Yesterday, Chris Tomlin tweeted about a video he saw and linked to it on his blog. It’s three kids singing Jesus Messiah and it’ll knock your socks off.

I love it when they go into the bridge. That harmony is insane.

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Over the last few days, I’ve been working pretty diligently on crafting a song that I’ve had floating in my head for a while now. I found a neat program called Guitar Pro that lets you write the music, and then it’ll actually play it back for you so you can see how it sounds. (See how is sounds? Whatever.) It’s great for writing down multiple tracks and then listening to them all together without spending a lot of time in GarageBand recording and editing them to fit over each other.

I used this program in the past during high school in my wanna-be-metallica-style-show-how-good-we-are band and liked it a lot. I found it again and decided to try it out again, this time on a Mac, and I now remember why I liked it so much. It makes writing so much easier, and you can get a much, much better feel for how everything sounds together. It also fuels musical creativity since you have a lot of control over arrangements and styles that you wouldn’t normally try. You can even write drum tracks in it. One of the fun things I’ve also been able to do is find some old tracks of my high school band that we wrote on Guitar Pro and listen to them again. They were really awesome, in a really lame sort of way.

What fuels your creativity?

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I got this package in the mail yesterday from Centricity Music. In it was the five CD’s I won in the Sunday Setlists 1 Year Anniversary Celebration. Three of the five albums are not in stores yet.

Of the four artists included in the pack, I was most excited about the two Matt Papa records. His music was recommended to me a few years back but I never got around to buying one of his albums. The album I’ve been listening to first, the new one called Your Kingdom Come in stores August 25, is thoroughly amazing. Quite a bit of the lyrics to the songs on it are straight up scripture, and it’s arranged in a really neat and fresh way. It also has a few short tracks between songs similar to the David Crowder Band’s A Collision. I’m stoked that the CD’s are here and I really want to listen to each one in detail since I’m not very familiar with any of the artists.

Is there any new music you recently found that you’re totally digging right now? Who?

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I am not a voice teacher. I don’t pretend to have any extended knowledge on the voice, singing, or anything like that. But, there are some very easy and fundamental steps that singers and worship leaders can take to increase their tone, range, and longevity while reducing strain on their voice. Essentially, it’s just to warm up your voice before belting it out in practice or on stage.

I had heard quite a bit about the importance of properly warming up your voice before singing, but in my hoity-toity, prideful, I’m-so-good-I-don’t-need-this state of mind, I neglected to do them. That is until recently. I looked online for a free vocal warm up track that I could play on my iPod and do as I’m driving from my house to Church. I found one and tried it. From the first time I did it before going into a practice, I immediately noticed a difference. I wasn’t straining on the higher notes, my voice felt relaxed and not forced, and when everything was over, my voice wasn’t tired. I have continued to notice these same things happening with each set I warm up properly before hand.

Now, it’s not a night and day difference we’re talking about here. Warming up doesn’t completely change the way you sing and all of a sudden make you sing like Josh Groban. But it provides the same benefit as warming up and stretching before going on a run.

It’s not important which warm up track you do, if you bought one or got a free one, it’s just important that you start doing them. You’ll notice a difference and you’ll be saving your voice from unnecessary strain.

Keep on singing.

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p.s. I’m pretty sure that it’s impossible to look or sound cool while doing warm ups. But that’s okay. Do it anyway. You can watch JD, from Hillsong United, who we all know is really cool, warming up before a concert.

A lot of people in the Christian music sphere probably know that the David Crowder Band released the first single last week for their upcoming album. The song they released is called How He Loves. Less known among the Christian music community is that the song originally written by John Mark McMillan. The story behind the song was that a great friend to John, and fellow youth leader, prayed one morning to God and said that if it would shake the youth of the nation and start a movement, he would give his life that day. He died that night in a car wreck. The next day, this song was written. Now, this song has really built up a lot of momentum since it was written. I believe it has received the biggest boost from Kim Walker and Jesus Culture version. We even played last August at one of the Heart of Worship events at Community Covenant.

Now, the thing is that the newest version of the song, released by the David Crowder Band, changes up one of the lines of the song. The lines that originally sang, “So Heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss” got changed to “So Heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss”.

Now, copyright law allows very small, minor changes to songs so that they’ll better fit the circumstances in which the song is played. And, this is a very minor change, it’s one word during a verse. But, defining a kiss as sloppy and wet makes it seem very different than unforeseen.

In regards to this specific song, I love the original lyrics. I love the imagery of Heaven just showering love on the earth, and to me, unforeseen makes it seem like a polite peck on the cheek that people sneak in on a first date; which is not the way God feels about us. He’s absolutely crazy about us and wants us to know it! So now, my question to you is a two pronged question.

Which lyric do you like better in this specific case? (Sloppy wet, or unforeseen.)
And, are you okay with changing of lyrics of songs? (Or do you hold to the belief that it was written that way for a reason?)

I’m hoping that we can get some differences in opinion going here and that’ll lead to good discussion on the subject.

d

p.s. Here’s a video of John Mark McMillan sharing the story behind the song and then singing it.

Okay, here’s what you do. Open up iTunes and go to your top twenty-five most played tab and then post the top ten most played songs on your iTunes. Don’t change anything, don’t try to play a song 12 times to get it into the top ten or to drop a song out. This is not your top ten favorite songs. You can add a disclaimer at the end if you want to. For example, “Okay, so the reason Hit Me Baby One More Time is on there is because I share this computer with my little sister and it’s her favorite song.” I’ll go first.

1. Majesty (Here I Am) – Hillsong United – More than Life
2. Came to My Rescue – Hillsong United – United We Stand
3. Til I See You – Hillsong United – Look to You
4. Take All of Me – Hillsong United – More than Life
5. All For Love – Hillsong United – Look to You
6. Always – Hillsong United – More than Life
7. More than Life – Hillsong United – More than Life
8. Awesome God – Hillsong United – Look to You
9. Sing (Your Love) – Hillsong United – More than Life
10. Consuming Fire – Hillsong United – More than Life

*I’m a little surprised by this list. Not so much the band as United is easily my favorite band, but the choice of songs. I would have thought that the songs would have mostly been from United We Stand/All of the Above rather than More than Life/Look to You. Who knew?

Okay, your turn. Post the top ten songs played in your iTunes.

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I’m going to start giving guitar lessons! If you or someone you know would like to learn how to play guitar, or already play a little bit but would like to take the next step in their skill level, come see me and we’ll work on developing your skill in playing through rhythm, chord knowledge and progression, chord variations, effects pedals and more.

Give me a call if you’re interested or spread the world by emailing this link to friends or people you know who would be interested. Use the little share/save button at the bottom of the page to share this page with those who would benefit from it.

Shred on,
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This is my pedalboard. This along with an amp is what I use to get the sounds I want and need when playing guitar onstage. The way it works is I play something on my guitar, the guitar sends a signal through cables to the pedalboard, the signal then runs through each pedal on the board getting morphed, shaped, and manipulated accordingly. After running through the pedals, the signal then goes to the amplifier which has a microphone set up in front of it. The signal then goes from the mic, to the soundboard, and then finally to the house-speakers which is what the general public hears. It takes every part of this chain working fully for it to sound good; when one thing isn’t functioning properly, the whole sound suffers.

January 18, during the last Heart of Worship event, I noticed that my guitar started sounding different, and not in a good way. I brushed it off as a fluke thing, “it must have been a power issue” I thought and didn’t think anything of it after. The next time I pulled out my gear and set up for a service, I noticed that it sounded terrible. There was no volume, everything sounded flat and had no depth. After some time-consuming tweaking, I was finally getting a good sound out of the gear, but I was still frustrated at the issues that were surfacing. The next time I set up the gear, sound check for the Easter service, everything sounded worse than ever. But after a lot of huffing, puffing, tweaking, and maybe a few other words ending in “ing”, I was able to get a workable tone that got used for the service. Afterward, I had no choice but to take everything to my laboratory, (my house), and find out why and what was causing my guitar to sound so dull, (known as tone sucking). I think that it might be helpful to draw you a picture so you have a better idea of what I’m describing.

At first, I thought the problem was with the guitar itself. But I ruled that out after playing through a different setup with the same guitar and it sounded great. Next I thought it was the Route 66 pedal, (the upside down house looking one). So I took all of the pedals off of the board, which were all attached to the board via industrial strength velcro, and disconnected them from one another. But before I tested out each pedal individually, I plugged my guitar directly into the amp, giving the purest signal possible to the amp; it still sounded bad. I came back later and played around a little bit, plugging the guitar directly into the amp, this time, it sounded better. I looked and noticed that I was using a different cable than I had been using. I plugged in the old cable: bad sound. I plugged in a different cable: good sound. “AH-HAH!” The cable that had been running from my guitar to the pedals wasn’t working properly anymore and was thus sucking a large amount of tone away.

Relieved that I had found the cause of the tone-sucking, I then proceeded to kick myself for not checking the cable before I completely dismantled my setup and thus have to go through the labor of re-sticking everything and connecting them, running cables over stuff, under stuff, and into stuff.

The moral of the story is this: always make sure to check your cable connections before doing a complete overhaul on your setup. You can most likely change a few words to apply this lesson to other areas, but I’ll leave that part up to you. I have to get back to reapplying the pedals to the board.

and get a new cable
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I spent an hour or so last night writing down lyrics, humming melodies, and coming up with chord progressions to some songs that I’m trying to write, I actually made a lot of progress on a new one and am going to put more focus on finishing it. But after I finished writing for the night, as I was getting ready to go to bed, I felt really refreshed and had a peaceful feeling about me. I wrote a post a few months ago about rest and refreshment. And I think that the great feeling after songwriting last night is a way of God telling me that this is a good thing for me to do to rest, relax, and spend time with God.

The timing of this realization is not a coincidence as the subject of rest and the discipline of taking a Sabbath was brought up during a prayer session Tuesday night. And so here, I post publicly my intention to use songwriting as a way to rest, relax, recharge, and spend time with God. I don’t believe that this is all that I personally need to do to be more faithful and intentional about a time of rest, but I believe that this is definitely a part of it.

So I want to issue a challenge to you, the reader. What’s something that you can do to be more intentional about resting and spending time with God on a consistent basis? Read your Bible more? Spend a certain amount of time every day/week in prayer? Do an activity that you enjoy that calms your spirit? And would you be able to commit to doing that and telling a couple people about it to hold you accountable to it? I encourage you to seek out a way to go about doing this and see how the time you spend with God in a more intimate way affects the rest of your day/week.

Mine involves songwriting. What does yours involve?

Dustin

Here’s the video of Come to Us that was played at Heart of Worship a couple weeks ago for those of you who couldn’t make it, or would like to see it again.

That night was such a great opportunity and God’s hand was all over what went on, not just with this song. Hopefully this is the first of many songs that will be written by this community of worshipers that will draw people into the presence of God.

Dustin