No, the name doesn't ring a bell, at least to me. Mary may very well remember. She remembers everything.

The original family that moved up there was Fred Miller Coulter, Victoria Profitt, and their son, Fred Profitt Coulter. They owned the Pine Knot Inn. Fred Miller Coulter played Dixieland clarinet. When Fred Miller Coulter died, my grandmother remarried to Clayton Lanning. Fred Profitt Coulter played classical piano, went to National Music Camp (in Interlochen), University of Michigan, and Julliard. While at UM, he met Xenia Valerie Coulter, got married, and had me (and my sister).

By that time, the house on the lake was the Lanning house, and I got shipped up summers starting around first grade for six or eight years. I also spent three years at National Music Camp.

The location of the house can be found here.

When summer roles around, I'll see if you're in the area. If so, maybe lunch? (You'll have to deal with my two kids, aged 12 & 15 by then.)

Last time I flew up, I flew through Chicago, not Detroit. I have no idea why.

Wow! So it looks like we've more or less hijacked this thread but I'm having way too much fun now.

My sister's places are all right next to each other on Center between 3rd and 4th. Actually, two of them are on the lake and the 3rd is between the other two and the road. They're old places. I'll have to check with her and her husband tonight to see if these names ring a bell just because his family has had these cottages for decades and they're still there. It's likely that the name will be familiar to them.

And in case the world hadn't shrunk enough, I was up at the NMC in Interlochen as well. I was up there in the summers of 77, 78 and 79 as a saxophone player. I have exceptionally fond memories of my time there. It was a really amazing place to be as a musician and now that we have a place in the area, I want to start spending time there again as a spectator.

I've even kicked around the idea of trying to work out a Stick seminar there. Wouldn't that be something.

Glenn

I don't mean to interrupt, but nice tracks Glenn...
I think Hard Times is one of the greatest stick songs to have emerged in the last years!
Incredible!
Please consider telling us how you got those sounds!
Take care,
-Japhlet

Ha ha. Yes I guess we digressed.

Thanks for that Japhlet.

If memory serves me correctly, I gave up the ghost on this one during the Stick-Tech seminar we did in Charlottesville a few years back.

The Echoplex has a setting that allows you drop short "bursts" of notes into a loop. You can either do this randomly for some seriously wild results (ala Andre Lafosse) or you can use the setting in conjunction with the quantize function and drop the notes in time (ala Andy Butler).

In the case of "Hard Times", the opening and bridge in "London Trains" and one of the MP3s off the downloads page called "More Loops", I simply started recording and captured a good 10-15 minutes of improvisation using this technique. Once that was done, I snipped short loops that I really liked out of the resulting audio and dropped those loops into the tunes.

I've toyed with putting together some tunes that can be performed live. As of yet though, the buildup to full steam is a bit lengthy and I don't want to risk losing my audience

Glenn

Yeah Glenn, I absolutely love that song. The groove is so fat. I'm hoping you find a way to play it live because i'd love to hear it live!

Cool!
Thanks Glenn,
-JBA

One thing that was really fun in mixing this record was finding ways to get the individual loops to blend with each other, without losing their own distinctive character.

On this tune, I used a transient modification plug-in to subdue the attack on certain sounds, and boost it on others.

On the "bagpipe" sound the attack was reduced a bit. A pic of the plugin setting for it is attached:

Logic also has some great filters.

Automating several parameters on these plugins adds some more life to the loops, and there's quite a bit of that at the end of the tune.

Love the tunes, Glenn.

Cool!
Thanks Greg!
-JBA