NOOB HOME RECORDING (002) - Lining Up Drum Beats

For the benefit of total beginners, I would like to point you to the Glossary link at the top. This will come in handy as I throw out a bunch of acronyms and foreign sounding terms. -Mario

After finding a suitable version of The Metro for a scratch track, it's time to get busy with drums or drum programming. In my case, it's the latter since I don't know any drummer, I don't own real drums and even if I did, I won't do a good job at it. Enter, the drum Virtual Studio Technology instrument or VSTi for short.

Owsinski, On Making Your Band Sound Great

Here's a few more golden nuggets from Bobby Owskinski on how to improve your band's performance. On his recent blog, he extracts some tips from his book: How To Make Your Band Sound Great.

He briefly explains Dynamics, Attack and Releases, and Turnarounds.

I think these can also be great songwriting tools. I'll make sure to take the time to incorporate these aspects into my songwriting process.

Read the rest of the article HERE.

Original Art: Momma Dragon

This was my entry to a dragon themed traditional drawing contest at pxleyes.com. I placed 8th out of the 10 entries. See the other entries here. I also posted a step-by-step on the site.

Fan Art: THE DARK KNIGHT

I've been a comicbook superhero fan since I was little and the ones at the top of my list are Superman and Batman. Here's my rendition of the Dark Knight, done entirely with pencil. I worked on this over a couple of weeks during lunch breaks at work, just adding a little bit everytime.

Goodbye for now, Netflix!

This might be old news by now but here's my take...

It Could Be the “CATALYST”… for Higher Bills

The recent Netflix price increase on their streaming plus DVD rental just left a bad taste in my mouth. The thing is I don't watch much TV as I have an aversion to five minutes or more of commercials in between shows. Netflix really offered a great alternative. Before streaming was introduced, I was on their 3-DVD plan but cut back to 1-DVD when I ended up holding on to the DVD’s for weeks, even months. My wife and I were seriously considering downgrading our cable service to the very basic and just relying on Netflix streaming for occasional home entertainment… at least that was the plan until the news of the increase.