I recently got the MIDI Drum Loops Complete library from Smart loops. Very impressive collection of MIDI drum loops. I'm taking down my "Drummer Wanted" ad.
Seriously, I can see myself using Smart Loops as my go to for beats on future recordings. MIDI Drum Loops Complete includes a wide variety of beats, fills and patterns. I was impressed with the fact that each groove includes a ton of variation. For instance, if you need a double kick fill, there are 10 different patterns to choose from. Making it very easy to find the fill that would perfectly fit your particular part. Some of the grooves have as many as twenty different variations, now that's awesome.
These loops are versatile and sound great in different tempos. Most of the loops are in 4/4 or 6/8 with some double-time and half-time feels. All of the beats, fills and patterns have a great natural human feel to them. They are very well played and can be placed quickly and easily into a song. You can listen to loop samples on the Smart Loops website.
I attached a short techno-metal track to the bottom of this post that I created using only Smart Loops MIDI patterns. It was done in Reason so the drum kit could sound better, but the Smart Loops patterns are awesome. The loops required very little editing and tweaking to get them to fit into my parts. I'm looking forward to trying these loops with something like a BFD2 or Superior Drummer kit and Pro Tools.
According to Smart Loops:
All of the loops were performed live with no quantizing, keeping the original feel of the performance by professional session drummer and Smart Loops founder Frank Basile. The loops are professional-quality, real-feel MIDI drum loops and can be used with any PC or Apple MIDI-compatible music software or hardware sequencer capable of reading standard MIDI files. All of the MIDI Loop libraries include loops in four formats for compatibility with nearly all hardware and software MIDI sequencers. Formats include Standard MIDI File (.MID) type 1, Standard MIDI File type 0, Cakewalk Session Drummer 1, Cakewalk MIDI Groove Clip (Compatible with Cakewalk Session Drummer versions 2 & 3).
You get all of Smart Loops' 5 MIDI drum loop libraries for only $59, which regularly goes for $145. Needless to say, this is a great deal for this set of loops. There are over 1,000 MIDI drum loops, beats, fills and patterns covering various styles such as metal, hard rock, blues, country, disco, funk, hip-hop, jazz, latin, pop, rap, reggae, r&b, shuffle, swing, and more.
In addition to MIDI Loops, Smart Loops also offers Acid, Apple and Rex2 loops as well as professionally recorded drum, guitar and bass samples.
Smart Loops is very affordable, you simply cannot argue with the $59 sticker price. It's definitely worth looking into if you want some professionally created beats. Check it out!
Portable Vocal Booth Home Version Review
Editors Keys makes some really cool and innovative products. They recently contacted me to do a review of the Portable Vocal Booth Home Version. What a treat, this product is so cool, I was very excited to give it a try.
First of all it is very sturdy and easy to setup. I had it put together and on my mic stand in less than five minutes. Basically what it does is surrounds your mic with soundproof foam. This is a great way to create clean vocals without reverb as well as keeping out computer noise, barking dogs, crying babies and screaming wives.
The specially moulded foam has been shaped and processed in a way which not only helps to create dry vocals, but to also prevent exterior noise such as traffic noise or air conditioning entering into your mic.
I did a few tests with and without the vocal booth, and yes it was quite a bit clearer with the portable vocal booth than without. I record in a concrete basement, so there are tons of sound reflections as well as noises that bleed onto vocals, the portable vocal booth did reduce the outside noise quite a bit. I was extremely happy with the way my vocals sounded with the portable vocal booth. My next test is to try it out with my 12 string acoustic, I'm sure it will work wonders there as well.
The Editors Keys Portable Vocal Booth Home Edition goes for $144 and comes with 110% money back guarantee. Go to Editors Keys to get more information.
I would recommend the Editors Keys Portable Vocal Booth Home Edition to anyone who's looking to improve their vocal sounds without creating a real booth. This is an excellent and inexpensive solution to all of your home recording vocal issues.
First of all it is very sturdy and easy to setup. I had it put together and on my mic stand in less than five minutes. Basically what it does is surrounds your mic with soundproof foam. This is a great way to create clean vocals without reverb as well as keeping out computer noise, barking dogs, crying babies and screaming wives.
The specially moulded foam has been shaped and processed in a way which not only helps to create dry vocals, but to also prevent exterior noise such as traffic noise or air conditioning entering into your mic.
I did a few tests with and without the vocal booth, and yes it was quite a bit clearer with the portable vocal booth than without. I record in a concrete basement, so there are tons of sound reflections as well as noises that bleed onto vocals, the portable vocal booth did reduce the outside noise quite a bit. I was extremely happy with the way my vocals sounded with the portable vocal booth. My next test is to try it out with my 12 string acoustic, I'm sure it will work wonders there as well.
The Editors Keys Portable Vocal Booth Home Edition goes for $144 and comes with 110% money back guarantee. Go to Editors Keys to get more information.
I would recommend the Editors Keys Portable Vocal Booth Home Edition to anyone who's looking to improve their vocal sounds without creating a real booth. This is an excellent and inexpensive solution to all of your home recording vocal issues.
One Month Of Building an Authority Site in 60 minutes A Day
I think it’s been a few weeks now that I started following Nate River’s WSO 60 minutes to $100 a day. I was about 2 weeks behind on starting this project due to the fact that I was waiting for my logo to be created from a Fiverr gig. I really wanted to brand my authority site so I wanted a catchy little logo. My niche is real broad and I love it because it helps me write articles easily this way.
I installed Google Analytics on my site about 2 weeks ago (when I actually started building the site) and I would say I am only averaging about 3 visitors a day right now. Which isn’t all that fantastic but it is all organic search traffic. Some visitors are finding it from the exact keywords I chose and some are arriving by a variation of the keyword.
It’s pretty amazed I am getting any traffic at all because so far none of my keywords are ranking on page one. I am curious to see if this will change in a few months.
So far no Amazon sales. I have had several click-thrus though. This isn’t too discouraging yet, considering I only have 10 articles up and of those 10, only 2 pages have affiliate links on them.
For now this is still something I can see myself putting effort into everyday. Affiliate marketing really burned me out and it is really nice to feel productive even for just an hour each day. It sure is better than doing nothing for my business at all.
Sorry this post is nothing uber exciting but I did promise I would update, so there you have it!
I installed Google Analytics on my site about 2 weeks ago (when I actually started building the site) and I would say I am only averaging about 3 visitors a day right now. Which isn’t all that fantastic but it is all organic search traffic. Some visitors are finding it from the exact keywords I chose and some are arriving by a variation of the keyword.
It’s pretty amazed I am getting any traffic at all because so far none of my keywords are ranking on page one. I am curious to see if this will change in a few months.
So far no Amazon sales. I have had several click-thrus though. This isn’t too discouraging yet, considering I only have 10 articles up and of those 10, only 2 pages have affiliate links on them.
For now this is still something I can see myself putting effort into everyday. Affiliate marketing really burned me out and it is really nice to feel productive even for just an hour each day. It sure is better than doing nothing for my business at all.
Sorry this post is nothing uber exciting but I did promise I would update, so there you have it!
Trying Fiverr Gigs Consistently To Boost My Sites
Man, with the lack of updates, you would think I didn’t care about my sites or earnings. Oh I do care about both of those things but with my earnings dropping to nearly 1/3 of what I was earning, money to invest in back linking aide was simply out of the question.
I recently read a thread on the Warrior Forum in which a guy was going to build a new site and rank it by just using Fiverr gigs. he built the site back in December and then once a week he would purchase 2 different Fiverr back link gigs that had two different back link methods (one was article submissions and the other was profile links). Well, his site is now sitting at #3 and last month it had earned $30 a month. Not too bad but he would certainly need to upscale that in order to make it a decent earning. I believe his site is just micro niche sites too.
In fact he used nothing but Fiverr gigs from start until finish. He used a gig to have someone set up the domain and install wordpress for him and then he used another gig to purchase 2 articles on his niche with an 800 word count. Here’s the link to the WF thread if you are interested.
Now, I had only discovered Fiverr in December. My main money making site had slipped from #3 to #5 right after the October Panda update so I had purchased 2 gigs to see if I could boost my site. One gig was a pyramid linking technique with a 3 tier system that was suppose to protect my site from a penalty but that was not the case. I got penalized within 24 hours of purchasing that gig; my site went from #5 to #23. Then days later i couldn’t even locate its position. It has been sandboxed for 4 months.
So, last week I purchased two gigs, one that offers to write an article on your niche and then submit the article to 20 different directories with some linking to the articles and then the other gig is another pyramid linking technique but it offers a 2 pyramid type technique as a safety measure to help prevent being sandboxed.
I am not sure which gig is the better one because I purchased them nearly the same time and my site is finally seeing some movement. It is now sitting at #35!
My plan is to purchase 2 gigs per a week until it gets its ranking back. Slow linking seems to be the best thing still!
Anyone else have some success with Fiverr?
I recently read a thread on the Warrior Forum in which a guy was going to build a new site and rank it by just using Fiverr gigs. he built the site back in December and then once a week he would purchase 2 different Fiverr back link gigs that had two different back link methods (one was article submissions and the other was profile links). Well, his site is now sitting at #3 and last month it had earned $30 a month. Not too bad but he would certainly need to upscale that in order to make it a decent earning. I believe his site is just micro niche sites too.
In fact he used nothing but Fiverr gigs from start until finish. He used a gig to have someone set up the domain and install wordpress for him and then he used another gig to purchase 2 articles on his niche with an 800 word count. Here’s the link to the WF thread if you are interested.
Now, I had only discovered Fiverr in December. My main money making site had slipped from #3 to #5 right after the October Panda update so I had purchased 2 gigs to see if I could boost my site. One gig was a pyramid linking technique with a 3 tier system that was suppose to protect my site from a penalty but that was not the case. I got penalized within 24 hours of purchasing that gig; my site went from #5 to #23. Then days later i couldn’t even locate its position. It has been sandboxed for 4 months.
So, last week I purchased two gigs, one that offers to write an article on your niche and then submit the article to 20 different directories with some linking to the articles and then the other gig is another pyramid linking technique but it offers a 2 pyramid type technique as a safety measure to help prevent being sandboxed.
I am not sure which gig is the better one because I purchased them nearly the same time and my site is finally seeing some movement. It is now sitting at #35!
My plan is to purchase 2 gigs per a week until it gets its ranking back. Slow linking seems to be the best thing still!
Anyone else have some success with Fiverr?
Three Month Follow-Up Of My experience with SE Slingshot
I’m jumping up and down over here. Finally something good happening with my sites for now. As most of you know, I had some sites slip in rankings after the October Panda algorithim change and mainly the one hurting me was the site that was bringing in about $500 in sales through the Google Affiliate Network – but more on that further down in this post.
The good news is that SE Slingshot has proven to be a great outlet for getting top rankings at a natural and consistent pace all while giving you backlinks with sticking power. I first used SE Slingshot back in the beginning of October 2011. Here I am just 3 months later and seeing the SERP results of my website being taken from #29 to #3 for it’s main keyword. And as you can tell by my Google Analytics screenshot below, the graph doesn’t lie. I went from 0 visitors a day to averaging about 15-20 a day now.
I’ll be honest with you. I have not been so patient after this last Panda change. I went out and purchased a few FIVERR jobs that would send me thousands of backlinks to my sites (excluding this one that Jacob was working on). One offer was for a pyramid like backlinking method so it was suppose to help prevent getting google slapped. WRONG! My site that was doing $500 a month through GA Network went from suffering at #8 to being completely sandboxed. Seriously, I couldn’t even find it on page 20 yesterday. Don’t be cheap guys. Cheap means spammy! You really do get what you pay for. I am going to be using SE Slingshot for my site that is sandboxed to see if it can be helped. I am desperate to get my income back from that site.
Special thanks to Jacob; owner of SE Slingshot, for allowing me to test drive his service. I highly recommend his service and I will update you all once I get my 2nd site going with his service.
The good news is that SE Slingshot has proven to be a great outlet for getting top rankings at a natural and consistent pace all while giving you backlinks with sticking power. I first used SE Slingshot back in the beginning of October 2011. Here I am just 3 months later and seeing the SERP results of my website being taken from #29 to #3 for it’s main keyword. And as you can tell by my Google Analytics screenshot below, the graph doesn’t lie. I went from 0 visitors a day to averaging about 15-20 a day now.
I’ll be honest with you. I have not been so patient after this last Panda change. I went out and purchased a few FIVERR jobs that would send me thousands of backlinks to my sites (excluding this one that Jacob was working on). One offer was for a pyramid like backlinking method so it was suppose to help prevent getting google slapped. WRONG! My site that was doing $500 a month through GA Network went from suffering at #8 to being completely sandboxed. Seriously, I couldn’t even find it on page 20 yesterday. Don’t be cheap guys. Cheap means spammy! You really do get what you pay for. I am going to be using SE Slingshot for my site that is sandboxed to see if it can be helped. I am desperate to get my income back from that site.
Special thanks to Jacob; owner of SE Slingshot, for allowing me to test drive his service. I highly recommend his service and I will update you all once I get my 2nd site going with his service.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)