of Alistair's music is currently playing on Jango, a US-based internet radio station. Jango's analysis suggests that people who like Alistair's music also listen to John Williams, Billy Joel, Ennio Morricone and Johann Sebastian Bach (see below).