Week Twenty-five

Sorry about getting this posted a little late. I recorded it this afternoon after church, but had to head over to the Petreas for our small group Super Bowl Bash. It was a blast, but left a little early so I could mix and post the MTPB blog. This week I used the songs “Audience of One”, “Your Name”, and “None but Jesus” all of which we played during this Sunday morning worship service which turned out to be completely awesome! In closing, I’d just like to say how disappointed I am that the Cardinals couldn’t hold off the Steelers offence the last few minutes of the 4th quarter. Ah well. Either way, this year’s Super Bowl was historic. The Steelers are the first to win 6 Super Bowls, and this is the first Super Bowl the Cardinals have ever made it to. I was kind of hoping that the Dallas Cowboys would be the first to take 6, but they sure did blow it this season. I can see my collegues at work laughing while they read this post because they really know how ignorant I am when it comes to football. Anyway, probably should have made all the football talk a seperate post, but I pray this podcast blesses you, and hope you have a great week!

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Week Twenty-four

24I just couldn’t resist! There will never be another podcast that is Week “24”. For those of you who are 24 fans, you know why I’m so hyped up about it! Don’t worry, the theme song or the clock ticking effects are NOT included in this podcast. 🙂

I don’t know where to begin. This week was almost a no go because of work, but I just couldn’t miss another week of Music to Pray By even though I missed Soundwave practice yesterday and church today because of the network outages and hardware failures we’ve been having all weekend… At any rate, this week was all original, and runs a little more than 30 minutes – I hope it inspires you to spend some time in prayer. For Jesus!

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Week Twenty-three

This week I used the chord progressions of some of the songs we played today for worship. I used a different position for the R-09HR, which caused it to pick up more from the sound board rather than the strings. I’m going to go watch 24 now. :mrgreen: God bless!

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Vocoder Synths are cool!

If you’ve heard the song, “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” by Daft Punk, then you know what I’m talking about. Anyway, Jeremy enlisted my help in doing a version of this song for a youth conference coming up this week. He already had an instrumental track so all we needed to do was record vocals with the new words that fit the theme of the conference and apply the right vocoder synth sound. Simple enough right? I figured a couple hours of work, but it ended up taking a weeknight and most of yesterday. At first, Jeremy actually tried to sing the part. Well, I wouldn’t actually call it singing. In fact, I was very tempted to post the audio of that first take, but Jeremy would probably kill me. After trying that a couple of times, we realized that with the vocoder synth, you just speak the words and the synth does the rest. Well, it’d be that easy if there was a MIDI track of the song anywhere in existance, but there isn’t – at least not on the WWW so I had to record it myself. Once the MIDI track was done, I broke out the EVOC 20 PolySynth that comes with Logic Studio 8 and started tweaking. I literally spent hours trying to come as close as possible to the original and learned quite a bit along the way. Here are the settings I ended up with:

evoc_20_polysynthAnother key is to use lots and lots of compression on the original audio track as well as the software synth track. I’ve read somewhere that distortion on the original track can have a nice effect as well. Oh yeah – and don’t forget about your EQ – you can really manipulate the end result with an EQ. If anybody out there is interested in acquiring the MIDI, feel free to drop me a line. I’d be happy to share it. Here is how it turned out:

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Week Twenty-two

Happy new year! I was going to do a seperate “happy new year” post, but never got around to it. For the first podcast of the new year, I used the songs “Your Name”, and a little bit of “Thy Word”. I know I’ve played “Your Name” in a previous podcast, but we did it for church this morning, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. The rest is original. “…Pray without ceasing!” 1 Thessalonians 5:17

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Week Twenty-one

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas. The songs I used this week are, “All Over the World”, “One Life to Love”, and “How He Loves”. They may not be very recognizable, and I kept wanting to go from 4/4 to 6/8. In fact, most if it ended up being in 6/8. This is the last podcast of 2008! Until next year…

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Week Twenty

The only song I used this week was “Mighty to Save” somewhere in the middle. The rest is original. I kind of got in the habit of picking songs out of The Connection Church worship set list, but since we’ve been doing mostly Christmas songs the past few weeks, there hasn’t been much to choose from lately. I actually recorded yesterday but decided to edit, mix, and post today. This podcast is the closest I’ve ever been to 30 minutes. I could do a special podcast of Christmas songs. I actually have a little bit of time on the 24th for this. If there are at least 5 comments to this post requesting a “Christmas Podcast” by the end of the 23rd, I’ll do it. Otherwise, my next podcast will be a week from now. I hope all of you have a blessed Christmas!

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“Play Now” feature broken for some…

flashThis has actually been broken for a while. Some of you may experience garbled audio if you try to use the “Play Now” feature available in the MTPB Blogs, downloads, and archives. This appears to only affect Flash Player 10. A workaround would be to either use the “download” link, subscribe to the podcast, or downgrade to Flash Player 9. I’ve tried this version on both a Mac and a PC and it works fine. I hope to find a solution soon and will let you know when it’s fixed. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Week Nineteen

Even though I only missed 1 week, it feels like a lifetime. It really felt great to sit down at the piano and worship today. I kept the podcast original this week with the exception of a different variation of the song “Love Inside” that Jeremy introduced to me yesterday. I’m just blown away at how great God is and by how He can love us the way He does!

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New Soundwave sounds…

Jeremy came over today and we did a really rough “unplugged” recording of two new songs he wrote. I used the R-09HR to record them – the same device I use to record the MTPB blog. The piano seemed to bit too loud in both songs… We tried to compensate on the second song by moving the recorder closer to Jeremy and the guitar, but that didn’t help much. We only played through them a few times before the final take. Today was the first I’d heard them and I really like them both! Soundwave will be recording these songs and more in either 2009 or 2010 for our new album. It’s gonna rock! Please let us know what you think:

Love Inside:

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Run:

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There was quite a bit of stuff going on today so I decided to do the podcast tomorrow. I’m sure there’ll be a little bit of the new Soundwave song “Love Inside” in it. It’s going to be a good one – stay tuned!

Week Eighteen

Once again, this week is all original. The same thing happened again where the recorder wasn’t actually recording for the first 10 minutes which was very frustrating since that probably would have been the best part of the podcast. I hope my frustration doesn’t show through in what was actually recorded. I ended up making more mistakes than usual which increased the editing time, but I think it still came out okay. On a positive note, I think I’ve found the best way to mic. I barely used the EQ and this has to be the fullest sound I’ve gotten out of the R-09HR. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you had a great Thanksgiving!

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Week Seventeen

This week is completely original. I didn’t use any songs. I also used a different position for the mic. It still picked up some lower frequencies better than the mids and highs, but I was able to fix this with an EQ. I know that I’ve been bad about blogging even though the election is over. Quite a bit has been happening at work lately. We found out shortly after the election that AT&T decided to buy the company I work for – Wayport. Since then, our department has been preparing for when the deal closes likely in December. It’s pretty exciting, but it has also been quite a bit of a distraction. Please keep Yoko, SanBan, and I in your prayers. We truly appreciate it!

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Week Sixteen

The songs used this week are “You are my King (Amazing Love)”, “Enough”, and the rest isn’t really any particular song. I realize I’m a day late this week. It’s because there was a network outage yesterday at work and I ended up working from 11:00 AM till 1:00 AM this morning. Just a heads up – I may try something new this week. I think if I just sit down for 5 or 10 minutes every day this week and record a small portion of the podcast it may turn out a little more creative. I’m going to give it a shot and see what happens. I hope you all had a wonderful Sunday. I know I did! You can check it out here.

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Week Fifteen

Wow – another day of problems, but at least there is a podcast to post this time. I’ve never had anybody come to the door and ring the doorbell while I was recording, but that happened today. I hope I wasn’t too rude to the visitor dropping off cookie dough that Yoko bought from her for a fundraiser. Also, the batteries in my audio recorder died before I was done so this week is a little short again – a little less than 2 minutes shy of the 30 minutes I normally try to do. It would have been a little longer if the batteries would have lasted just a few more minutes. Because of this, the ending is cut short pretty abruptly – my appologies. From now on I won’t trust the battery indicator on that thing and just swap out the batteries every month. One day I will have thought of everything and will post a perfect podcast every week! Um… well… actually… probably not, but it’s worth a shot. God bless!

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Week Fourteen

The songs used this week are “He Reigns” and “Hosanna”. I think I’ve done “Hosanna” before, but this should be a different variation. If you listen to the podcasts very much, all of it may start to sound similar. I hope this is okay, and if used as intended, prayer will be the focus rather than the music. I’m listening to it right now and it’s obvious especially in the octives that tuning is definitely needed. It must have something to do with this last cold front that came in. As soon as I’m done with this post, I’m going to call the tuner and make an appointment. Also, I apologize for not blogging more. I’m pretty wrapped up in the elections right now so that is pretty much eating up a majority of my spare time. I should be back to my old blogging and twitting self a week or so after November 4th hopefully. 🙂

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Week Thirteen

Today I used the following songs: Great God, You are My King, and Day after day. I haven’t been blogging much the past few weeks, which should change in the next couple months. A quick note on the tuning – I checked it today and the grand seems to be holding tune okay. I think it has a lot to do with mic placement, which should be resolved since I took more time to work on this today, and I believe I’ve found the right spot.

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Week Twelve

Sorry I’m a day late in getting the podcast posted this week. Yoko, SanBan, and I spent the entire day out visiting family in the Houston area on Saturday. This week I tried a different mic placement and I’m not sure if it came out as well as I thought it would. Plus, I think the piano is finally slipping a little out of tune. I’m going to try to get it tuned either this week or next. The songs I kind of used this week are: “When All is Said and Done”, and “How He Loves”. Pray continually!

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Week Eleven

As promised, I played around a little with mic placement and believe I found a good spot. I actually used 4 songs for the first time. They are: I Can Only Imagine, From The Inside Out, Who am I, and Amazed. I really enjoyed playing this week. I normally have the lid of the grand piano closed, but I had it wide open this time, and the sound was wonderful. God is good!

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