Man... This past month has been a friggin' whirlwind.  I refuse to believe November is nearly gone. Anyway...  Jesse and I are almost done with our debut Christmas album, "Herod the Fink", and while recording the last drum session, I thought it might be cool to see what I look like when I play.  Well, as fate would have i...

Yeah, I'm tired, but man - life is good.  I spent way too much time on our Herod The Fink project last night (and into the wee-hours of this morning), but it was so worth it.  We are really cranking to release a truly unique Christmas album.  My only regret is that we didn't start this sooner, so we could get more content.  But ...

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I just got done playing some sweet jazz for a client, and with the usual rock 'n' roll requests coming in, this was a great change of pace. I'm always intrigued at the different nuances that exist between styles of music as it pertains to rhythm and percussion.  Rock and roll pounds out some great 4/4 along the occasional 3/4 timing, with so...

A few months ago, I thought I'd get a bit more serious about setting up a semi-professional studio in my home.  It's worked out great, so far! As I've worked with clients, they've been more than happy with the results, and I'm learning new techniques and tricks of the trade at the same time.  So far, so good. So, along this trail, I b...

Through the 20 plus years I've been playing drums, I've had all sorts of drumkits, and I've used all sorts of heads.  Well, it came time to replace my snare head recently, and I was offered a new type of head by Remo. The Remo Ambassador Black Suede is a single-ply head which is meant to offer a softer sound without muffling the inherent res...

From the first memories I have, my life has been lived through rhythm.  There has always been an inherent "groove" of my life.  From walking down the sidewalk after school when I was in Jr. High, pacing the rhythm of the lines in the cement, and timing my steps accordingly, keeping the "1,2,3,4" clock in my head going ...

Wow... It's been a long, long time since I updated anything about my life on here.  Mostly because stuff got really busy, and really interesting about April of this year.  I've documented all the crud that we've gone through, so no need to rehash that. What I would like to say is that music is more a part of my life now than it ever has...

My sister died a week short of her birthday. It was really hard but we got through it.   Today, my nephew drove me right up the wall. I couldn't believe how much energy he had and how much trouble he could get into. Ben did most of the taking care of as I was busy with helping Holly with her resume   I get to move out for the first ti...

You know you've got a great project when its name is "Herod Fink", and it's Christmas-themed with an alternative flavor.  Yeah...  I'm really enjoying life right now. Anyway, so far, this project has been a whirlwind, but one we definitely cannot get enough of.  we couldn't stand it anymore, so we posted a little diddy f...

I hate life sometimes i swear.Yesterday i was riding my stupid  bike......which i shouldnt have been doing cause it has 2 flat wheels and when i went to turn around my house i hit a rock or something and the handle bar slipped out of my hand and i lost balence and fell when i fell i landed on the handle bar and i have a hard time walking cause...

Thanks to the wonders of technology, Advanced Budget Studios now proudly accepts all major credit cards! In other news, we haven't posted much because we're taking it easy during the holidays.  We'll start crankin' out the serious tunes again in January.  (If you have sessions scheduled for November or December, no worries... We'll stil...

I just wanted to let you all know I'm experimenting with putting ads on ILoveMyJournal.  I've been paying a bit too much to host the various sites I put up, so I'm seeing if I can re-coup any of it through ads. If you want to get rid of the ads, simply log in.  As soon as you log in, all ads should disappear. I'm not 100% sure if I'm ...

I decided to get back into reading the scriptures now that I've finished the last conference talks. This has nothing to do with Mosiah 3, but one thing I neglected to write about was the last gospel doctrine class I attended.  Our wonderful teacher, Ryan Anderson taught again, and made a wonderful parallel out of Amalickiah and Satan. We...

Well, I'm happy to announce that after a month and a half of jumping through hoopes to get this thing off the ground, it has finally begun! The construction of the new home for Advanced Budget Studios has officially started, and I cannot tell you how excited I am. The only down part of this whole situation is - the waiting.  I anticipate t...

Wow....  This is gonna be one of those entries which might just take up an entire novel, if I were to write down what I wish I could. To begin, yesterday Sarah and I went to Vegas to celebrate Shaun Roos's birthday. The whole kit-'n'-kaboodle began about a month ago when Tiffy, Shaun's girlfriend, emailed me asking me if I thought I coul...

Today was pretty laid back.  We watched one session of conference (Annie and Craig were gracious enough to let us watch it on their TV), played a lot of Brandon's new Wii, and went to a park which was pretty cool. Other than that, today was .... average. Here are some pics of the park. Collin found some guy who was quite nice, flying ...

The beginning of this talk was set by talking about the experience President Gordon B. Hinckley had as a deacon.  He spoke of the moving power of the men singing "Praise To The Man", at a Stake Priesthood Meeting. While reading that experience, my mind immediately turned back to a very similar experience I had when beginning my mis...

Within the first 5 verses of this chapter, I'm reminded again of how a person works who is truly interested in God's commandments. Lehi was commanded of the Lord to have his sons return to Jerusalem to get the plates of brass from Laban. Telling Laman and Lemuel would most certainly have some consequences in that they would automatically assu...

 So, I don't have near the time to dedicate ato this right now as I should, but I'm gonna need half-a-day to get it all out. Yesterday (Friday) I had a 'dress rehearsal' for the Temple Choir, and the singing in the Celestial room was indescribible.  It was amazing to sing there, and the acoustics were wonderful.  But the thing I k...

Well, people....  Most of yesterday (until this morning around 12:30am) I spent trying to figure out what to do about my email situation. Here's my situation:  I get so much friggin' spam, I can't stand it.  This shouldn't be news to anyone.  The person who receives no spam is a person who doesn't have an inbox. So, I decided ...

 So, I was just in bed just about to fall asleep (like within 1 or 2 minutes of sleeping), and I felt like I needed to come and write in my journal. My prayers on Sunday evening, I believe it was, felt just like I was communing with the Spirit.  Everything spiritual seemed so easily understood and understandable. Man, I hope this make...

Whenever I do credit card checking, I always end up searching for longer than it would take me to create it myself, so...  without further ado, here's the Luhn, or "Mod 10" algorithm for validating credit card numbers. function mod_10($cc) {     $reversed_string = strrev($cc);     $string_array = str_sp...

I guess I just take for granted all the tips 'n' tricks I've learned over the past 10 years I've been building my own systems (along with most of my family's and friend's computers), so with that thought, let me try to explain how I build computers. First off, this article is intended for those people who are not necessarily tech-wizards, but ar...

Okay..  I have no idea why I'm writing this, but to heck with it.  People should know.  Either that, or I need to figure out what the hey I'm doing wrong. So, about a year ago I began a crusade to help AMD / ATI as much as I possibly could.  I've already been buying AMD processors now for at least 5 years for myself, my work,...

I've been finding it hard to write / blog lately, simply because I have no desire to write.  I've been thinking about this for a bit, so I decided to write about ... writing. In order to write  / blog, I have to have something to write about - obviously.  What isn't so obvious is, I always have something to write about. I came to...

The first thing that stood out to me this time around was the anger of Lamoni's father.  Try to place yourself in the situation Lamoni found himself in.  There are so many variables in the situation, it's hard to imagine exactly what was going on with the family undercurrents, but holy cow.  Lamoni's father drew his freaking sword an...

We recently had the pleasure of working with The Blue Aces again, and as expected, they were stellar.  This time around, however, they recorded an acoustic song which really contrasts the versatility in their song-writing.  The song is called "One Of The Heart" and should be available soon. Lookin' forward to doing more work w...

 So...  I thought I'd be going to bed, but here I am. When the Spirit directed me to come down and write down my testimony, I wasn't (and still am not) quite sure what to write.  This certainly isn't due to a lack of testimony comparative to other times I've done this, but rather quite the exact opposite.  It is because my tes...

 So, with the new G+ hangout update, all of my Chrome extensions quit working ("My Hangouts", "Hangout Canopy", etc...), and I was wondering how in the heck to find hangouts to meet new people... Well, it's actually very easy. Within G+, search for #hangoutpost Then, in the drop-down right-side of the submenu, click &...