My brother in law Chris has been wanting to release an album since “Everybody Knows Your Name” went out a few years back.  I’ve had the good fortune of being selected to play drums on said album so Chris and I have spent a pile of time over the last couple weeks arranging and recording drums for 9 of the songs that’ll be on the album.

I definitely recommend every drummer does at least some recording and arranging in a studio.  It gives you a chance to really think-through every fill, hitch, kick pattern, whatever that you do without thinking when you’re playing live or jamming with a band.    It’s a great way to study and refine how you play.

Site re-build:

I love this WordPress install so much I decided to base my entire (photography, music, portfolio, etc.) site off of it.  So I’ve moved some stuff around and changed some links and sub-domains to get it working the way I like and I have to say:  Wordpress is awesome.  Tons of support, support, super easy to setup and tweak.  It’s great, and I highly recommend it as a basic content management system.

There are people that play music and there are people that write code and there is a thin intersection between the two containing people like me: programming musicians.

Virtual Studio Technology is a SDK written by Steinberg just for us.  This SDK allows programmers to create “plugins” from well-designed code base classes that can receive, manipulate, and output both audio and MIDI data.  These plugins are easily compatible with almost every non-linear audio editor out there including Logic, Cubase, ProTools, Sonar and many more.  Nice.

Anyway, I was thinking about purchasing a few plugins to use in my DAW (Logic Pro 9 is my choice) and I realized that some of them would probably be pretty simple to write if I had the right tools. Hence, I am hoping to write my own VST or AU plugin over the next few weeks.

Although it might be more difficult then I’m currently anticipating, my current plan is to write a drum replacement tool similar to Drumagog that I can use in my own recordings.  As far as I can tell, this would require only a couple specific bits of logic for core functionality:

1. Audio level monitoring. The sound of the drum would have to be replaced when a sample is processed that has a signal level greater than a certain (user-settable) threshold.
2. Velocity-specific sample triggering. Once we have determined that a drum has been hit we need to trigger (perhaps via some MIDI interface) some sample for that drum.  This requires that the user can somehow select which sound (or perhaps sound-generator or MIDI channel) to use, so we can replace a drum channel with the user-selected sound.  We also will have to make sure that the velocity or volume of the sample we trigger is somehow related to the loudness of the original sound in order to maintain realism in the replacement.

Any suggestions?  I’ll definitely be keeping you posted once I get started.