The following songs were used in this podcast: “Your Grace Is Enough”, “Marvelous Light”, “Sing, Sing, Sing”, and “This is the Air I Breathe”. Throughout recording, the mic placement changed slightly so there are some noticeable variances in the tone. The next podcast will have a more consistent tone throughout since I believe I’ve found the “sweet spot”.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:48 — 45.7MB)
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The past few days, I’ve been working tirelessly to get the podcast back up. There have been a number of changes. The first is podpress is gone forever. I discovered this podcasting service called Blubrry PowerPress, and it seems to be way more stable and functional. It took forever because I had to modify every podcast that’s ever been posted since the import from podpress didn’t work. Also, I added ID3 tagging to all the posts so artwork shows up now. There are still some issues to work out. First, in order to add a podcast description, our webserver needs to be upgraded to php5. Not sure why, but I’m working on getting that done soon hopefully. Also, I’m working on updating the artwork for the iTunes store and for the ID3 tagging. We’ll see how that goes. Please use the “contact” link to report any issues you might have.
Felt a little rusty recording this one after 6 months off. It’s great to be back at it. There’s a pretty even mix of original melodies and contemporary songs like “God You Reign”, and “God Of This City”.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:34 — 45.7MB)
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Unfortunately, the WordPress 3.0 upgrade has broken quite a few things on the site including podpress, which is the plugin I use to post MTPB. I’ve been working on it for a while now and I can’t figure it out, and since this version of WordPress hasn’t been out for very long, there isn’t really any information out there on this problem. I’ll likely have to figure out a way to downgrade to the previous version. I have Soundwave practice tomorrow so it will likely stay broken through Thursday or Friday depending on how long it takes me to fix it. I’ve got the new MTPB podcast ready to post too! Please pray for me that I’ll find a fix quick.
This past weekend, Soundwave came together at my new place to record two new songs, and we got quite a bit done. I still have a lot of mixing to do, but the new studio is definitely helping. Check out the pics below:
On a side note, the piano was tuned last week, and I’ve got the next podcast recorded. I’m a bit rusty so it’s taking me longer than normal to edit, but I hope to finish it tonight. Stay tuned!
I decided to go look at my podcast on the iTunes Store, and found some truly awesome “Customer Reviews”. They make my heart ache with the desire to record another podcast. Fortunately, we close on our new home a week from today so the next podcast should be coming soon.
It’s not to another country or anything like that. Things are bad, but they’re not that bad yet. 😉 We’re just moving across the street to Buda. I probably should have blogged about this sooner but life has been full speed ahead! Since my last post, we’ve completely transformed this house into a new home staged beautifully. There have been a dozen people in and out of it helping us. We’ve got it listed for sale, packed up half of our stuff in boxes, and still have more to go. Somehow, I found time for a local Huey Lewis cover gig. We had a 10-piece band – there were 4 singers, two of which were the electric guitarist and drummer with an electronic pad, trombone, trumpet, and sax players, an organist with an old 60’s B3 and Leslie cabinet (beautiful sound), bass player,and myself with every synth sound I could hear in Huey’s songs. We performed for Valentines Day, and had a really great time. At work, we brought hundreds of servers into production in our new datacenter in San Antonio. It’s our primary datacenter supporting AT&T Wi-Fi Services. It’s huge, and I’m responsible for the network – lots and lots of pressure. 🙁 Yoko had her yearly Okinawa Tomonokai event in Downtown Austin where hundreds of people go experience traditional Okinawan food and dance. I also got to serve with Soundwave at a wonderful church in Bastrop, TX this morning. We had a great time – lots of similarities to my home church. I would have most certainly fit the podcast in if my piano were tuned. I’ve held off since it’ll need to be tuned after the move, which should be the beginning of April. In the new home, I’m going to turn a room into a studio where the piano will reside so recording podcasts will be so much easier. The new piano will just have to wait for now.
Below you’ll find a video I took of Sanban a while back on my iPhone, and I just had to share it.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6JkEqZVmOQ
Thanks for your patience in waiting for the next podcast. The next one will be recorded in our new home – stay tuned!
This past weekend was an amazing experience. One I will likely not forget. It was by far the largest motivating crowd of young people Soundwave has ever had the honor of serving. It was the most performing we’ve ever done as a band over a weekend as well. It started Thursday for us. We set up till midnight and was back at it around 8:00 AM. There was sound and lighting work, sound check, practice for the band and the Youth Animators, and things kicked off that evening. The Youth Animators actually taught movements choreographed to our song that we recorded in my studio to a crowd of over 1,800 excited young people. We then got to perform it live all throughout the weekend. Friday, Karli became very ill and had to go to the hospital Sunday morning at 2:00 AM. We’ve been praying for her. Jeremy’s last tweet says she’s doing fine, but please remember her in your prayers. I hope this video will lift their spirits. After the stills at the beginning, there’s video. All of it was shot from my iPhone except for some of the pics Jeremy tweeted. I shot the video portion at the end while we were tearing down after a massively huge and motivating God-filled weekend!
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRGh9fw-9_4
Piano update: It’s still not tuned, and I will be blogging very soon why – sorry for the long stretch between podcasts.
I sat down at the piano last week ready to record the next podcast, and due to all the cold weather, it’s really caused my piano to get out of tune so 10 minutes into recording, I decided to wait until the piano gets tuned. It has been extremely busy at work the past couple of months because we are moving our datacenter to San Antonio and I’ve been put in charge of bringing up the network which is pretty complex so I’ve put in probably over 150 hours this week and last working and driving back and forth to San Antonio. I actually have to go in today to wrap some stuff up before Monday so I’m afraid that the podcast has been postponed yet again. I hope the archives can provide enough music for prayer in the interim. God bless.
I Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. We certainly did hanging out with the family. I just realized that we didn’t take any pictures. We really need to designate someone to do that next time we get together because there are so many memories to be captured. This is the last podcast of 2009, and it is all original. I hope you enjoy it.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:28 — 42.9MB)
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The past few weekends have been non-stop family and Soundwave. We had the “Night of Worship” on the 21st of November which encompassed a day of practice, Thanksgiving with the family the following weekend, two entire weekends of Soundwave recording, mixing, and mastering here in the studio after that, and I’ll be out in Sonora, TX hunting at the deer lease with dad and all my brothers this weekend. My goal is to take down the buck I passed on last season. (see last year’s blog and Youtube video) I’ll try and send out some tweets about the hunting experience if I can get online. The best part of it is going to be chillin’ with all my bros, David, Adam, and Josh for the first time in a very long time.
Here’s the song we recorded. Jeremy wrote it for the DCYC event we’ll be serving an entire weekend at in late January. It is going to be awesome!
[media id=4 width=220 height=16]
I mentioned in the last podcast that I would blog about the new method of recording used in the last podcast. Instead of the Roland R-09HR, I used a balanced pair of Rode NT5’s with the Apogee Duet as an audio interface. The results were pretty surprising. Normally the EQ I use will have massive peaks and valleys throughout, but with the NT5’s, very little EQ or anything else for that matter was needed.
This is a good shot from the front. You can see the XY pattern used.
This shows the XY pattern from the back, and the placement inside the piano. I actually used Westone in-ear monitors, which completely block out any sound and listened to what the mics picked up using various positions over the piano strings and soundboard. This is what I came up with.
Here’s the MacBook Pro running Logic Studio 9 with the Apogee Duet ready to go. This thing is so quiet!
A shot of the whole setup.
Because of Thanksgiving weekend, I’ll be taking this week off from the podcast to spend some time with the family. Next Saturday, Soundwave is going to record one of our new songs here at the Maestro Music studio, but I’ll try to get another podcast recorded next Sunday after church. Happy Thanksgiving!
This podcast, I used a completely different setup to record. I’ll blog more about it later. I used a number of familiar tunes. It was basically our set list for church this Sunday, and I think it turned out okay. There are some sounds in the background that got picked up by my new setup in the beginning, but they shouldn’t be too distracting. I hope this podcast inspires you to spend more time in prayer. LORD knows we all should be when you consider these crazy times we live in.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:44 — 41.4MB)
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I decided to change the naming from “week” to “podcast” since these will no longer be weekly. However, I will attempt to record one every other week. This podcast was actually recorded last Monday, but I wasn’t able to finish editing and mastering till this evening. The only recognizable song used is “Revelation Song” which I think I’ve done a few times. I also had issues with the R-09HR so I’m about to move to a traditional recording platform, which I will blog about sometime this week. This podcast is probably not as inspiring as previous podcasts partly due to the sound issues. If it’s used during prayer, it probably won’t be that noticeable, but I apologize for this. Just know that the best is yet to come.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:38 — 46.8MB)
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![DSCF0542 [1280x768]](https://i0.wp.com/musictoprayby.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/DSCF0542-1280x7681.JPG?resize=854%2C640 "DSCF0542 [1280x768]")
We did it again! With your support, we would love the chance to become #1 this year in the Austin Artist Showcase. Please check out the song we submitted, and vote for us – we would sincerely appreciate it!
http://www.theriver1023.com/pages/riverpages.html?feed=139053&article=6240204
On a side note – I recorded the podcast on Monday, but have been having issues with my Mac so I’m still trying to get it edited and mastered. Sorry for the delay.
This was one very busy Soundwave weekend. It started with shopping for “Soundwave” clothes on Friday night, a long practice and a photo shoot on Saturday, and a show right after church on Sunday. Each evening, I was left too exhausted to record a new podcast. I’m going to try and give it a shot this evening. I’ve mentioned in previous posts that after the big exam, I’d go back to weekly podcasts but I’ve decided to shoot for every other week for a number of reasons. I think this will help each podcast to be more unique and creative. Stay tuned for podcast #34!
This was supposed to be posted yesterday, but it has been a very busy weekend. I thought that after the exam, I’d have a lot more time to do stuff, but that certainly is not the case. At any rate, it was certainly a change in pace to sit down at the freshly tuned grand piano and worship for 30 minutes. I played a number of familiar melodies, but they’re all kind of mixed together so I won’t try to mention them all. It sure is great to be back to living life! Have a great week!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:18 — 39.7MB)
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Thanks to everyone for their support. Below is the story of my journey I posted on one of the CCIE study groups I followed for years while preparing:
My journey began a little over 5 years ago. I had already obtained some Cisco professional level certs and figured the CCIE couldn’t be much harder so I booked a lab and a bootcamp with IPexpert. I had some experience, but nowhere near the skills necessary for a CCIE candidate, which I realized the first day of Scott Morris’s bootcamp back in 2005. That was back when ATM and ISDN were still on the exam. At any rate, I barely made it through layer 2, and got stuck on layer 3. I knew I didn’t have a chance.
3 years later after gaining some valuable experience on the job, and putting together a lab of 7x 2811’s, 5x 2600 series (2 of them XM’s), 3x 3560’s, and a 3550, I started hitting the books. I purchased the IPexpert Blended Learning Solution, and worked through all 3 volumes (Volume 1 I worked through twice), watched the videos and listened to the audio throughout my study time, and read the following Cisco Press books:
Cisco QOS Exam Certification Guide
CCIE Routing and Switching Exam Quick Reference Sheets
Routing TCP/IP, Volumes 1 and 2
Internet Routing Architectures
CCIE Routing and Switching Exam Certification Guide
Developing IP Multicast Networks
I started studying on a regular basis after I passed the written back in October of 2008, but really started hitting it hard the day they announced the change and I scheduled my lab date. For the OEQ’s, I used the IPexpert as well as the Internetwork Expert Core Knowledge sims. I’ve studied for more than 500 hours since May. I put everything on hold – the band, my “music to pray by” blog (http://musictoprayby.com), and my wife and 1 year old child. The only thing that didn’t go on hold was God and serving at the church. Yoko and I sacrificed celebrating our 10 year anniversary on September 25th so that I could wrap up preparing for the lab. My wife is awesome – she did this without complaining once. I couldn’t have done this without her support.
I just want to thank my LORD and Savior, Jesus Christ for being my inspiration and giving me the abilities I have. I also would like to thank IPexpert for putting together some of the most challenging material I’ve ever put myself through. After working through all the labs and understanding the solutions, I actually felt a little over-prepared, which is certainly not a bad thing. I would also like to thank everyone in groupstudy for helping me out with the questions I posted. I didn’t participate much compared to a lot of the other professionals who are a part of this awesome community, but I’ve been reading religiously for over a year now, and that knowledge gained from yall has been a tremendous help!
Here’s a little bit about my lab experience:
I flew into San Jose from Austin on Wednesday just so that I’d have Thursday to relax and get mentally prepared for the big day. On Friday morning, we met the proctor. I actually remembered him from my last lab date over 4 years ago. He showed us to the lab, and to my surprise, there were these really nice Dell 24″ displays at each station. I remember them being junky CRT’s the last time I was there. The OEQ’s were not super easy, and if I would have relied solely on my lab experiences, I probably would not have passed. I think the reading I did certainly prepared me for these more than anything else. The irritating things were my keyboard’s space bar made this squeaky sound that was really annoying and the guy next to me had this habit of humming, but once I started my lab, I zoned in and finished in a little over 4 hours. At this point, I’m freaking out thinking there has to be a page missing or something. So I took a little over 2 hours going over everything again very carefully and found a few mistakes. At 3:15, I figured it was pointless to stay any longer so I did another round of tclsh pings and write mems and left.
Thanks again to everyone who has already congratulated me. Now, it’s on to the SP track before they add OEQ’s!
Well, I just got the piano tuned yesterday, and I can’t wait to do the next MTPB podcast! Look for it to be posted sometime on Sunday.
For the past 2 weeks, study time was cut in half, but I’ve started picking up speed again for the 2 month stretch I have left. During this time off, I spent a bit of time researching the new Yamaha Disklavier Mark 4 System. I even went to the local dealer and played one of the grand pianos that was built with the system. 5 word summary: It completely blew me away! They recorded about a minute of my music, and the playback was exactly what I played – sustain pedal and every meticulous keystroke made. There’s a lot more it will do. The benefits would be huge for my family, the Music To Pray By ministry, and me:
Needless to say, this is something very exciting to me. Upon further research, I discovered these things aint cheap. They are basically the cost of a new Mercedes ML500. During my research, an opportunity to buy a used one grabbed my attention. It was an S series which are crafted with much finer wood, it was only 2 years old, it was the pro version, which normally costs substantially more, and it was practically half off due to the seller’s circumstance. I came very close to making a very bad decision by going into debt, but thanks to some very wise counsel from my father, I turned down the offer and decided to start saving up for it. In the meantime, I’ve thought about doing the podcast with a keyboard instead of the Yamaha C2 Grand. This way, I could go back and record those podcasts with the Yamaha DC7M4 when I get it. What do you think?
Here’s a picture of it:
This day last year was my first post to the Music To Pray By Blog and now, a year later, there have been close to 30,000 downloads of 16 hours of recorded piano music to pray by. This is truly a God thing. This week was kind of a half-way point between when I started really studying for the CCIE and the dredded date of October 2nd so I took a break. Since mid-May, I’ve put in right at 300 hours of study, and I’ve made a great deal of progress. It may not be the 40 hours a week I was shooting for, but it’s the quality of study that has helped. This podcast, I used the following songs: “Audience of One”, “God With Us”, “Mighty to Save”, and a small piece of “The Motions” at the tail end. It’s been so long, I’m starting to feel a little rusty. Gloves will be off after the exam. Jeremy has already booked some Soundwave gigs right after so I’m looking forward to getting back to my normal life. 2 more months to go!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:22 — 65.0MB)
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