Is This Thing On?
(The Recording page has *finally* been updated!)
Over the past few years my family has written and recorded a number of songs. I decided to take the best ones so far and put them into a little album on my iTunes playlist. I'm happy to share the tracks with you!
Note: all of these tracks are still a work in progress. They may be updated at various times.
Track List
In these tracks you can also hear the evolution of my attempts at drum recording. About a Time, Pirates, and You Are include drums recorded in a very basic way, and then augmented with samples. This involved a very tedious process of manually creating the MIDI data for each snare and bass drum hit. (Logic Pro 9 was not yet released, which has the capability of doing automated drum replacement.)
In Mirror of Eternity I went the opposite direction, creating programmed drums and then augmenting them with some recorded hihats and cymbals.
The drums for Rockem Sockem Hockey were recorded last summer, but before Stephen and I had properly tuned the snare drum. As a result, the quality isn't as high as in more recent tracks. I hope to try some sample replacement on the snare drum soon.
Our Song, Not Gonna Sing, and Millette Guitar Concerto are using recorded drums with no sample replacement. They turned out fairly well, I think! I still need to make a few adjustments (especially to MGC), but I think I've now got a good method for recording drums with my home made mics and the Shure SM-57 on the snare top.
Happy Sunday and Summer Vacation are using purely programmed drums.
What do you think? Any mixing or recording tips to pass along?
Web page updates?!
Umm. So this is getting to be a bit of a familiar refrain, unfortunately. I've been pretty busy as of late and therefore have been unable to update my web page on a regular basis.
(If you're reading this on Facebook and you're wondering what I'm referring to, check here: http://www.darryldot.org.)
Anyway, I'm finally getting around to doing some updates! I've changed the theme to something called Lightword. I modified it slightly, but it seems to be a generally nice and simple theme. I've also been doing some general updates to the other pages on here.
In my rare free time, I have been busy with mixing some of the recordings we did last summer. I really, really need to give the Recording page a general overhaul... stay tuned for more in that department!
In other news, congratulations to David and Roxanne! Andrew Dominic was born on January 19, 2010. Here he is, at two days old.
And also: congratulations Andy and Jane! Spencer was born on February 1, 2010.
Cool to be kind
Here is another amazing story about a man by the name of Abbas Jahangiri. Owner of a successful Toronto night club, Abbas himself lives in relative poverty and uses his profits to give to the homeless poor in downtown Toronto.
(Yes, he drives a Hummer to bring food and other supplies around, but as he says, Mother Teresa herself might also have approved if she had been working on a cold, winter night in downtown Toronto.)
Comparing Notes on Captivity
Here's an incredible interview / conversation between Melissa Fung and Ingrid Betancourt. Ms. Betancourt was held hostage for six years by Columbian guerillas, while Ms. Fung (CBC reporter) was held hostage in Afghanistan for close to a month in 2008.
http://www.cbc.ca/thenational/indepthanalysis/story/2009/10/06/national-ingridbetancourt.html
Especially check out about 2/3 into the interview as they compare their prayer lives in the midst of captivity. It's pretty amazing.
New stuff
Here's just a quick update:
1. Elaine and Brendan are now engaged! Congrats! (It's going to be a busy summer next year, with Danny & Becca and Elaine & Brendan.)
2. Due to Fr. Les's illness, I've temporarily been assigned to St. Anne's parish in the north end of Saskatoon. (For any canon law geeks out there, the technical term is "parochial administrator," - Can. 540. :-)). It's a lot of work but the parish has been very welcoming! I'm also still living at Holy Family, since this is a temporary placement.
3. There's some new music to listen to. This is all a work in progress... the synthesized electric guitars really need to be replaced by the real thing, and the song itself needs a lot of work (like, some melody).