DRUMS

So sorry it's been a but since I've posted last. I've been really busy lately working on finishing up our new 7eventh Time Down album and during that we had a week off and I helped another band. I'll post some pictures from that weekend on here sometime soon. For now I thought that I'd post some pictures and talk about my drums cause I've had several people ask me questions on twitter about the gear that I use. I'm endorsed by a couple of different companies. I'm endorsed by Risen Drums, Vater Drumsticks, Istanbul Cymbals, Remo Drumheads, and Audix Microphones. Here are links to each company...

Risen Drums (they build the drums I play) http://www.risendrums.com

Vater Drumsticks (they make the sticks I use) http://www.vater.com

Istanbul Cymbals (they make the cymbals I play) http://www.istanbulcymbals.com

Audix Microphones (the mics my bands uses) http://www.audixusa.com

Here are some pics of my drum set up. If you have any specific questions about anything that I use please e-mail me at austinmiller3@juno.com and let me know and I'd be more than happy to answer them for you.

A picture of some of my snares


A picture of my kit from the front


A picture of my kit from the top

NEW TOUR ROUTING!!!

So I've updated my tour routing for June and July. If any of you think you could help us book any of these dates please let me know by e-mailing me at austinmiller3@juno.com or hitting me up on twitter. This tour is going to be a lot of fun and will be VERY reasonably priced. I look forward to hearing from you soon....Here's the routing.....

JUNE-
3- Knoxville, TN
4- Kingsport, TN
5- Graham, NC
6- Roanoke, VA
7- Charleston, WV

10- Canton, GA
11- Marietta, GA
12- Macon, GA
13- Albany, GA
14- Somewhere else in Georgia

17- Tampa Bay, FL
18- Somewhere in Florida
19- Somewhere in Florida

JULY-
1- Evansville, IN
2- Paducah, KY
3- Jackson, TN
4- Greenville, AL
5- Shreveport, LA

(anywhere in Texas for these next dates will work)
8- Tyler, TX
9- Dallas, TX
10- Houston, TX
11- Alexandria, LA
12- Monroe, LA

15- Chattanooga, TN
16- Somewhere in KY or TN
17- Logan, WV

I sincerely appreciate all the help that you all have already been and I look forward to us all locking in these dates and coming to a town near you. It'll be a blast.

The Big Idea / Vision Announcement

So I’m sure a lot of you have been keeping up with my “tweets” about my big “Idea / Vision” that I had yesterday and that you all have been sitting on the edge of your seats waiting for me to announce it! J I’m so excited about this idea and I think now it’s finally time to reveal this idea….so here it goes…….Wait……did I ever tell you all how thankful I am to have met all of you. You ALL truly feel like family to me and the guys and I consider you all my friends even though a lot of us haven’t even met in person yet and…..OK OK….I’ll quit stalling……ha ha…..

A lot of you have been asking for us to come and perform around your area. Many of you are even working with your churches on having us come and perform in your area so that got my wheels to turning yesterday. I thought….wouldn’t it be nice to combine that with the way that many of us met which is through “Twitter”. I came up with the idea for 7eventh Time Down to have a “Twitter Tour” So far I have this tour planned to go from June 3rd – July 19th. It would hit many of the areas that our twitter friends live in. Of course it would be impossible for us to hit ALL of the areas that our twitter friends live in but this is just the start. If this goes as well as I hope then we could eventually take it all further west and to other areas. This tour wouldn’t just be us playing in areas that our twitter friends live in but it would also be promoted using twitter. This is where I don’t have all the details worked out yet.

I’m thinking maybe that we have some kind of twitter certificate for each show where people obtain them through twitter and print them off and then would include their twitter name on the certificate and would present that to get in to the show or something. This is where I need all of your help. I’ve listed the tour routing below. If you see a town that you live in or that you know people in I would like for you to e-mail me at austinmiller3@juno.com Then I would appreciate it if you would help me spearhead the event in your town. You would help me by getting either a church or individuals who would be interested in bringing the tour in. Then you would also be in charge of helping promote the concert using twitter or other media sources. You could put together a team of individuals who would help promote the tour and the idea is that each person on the team keeps doing that and before long everyone is sending out messages about that certain concert. Then once everyone is at the show then they could take pictures of the show, tweet about it all in real time. I think this would make for a much more intimate atmosphere because everyone would be friends, etc. Then the friendships would hopefully continue to grow even after leave and we all stay in touch, etc. Also by everyone helping in booking this tour and promoting it etc then everyone will have more connections to it. It wont be like you’re just attending some other concert. It’ll be sort of like a family reunion / celebration. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun.

So there it is…..hopefully my idea didn’t let you all down by not being as cool as you may have suspected but I am so excited about this idea and hope that all of you all are as excited as I am in making this dream a reality. I'm sorry if this is all confusing I still haven't figured out everything for this idea yet so if you have any suggestions or questions please e-mail me at austinmiller3@juno.com and let me know. I need your alls help in making this a reality and I hope that you all are interested in standing beside me and the rest of 7eventh Time Down in making this happen. Now here’s the PROPOSED routing. If you see a town that’s near your town even you can contact me and tell me how far it is from your town and we can move the date to your town.

June

3-Knoxville, TN

4- Kingsport, TN

5- Graham, NC

6- Roanoke, VA
7- Charleston, WV

10- Jackson, OH

11- Detroit, MI

12- South Bend, IN

13- Portage, IN

14- Indianapolis, IN

17- St. Louis, MO

18- Springfield, MO

19- Somewhere in Northeast, AR

20- Memphis, TN

27- Point Pleasant, WV (booked)

28- Huntington, WV

JULY
1- Evansville, IN

2- Paducah, KY

3- Jackson, TN

4- Greenville, AL

5- Shreveport, LA

8- Tyler, TX

9- Dallas, TX

10- Houston, TX

11- Alexandria, LA

12- Monroe, LA

15- Chattanooga, TN

16- in Kentucky or WV

17- Logan, WV

18- Dunbar, WV (booked)

19- in WV or Kentucky

What's with this weather?

Ok so I'm sure that most of you have seen my rants on twitter about the weather here in KY. I had been on vacation with my parents in Florida all alst week and had been living my days on vacation in like sunny 75 degree and higher weather and then came back home to KY to 75 degree weather on Sunday and I was riding motorcycles in a short sleeved shirt and then last night i was driving home from my churches studio and it seriously looked like i was driving through a blizzard. This weather is crazy. It's snowed all day today and it's supposed to be cold tomorrow but then back up to like 70 on Thursday. I don't know what kind of time warp I got caught in coming back from Florida but this is crazy. As our sound guy Chuck always says "It's a sign of the end times!" ha ha. Anyway, this blog will be short cause I'm in a hurry. I will hopefully have my video blog posted sometime tonight or tomorrow for you all to see some things from my vacation. I hope you all have a wonderful day and I look forward to hearing from all of you on Twitter, facebook, and myspace.

God Bless,
Austin Miller
7eventh Time Down
www.myspace.com/seventhtimedown

On our way home

So this past week at Disney world was absolutely amazing. I got to revisit a lot of my childhood memories and also make new ones. It was nice to be able to go to whichever park, whenever we wanted. I basically had enough time to do all the major things several times and also get to see all the shows and other things that we typically had never taken the time to do.
Sorry that also during this time that I had been slow on twittering and blogging. I had expected to twitter constantly however I quickly learned that my battery couldn't take me twittering for 15 hours. Ha ha. I tried to quickly edit together a video of our trip. I didn't have enough time to make it as good as I could so it's pretty basic. I'm going to have to release two different ones to you all though because when I finished the first one it was 10 minutes long. The second one should be much shorter too. I'll post the first one when I get back home tonight and have Internet again.
I'm excited to get back to music as well. We'll start back with shows on the 16th. I have a lot of booking to do for may through august but it'll be fun to do. I'm gonna try to get us out west to visit all of our new friends and our old friends in Texas as well as california. If you have a suggestion for a town you'd like us to play in then please let me know. I'll be sure to let everyone know when I get my video from my trip posted. Hope to hear from you all soon.

God Bless,
Austin Miller
7eventh Time Down


-- Post From My iPhone

Disney world

Hey everyone. Sorry I haven't posted in the last couple of days. I've been on vacation with my parents in Disney world. I'm gonna try my best to still blog everyday but the last two days my phone has died before the end of the day and then by the time I got back to the room I was too dead to write.
I have been taking video footage as well and I hope to post a midtrip video blog as soon as I get a chance to edit it together.
I'll be leaving for a one day trip to Miami tomorrow. I had a flight voucher that was getting ready to run out so I decided to use it to fly to Miami to visit the beach and then come back. I'm pretty excited about. Not excited about having a 7:00 flight though. Ha ha.
Thank you all for reading this. I'll have a better update when I can type on my computer and not my iPhone.

Austin


-- Post From My iPhone

Another day down!

So this week really flew by. I had so many things to get done. I've been trying to finish the VBS cd all week long. Didn't get it finished but I made a lot of sweet progress on it. I should have it all finished the week that I get back. In case you didn't know I"m going to be leaving tomorrow morning with my parents for a trip to Disney World. I'm so pumped. I haven't been since I was 18.
I also borrowed a video camera because mine wont work with my computer. So I plan on doing several video blogs on my trip. I'll post links to them on here and on twitter so you all can keep up with what I'm doing. I'm sure you'll see tons of twitters from me as well.
Sorry this blogs gonna be short and pointless but I wanted to stick with my daily blog routine and I'm actually trying to work on a song while I'm typing this and although multitasking comes along with being a drummer I need to actually focus on one thing because.....I haven't even packed for the trip yet. I have to drive 30 minutes home from here......pack....then sleep.....get up at like 10:00 and be ready to leave at like 11:00. I'm going to drive so that my dad doesn't have to. Plus I like driving because it passes the time faster or at least I think so. If I don't drive for some reason then I'll twitter the whole time and that will definitely pass time. I hope all of you have a great day. Look forward to talk to all of you soon.

God Bless,
Austin Miller
7eventh Time Down

What to do.....what to do.....

So I've been trying to decide on if I want this blog to be about my everyday life or more of a music journal about gear for drummers? Or maybe it could serve both purposes? Yeah that's probably the better option just because I know a lot of my friends aren't drummers and I'm not really what people call a "gear head". I don't sit and study music gear ALL the time....however I do have my moments. :-) So I'm sure that I could only really talk about drum gear for so long. My wheels just started turning a bit about that the other day because I was asked by one of my twitter friends to talk about the kind of gear that I used so I thought I could talk about it all on here.....show behind the scenes pictures, etc......I can't do it yet but I will if that's what people want. As for now this blog will still just be random goodness from my life! :-)

I've been working everyday this week on band business stuff. We've been having tons of calls coming in the last couple of days about people wanting to book us for shows this summer. That's kind of exciting....however most of them are for May and June and I need to fill dates in April which is basically right around the corner so boo to being a tad behind. In the afternoons I've been going to my church studio which is 30 minutes from where I live and producing a cd for our VBS. I've been attending this church for the past 5 years. I actually started going to this church because a band there asked me to produce and record their first cd for them......shortly after that they asked me to produce and record a cd for our VBS.....I've done that every year since. It's actuallya lot of fun because I get to make really fun music and we basically redo some old classics like -"Father Abraham", "Lords Army", "He's got the whole world", and this year "Deep and Wide". The rest of the songs on the cd are typically geared around whatever the theme for the year is. This years theme is "Super Hero" so it's actually been kind of hard to come up with music that is superheroesq but I'm having fun with it. I've been on a club/techno kick this year for some reason so the music is really electronic with a lot of synth/keyboard stuff but I'm so diggin it. I enjoy doing that kind of stuff. I'll be sure to post a link to a myspace or something once we get the VBS music up.
Mikey and Cliff are still in ATL working on Vocals. Today will be their last day down there....THIS WEEK......ha ha......Scotty leaves back out for the road tomorrow AND tonight is Mikey's 25th bday so he'll be coming home so we can all share in celebrating his life! :-)
During the midst of working on band stuff, and VBS, I'm also preparing to go on a vacation with my parents. Well it's kind of a vacation / business trip for my moms office. Her office takes business trips where they go to classes but then they also have tons of time for fun. This time they're going to Disney World in Florida. Our lead guitarists wife also works with my mom so he and his wife will be going as well. It's going to be a blast. I'll basically be spending every day for a week in some sort of Disney park! :-) I'm also going to fly to Miami for one day. I know that sounds random but I had a flight voucher from American Airlines that was going to run out on April 15th and I needed to use it and our hotel at Disney World offers free shuttles to the airport so I planned a one day, one night trip to Miami so I can go to the beach and then come back! ha ha. I'm gonna try to video tons of stuff from my trip and post videos of it online and on here for you all to see. It'll be fun.
Ok wow, this blog is long and not really about anything interesting....sorry. I thank all of you for keeping up with me and wanting to read these blogs. I'm sure I'll catch all of you on twitter throughout the day. I hope you all have amazing days! Bye for now!

I'm sorry again....

Ok so this WILL NOT be the trend for my blog.....this whole "daily blog" that turns into an every three days blog. I do want it to be a daily blog and it will be. I finally figured out all the bells and whistles to my blog application that I downloaded for my phone so now I simply have no excuse for not blogging everyday other than I just simply didn't do it which I wont let myself do....or is it not do? I'm confused. Anyway, where to take back off at. Things have been going great here. I'm currently getting ready to work on booking more shows from April on. Basically trying to fill our open weekends in April and May and then I hope to book a good steady tour in June.

I know that I had mentioned to many of you about a tour that we had been asked to possibly be part of in June that was going to take us out west. Well.....I got an e-mail yesterday from the band saying that they weren't going to be able to take us out after all......bummer. OH well, guess that just means that now we'll have to book our own west coast tour!! :-) I'm not exactly sure of the routing I'll choose yet but I do know that I'd like to go through Memphis, St. Louis, Louisiana, Texas and then maybe if I get all those areas booked then I might try venturing further out west. That'd be getting into uncharted territory for us.

Mikey and Cliff are back in ATL working on vocals for our new album. I'm so excited for this project to be finished. I'm really excited to be able to finally share all of it with you all and the rest of the world. I think that everyone will find something they like on it. It's BY FAR the best project that we've ever worked on or been part of. Scotty is an amazing producer and we're honored to work with him.

Also, while its on my mind thanks to all of my twitter friends. I truly do feel like I have a HUGE extended family and it makes me feel really good. And if you're reading this and dont have twitter then....What the heck are you waiting on go to twitter.com and make your own and then find me and then add all my friends because they're great! Then....you can join the party!

As I said on twitter this morning, I have tons of stuff to do today (shows to book and tons of design stuff to do for the band blog, and hopefully a new myspace layout). I'm really excited about our band blog. I'm hoping for it to have tons of great content such as video footage of us on the road as well as videos from us just hanging out at home or in the studio, etc. I'll be sure to let all of you know when we start blogging on it. I think that's enough of me rambling senselessly today. I'll be back tomorrow for another blog! PROMISE!

On the road again

Finally, were back on the road.....even if it is just for two days. I love the guys in my band. Were honestly like brothers and we love each other to death and we love playing music together. We've been in the van for 4 hours. We have 2 hours and 41 minutes left till we get to the hotel according to our gps



Were sitting here talking about all of the shows we used to watch when we were younger. Maybe because I've been watching videos of the sweedish chef from the muppet babies. That guy gets me everytime. The one I watched today he was throwing a ball of dough in the air and shooting it with a shotgun.....he was basically showing how he made donuts. Ha ha. Anyway, that's enough rambling for now. This van is making me delerious......or is this just my normal self?

-- Post From My iPhone

Sorry that I didn't post yesterday. I had planned on doing it at the end of the day so that I could include everything that I did for the day, however; as many of you know my grandma had to go to the hospital and then I had to run there and that was an hour drive so I was a little preoccupied. I hope to do better at keeping my blog updated now as I purchased "blogpress" for my iPhone. I hope it works as well and easily as it looks like it will. 

So yesterday was really laid back. It has been nice getting to spend some time at home while we've been off recording the new album. I finally cleaned out the trunk of my car which took like 2 hours to do. It was full of basically every jacket I've probably ever owned as well as a whole wardrobe that I seemed to have forgotten about.....so it's kind of like I have new clothes! :-) After cleaning out my car I decided to ride around the lake in our hometown with my girlfriend (www.twitter.com/emyred) 

Now I'm getting my things together for me and the guys to leave for Cleveland, OH. We will be driving the remainder of the day. In the morning we will be leading worship at Garfield Memorial Church. Looking forward to getting back on the road in April. I miss rocking with the guys and I miss our crew. I promise these blogs will get better and more interesting. I've just been swamped and now that we're getting ready to hit the road again I'll have tons more stuff to write about. ha ha. Thanks for taking the time to read. 

My first Blog

So, I've never really don the whole blogging thing but I guess there's no better time to start than now, right? I'm hoping that a lot of my twitter friends will come check this out. It's nice to be able to say things in more than 140 characters. I'm not really sure if this blog will have a specific purpose other than for me to basically share my daily life with all of you. I'll post pictures from my day and just basically talk about what's going on in my life........which.......I guess.......is probably the point in blogging anyway. Sorry, like I said I'm new to all of this. ha ha

Thank you for taking the time to stop by and check this out. I'll take the time later to spice up the looks of the page. I did go to school for Graphic Design before having to withdraw to go on tour so although I haven't done a whole lot of Graphic design work since withdrawing 4 years ago, I still mess around with it every now and then. Web stuff was never my nitch though so hang with me. ha ha.