Podcast Fifty-nine

This podcast, I used the songs, “Came to My Rescue” and “I Will Exalt”. Since I actually recorded this podcast over a month ago, I had to refer to planning center for the song names.

It is nice to be up on the new hosting provider. I was finally able to update quite a bit on the podcast so things look much better in the iTunes Music Store. If you have iTunes installed, feel free to check it out.

Interesting fact: this podcast contains 16,782 notes, and I probably touched 80-90% of them during the editing process. 🙂 I either need to learn how to play better or be less picky about timing issues.

I hope you enjoy the podcast. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you. May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.

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Podcast Fifty-eight

It’s finally finished! The songs used are mostly original. I did play a familiar melody at the tail end. Most of it is a little more fast-paced than the norm. May you continue to be inspired to pray through my offering of worship to our wonderful Creator. To Him be the glory!

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Podcast Fifty-seven

This week we had Wednesday Night worship at The Connection Church so I used quite a few songs from that service – “Mighty To Save”, “Came To My Rescue”, and “Awakening”, a new worship song by Chris Tomlin that is pretty awesome. Be sure to check it out if you haven’t heard it yet. A couple originals are included as well. One was from a previous podcast. I’m still on a quest for the perfect piano mix. Mic placement and EQ has been changing every podcast. I really need to swap out my NT1000 with something else. It isn’t very balanced across the frequency spectrum. Maybe I’ll be able to afford the mic I’d like to replace it with in a couple months. Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and the rest will be added. I pray this podcast assists you in seeking!

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Podcast Fifty-six

I used only one song this podcast. It’s by Robbie Seay, and it’s called “Crazy Love”. The rest is original. This podcast is actually a second take since the first didn’t record properly. I always thought recording to MIDI would eliminate having to re-record podcasts, but not true. I did learn that the Disklavier does not like any kind of MIDI signal coming into it when recording so hopefully this will be the last time this happens. I do believe the second take turned out better than the first – thank you Holy Spirit. Draw near to Him and He WILL draw near to you. Not only is that in the Bible, but I have witnessed it first-hand.

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Podcast Fifty-five

I used two songs from last week’s service for today’s podcast – “Forever Reign”, and “God You Reign”. The rest is original. I used a different acoustic piano sample for editing the MIDI this week, and it actually disguised a lot of the small timing issues which is good and bad. The good is it took me half the time to edit (~4 hours instead of ~8). The bad is I notice them when playing back on the DC3, but I’m pretty sure most people won’t notice. For those who do, you’ll have the CD to look forward to. My plan is to make it as perfect as possible. Stay tuned! As you pray, please remember to pray for Japan.

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Podcast Fifty-four

We did a new song called “Our God” by Chris Tomlin in church last week, and it’s a beautiful song so that’s what I started this podcast with. The rest is somewhat original. A familiar melody came to mind towards the end, but I couldn’t pinpoint where it came from. Feel free to leave a comment if you recognize it.

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Podcast Fifty-three

This week I used a new song we played at church called “Came to My Rescue”. It is a wonderful worship song and it would be worthwhile to check out the lyrics if you haven’t heard them before. I also played “Amazing Love” and “You are My King”. The rest is original. Even though I didn’t spend as much time fixing timing issues as the last podcast, I did spend most of the weekend editing. I hope and pray one day this will be my full time job. God bless all of yall out there who are listening and may He continue to draw near to you as you draw near to Him!

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The story behind the $100 song – Terms of Endearment

Growing up, I didn’t have a choice when it came to taking piano lessons and practicing the piano. I remember like it was yesterday how my mom would sit me down at the piano and tell me I had to practice an hour or get a whipping. She would then set the stove timer for an hour and I would have to sit there and run through my practice routine before I could do anything else. She doesn’t know this, but I used to sneak over to the kitchen stove and knock 5-10 minutes off the timer every now and then when I could get away with it. I started taking lessons at the age of 7 and by the time high school came around, I had gotten pretty proficient at learning and playing classical music. I can just picture in my mind’s eye my dad thinking to himself, “this kid’s gettin’ pretty good” so one day, he offered to pay me $100 if I could learn and perform the piano solo, “Theme from Terms of Endearment”. The $100 was all the motivation I needed so I started practicing it every chance I got. I even remember my piano teacher, Mrs. Lum giving me pointers. I actually combined the standard and advanced arrangement into my own custom version. About a month or two later, I had it memorized and as I was running through it at home, my dad came over and gave me a $100 bill. That was the first money I had ever earned playing the piano and it was truly motivating. So, here we are two decades later and my dad asks me, “where’s my $100 song?”. Well, obviously, I had forgotten it long ago, but I found the sheet music for the standard arrangement online, and my mom actually found the advanced arrangement I used back in high school. It even has Mrs. Lum’s notes throughout so I spent the past month practicing almost every night and got it recorded for him. Here I am 20 years later still earning that $100! 🙂 Enjoy!

 

Podcast Fifty-two

I used new mics and new mic placements for this podcast, and have to say, this may be the best podcast yet in my opinion. God is so good! It is such a huge blessing an honor to be serving Him in this way. Everything but the beginning of the last song is original. Pray without ceasing!

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Podcast Fifty-one

It seems like ages ago that the last podcast was posted even though it’s only been 4 weeks. The piano was recently tuned and is sounding wonderful. I’ve had this podcast ready for a while now. There were some issues with the sustain pedal after we got the technical problems resolved so I had to fine-tune the sustain MIDI data in a number of locations, which may be noticeable in some places. You’ll hear the melodies of “This Church”, and “God of this City” as well as an original. I pray this podcast is a blessing to all who listens – a great deal of time went into this one.

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Podcast Fifty

Merry Christmas! Well, this is the place to come when you’re burnt out on all the Christmas music being played everywhere. I had planned on adding a Christmas song or two, but that didn’t work out. Everything this week is original. I may have hit a few familiar melodies once or twice throughout. Thanks again to all who continue to listen and pray. Monthly download counts continue to grow with over 16,000 this past November.

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The HUGE Improvements are here!

Some of you may remember when I posted this about a year and a half ago. Recently, someone living in a part of the world where you can be killed for preaching Jesus reached out to me. They shared with me how they duplicate and hand out CD copies of the podcast in hopes the Truth would be revealed by the Holy Spirit through the music since they’re forbidden to share God’s Word. This really brought home to me the importance of this ministry. I firmly believe this is a big reason God put me here.

I didn’t go all out with a DC7M4, which would have been too big for the studio anyway. Instead, I went with the DC3M4 which is only about 5 inches bigger than the C2, but it does have the Disklavier system and allows for me to edit MIDI rather than audio. It is taking time to get used to playing in a manner that makes it easier to edit, but I’m getting there, and I think the results are pretty noticeable. Last week, I spent over 16 hours working on podcast 49, and though the difference may not be huge, there are certainly no more sour notes. A stroke of the “delete” key now takes care of those. I’ve also been able to improve timing issues through the editing process, which was impossible most of the time when I was editing audio. This is going to make a huge difference in the quality of each podcast. No more distractions from what this is all about – drawing near to God. If you’ve been blessed by this ministry, and if the Holy Spirit leads you, please:

The first donation was given today – thank you! Every bit of money donated will go directly into the cost of this huge investment. I will also be moving forward with producing a CD of all the best original melodies God has given me over the years. It’s going to be awesome! I hope to finish this before 2012. Pre-order will be available a month or two prior to the release. Thanks again to all you faithful listeners – I pray for you almost daily. Here’s a sample of the piano in action playing back last week’s edited podcast:

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKZST9L8C6Q

Podcast Forty-nine

This week is all original since the church set list is pretty much all Christmas music. There were a couple that weren’t Christmas songs, but they weren’t really appropriate. Well, maybe one was. I guess I might do it for the next podcast since the set lists for the rest of the month are going to be full of Christmas songs, unless a MTPB Christmas Podcast is a good idea – is it? Anyway, I have a big surprise for those who listen so stay tuned. I’ll be blogging about it next week sometime. Hopefully there will be some noticeable improvements in the podcasts from here out.

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Podcast Forty-eight

A podcast subscriber suggested recording without the usual increase in dynamics so I gave it a shot. My wife has actually suggested this as well a while back. I hope you enjoy it. I used the following songs: “Real”, “I Will Rise”, “Healer”, “None but Jesus”, and one melody I don’t recall the song it came from. It wasn’t really planned. I hope you have a wonderful Thanks Giving!

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Podcast Forty-seven

I apologize for being a little late for this podcast, but had the mic / audio interface problem again, and I didn’t discover it till it was too late so no second-take this time. I tried to compensate by automating the pan, but it’s still not like I’d like it. Because of this, it took quite a bit more time editing. This issue also caused me to use a bit more compression than I’d normally use. Hope it’s not too much of a distraction. I’m may just use my keyboard next podcast if I can’t figure out why this is happening. I’ll be sure to keep you posted. I used “Jesus Saves”, “All I Need is You”, and “Give Me Faith” this week.

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Podcast Forty-six

I used the following songs: “Your Grace is Enough”, “King of Glory”, and sort of used the chord progressions of  ”Own Little World”. Once again, there ended up being a lot of timing issues in this podcast. Can’t wait to get the Disklavier. That will make timing much less of an issue. This podcast is actually a second take. My first take got botched for some strange reason. The left channel kept fading in and out. I tried to use automation to correct it, but it was so random it was easier to just record again. It could be the pre-amps in the audio interface, or an issue with phantom power. Hopefully it’s isolated to inputs 7 and 8. I moved the mics to 3 and 4, played a sine wave for about 10 minutes, and there was no variation in amplitude. The Motu 896HD is almost 7 years old so I guess it may be time to look into upgrading.

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Podcast Forty-Five

Happy 10-10-10! Did you know that in some areas, the number of people getting married today is 10 times the norm! I happen to be at one of those weddings today. My best bud since the 7th grade is getting married! It was really hard to leave my wonderful wife with our 4-day-old son, Jacob, and our 2-year-old Sanban, but thankfully my mom is there to help out while I’m gone. At any rate, this podcast, I used the following songs: “Revelation Song”, “The Motions”, and “All I Need Is You”. Since my time was limited with the new baby and all, I wasn’t able to do any flex-time editing, but hopefully my lack of timing won’t be too distracting. God bless!

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Podcast Forty-four

There are quite a few familiar melodies from previous podcasts in this one. The only song I sort of used was “Your Love is Amazing”. I didn’t spend as much time editing this week since I kind of ran out of time. Yoko and I just hit our eleventh anniversary, which is really exciting. We went out to eat at our favorite restaurant and sort of took it easy this weekend. I hope this week’s podcast is a blessing to you!

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Podcast Forty-three

I didn’t get to spend as much time as I would have liked editing this podcast, but I think it still turned out okay. I’ll be out all day on Sunday for a Soundwave gig in Waco so I had to get everything done on Saturday. I only used the song “Jesus Saves” at the end. The rest is original – some melodies may even sound a little familiar from previous podcasts. I pray it inspires you to draw near to God!

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