BlakeAtwood.com

In an effort to better the sound of our worship services on Sunday mornings, my boss deemed it necessary to replace the electronic drums I’ve been playing for the last three years with a live set, to which I said, “Finally!”

After a few hours at Guitar Center, we came away with this Pacific MX Series Fusion Maple Set, with the Emerald Green-to-Black Satin Fade. I was sold on these as soon as I tried a Birch set next to a Maple set. The maple, as I learned, is louder, boomier (to use the made up parlance of musicians everywhere), and fills a room better than birch. It also helped that the maple set came with DW heads instead of the Pacific heads (even though Pacific Drums are made by DW, there are still different levels of heads – and I usually try to stay fairly level-headed, even if my head is in the clouds…)
We also came away with:

• a Pacific Hardware Set (DW Kick Pedal, hihat stand, cymbal stand, snare stand)

• 1 Zildjian A Custom 17″ Crash

• 1 Zildjian A Custom Mastersound 14″ Hihats

• 1 Shure Beta 52

• 3 Sennheiser E604s

I’m very pleased and can hardly wait to get the set together, tuned, and played. Course, I have to wait about a month or more before that happens, but right now I’m content just looking at their Emerald Beauty (which will be the first single released off my solo album).

this is what the numbers would be.

How easy it is to forget how good we have it.

First, go to Pandora and register. It’s a web-based music player through which you can create your own stations based on your favorite artists. While playing the songs, you can rate the music, thus allowing Pandora to learn your musical tastes and play more music it thinks you’ll like. It’s fairly addictive.

Once registered, go to OpenPandora and download the desktop client. It adds some quite nice functionality, like a mini-player and the unnecessary use of a browser to listen to the music. You can even look up lyrics. It’s great.

“Yatooma said this is where his clients drank ‘the Kinkade Kool-Aid.’”

- this article 

After getting into town from San Angelo around 2pm, I left to shoot a wedding at 3pm.

I’ve been working as a part-time wedding videographer on Saturdays. I get to film some fairly high class affairs. This wedding was one of the daughters of the Covert family, most well known for their line of auto dealerships. I was told that at the last Covert wedding there were a few celebrity attendees, most notably Matthew Mcconaughey and Sandra Bullock, so we were on celebrity lookout. I thought I saw Jessica Simpson, but, in retrospect, hardly anyone was around her, and that doesn’t seem plausible for someone of her fame, or notoriety, depending on your take… (update: video confirmation…it was Jessica Simpson…crazy, eh?)

The wedding was at the Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Austin, a great site. The reception was at the UT Golf Club in Steiner Ranch. There were fireworks at the reception. I enjoyed the venison and the sirloin. Then I went home, late, only to wake a few hours later to play two services at my church. Then to a show…