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I started playing the drums when I was 16, a few years after I started guitar (skip to Here's How I Did It if you don't care). It fed a different need—one that had me drumming on my steering wheel to a turn signal metronome. A few years after I rented an apartment in Los Angeles, it came time for me to find a neighbor-friendly electronic drum kit. These kits have some issues, though. If they're affordable, they probably sound like crap. Kick drums always seem to slide around, even with a dedicated rug to sit on. I needed something stable that sounded authentic. Like manna from Heaven, I found the answer—the Roland TD4KP. A lightweight kit with a kick drum attached to the frame. It folds up, and it doesn't sound half-bad either.  Unfortunately, Roland discontinued the TD4KP somewhere around 2018. I only discovered this change afterward, having declined buying one for half price during B&H Photo's Christmas clearance sale that year. I thought it could wait, but m

A few years ago, a friend of mine asked me for help writing SEO-driven content. I wrote him the following email, and I'm sharing it here for anyone who needs it.   ------------ What's happening, Drew? So, when writing a web page, you want to create a series of headers that will draw traffic. I'll try to explain them here. First is your H1. An H1 looks like this. Your H1 is ONLY the main search term and geographical area . Only.  Nothing fancy, as much as you'll want to make it a catchy headline. Don't. That's for the next one.  So, what's the main search term? I was looking up my friend's solar company, and this is what I found, courtesy of the free website called UberSuggest . You'll see here that I typed in the search term, "solar power ogden utah," but the major search term was alternative energy . All my ads and marketing should be optimized for that, because that will drive traffic and boost my SEO score. My headline would now

The Jake Fire in Santa Clarita wasn't as bad as it looked. Fire crews had everything contained within a day, but when it broke out, the Santa Clarita Valley shut down and closed I-5 near my job. For me, that meant working from home and getting all my writing done by 3 p.m.—plenty of time to beat the traffic heading north and meet my friend/drummer Harry. By sheer cunning and programming acumen, Harry found an error on a radio station's website after they announced a giveaway for RATT concert tickets. While other hopeful winners were stopped by 404 errors from a bad web address, Harry correctly guessed the URL and won the giveaway. After his wife said she couldn't go, the invitation passed on to me. You know RATT—they did the song "Round and Round" (which you may have confused for Van Halen's "Panama"), back when music videos regularly included Waspy dinner settings like this . The band was fortunate enough to score some of the primo 80s publici

Yes, the Monoprice 5W Guitar Amp Slaps If you haven't checked out this 5W tube amp from Monoprice , hurry and do it before the price goes up again. 30 years ago in November of 2019, I bought this amp for around $120, an increase from its $105 price tag when I first saw it. Now it's almost $170, and it remains a steal at that. Seriously, this amp is so awesome. Is Monoprice Any Good? Let me start by clarifying that I own just three items made by Monoprice—this amp (actually branded Stage Right), a tuner pedal, and a mono-to-stereo 1/8" adapter. All of them work as well as or—in the case of this amp—better than expected. Because Monoprice's gear is so cheap, people are rightly suspicious. After all, name a guitarist who wasn't burned by Behringer gear time and time again. We know too well that you get what you pay for. ...except with this Monoprice 5W tube amp, because it's way better than its price suggests. What Can It Do? Feature-wise, it&#

When I decided to hike the Chilkoot Trail—a 33-mile journey straddling the border of Alaska and Canada’s Yukon Territory—no one could have prepared me for what lay ahead. I was an active 23-year old and had managed a tough hike only days before. I was in decent shape. No need to train for a touristy hike like this one. After a long day of drinking, a couple of my friends threw out an idea: let's hike the Chilkoot and get back for work by Tuesday. With the dull threat of a hangover dragging my sleep-deprived body, I would have been wise to reconsider making a journey like this in under 24 hours, but hey, it's Alaska. You go on adventures, you suffer the consequences, you have stories to tell, and that's exactly what I got in return. 2011 boasted some of the century's worst trail conditions. Hitherto flat, dry paths were now flooded with waist-high rivers we couldn't avoid—something we would've learned had we registered for the hike, but the park ranger&