One of my favourite places this side of heaven is Rock Sands Lake near Bancroft, Ontario.  As I write this I’m on my way to this place, which my cousins and I refer to as simply “the cottage”.

From the minute I arrive till Wednesday morning I’ll be playing volleyball, canoeing, swimming, playing “king of the raft”, and most importantly: talking and dreaming with some of my best friends.  And they know how to dream.

Most often, we spend at least a couple nights laying in canoes as we float around the lake staring at the stars, and talking about life.  It’s usually one of the most inspiring few days of my year, and I can’t wait to get there.

Here is a song written during one of our weeks at Rock Sands Lake:

The Cottage, by JASK

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.

Yes, I officially have a blog that I’m going to be using.  I’ll be using it generally as a place to post ideas, project and events that I think either might befit from being read by the internet population at large, or might have the potential to spark interesting discussion.

I’ve designed a number of blogs in the past, but this is my first time coming up with something I like for myself.  Obviously I’ve just done a simple WordPress install and thrown on the Elegant Grunge theme by Michael Tyson (thanks Mike), but I’m liking the look, and it fits what I’m trying to do.

Comments are open, so feel free to respond to anything as you see fit.

For those who don’t know, I also have a photography portfolio, Facebook page, and Twitter account you might want to check out.  Oh, and you can always subscribe to this blog via it’s RSS feed so you don’t have to check every day, like you know you will anyway.

My brother and sister (currently residing in B.C.) were down last week.  Great time relaxing, playing music, sports, swimming… all that.  Managed to squeeze some time in while all the kids were awake to get some pictures of us all together.

Speaking of family, I’m not the only one with a blog: my sister Cheryl (who writes much better, and with much more purpose than myself) also has one, along with my sister in law Shannon who writes ”In Metaphors” and my cousin Chris (a.k.a. “Kryptech“).

My second wedding photography experience happened last weekend as I was doing the visual capture for two good friends of mine:  Gabe Laramay and Kristan Bulger.  We had the unique opportunity to time everything in order to get some pictures with July 3rd fireworks.  Good thinking guys!  Turned out pretty good.  Going to be adding a couple to my portfolio for sure.

In related news I’m going to be re-designing my entire photography portfolio over the next couple of days.  The current infrastructure makes it really difficult to add images and such, so I’d like to use something a little more dynamic.  Probably going to end up publishing through JAlbum with a custom skin.  Suggestions?

Joel Kidd and my cousin Christine Vogel gave me the privilege of doing photography for their wedding on May 29th.  My first!  Fortunately we had plenty of time for the official photo shoot, so it was a fairly relaxed day overall and the pictures turned out great.