Our last full-blown concert put on by the band was over a year ago, and we are doing a full set of originals and a ton of worship that’s bound to be familiar to most everyone – especially those who go to The Connection Church. See the flyer below for details. We were working till after midnight last night preparing, and this is one concert you DO NOT want to miss! It’s gonna be awesome!
DCYC 2012 was the best yet. Over 2,200 young people came out to sing and worship with Soundwave and it was an awesome time of ministry. Jeremy talked about some new arrangements of songs used in the Catholic mass by Matt Maher and mentioned the music and charts would be posted on my website so you can download them here:
I’m not catholic, but I have grown to deeply respect the catholic church especially after attending events like DCYC and being a part of the lives of some of my best friends in Soundwave who are devout catholics. Like Jesus said in Matthew 7:16, …”You will know them by their fruit…” Here’s one of my favorite songs from Mass of Communion:
We had a great time the past few days and we’re even more excited about the CD Release Concert on February 4th, 7:00 PM at The First Assembly of God Church of Lockhart off 183 before you get into Lockhart. If you’re in the area, please come and check us out. It’s going to be awesome!
I left out all the boring technical stuff for the most part. The event was an unbelievably amazing experience! Hope you enjoy the video – all of it was taken from my iPhone except for the last bit. I chose the song “Hey, Soul Sister” by Train mostly because they performed a concert at the Cisco Customer Appreciation Party towards the end. It was outstanding!
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I43huEuFzk4
Once again, Soundwave was blessed with the honor of participating in the largest Austin DCYC event in it’s 53 year history! It was an awesome experience to say the least, and wanted to post some media from the event. Here is a Youtube video of something the Youth Animators put together. This looked much more amazing live. Unfortunately, my iPhone is limited in it’s video capabilities:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUZCREzxAPY
Here’s a picture I took of these motivated young people Sunday morning:
…and last but not least, Limitless – the Soundwave Original written specifically for this event and recorded in my studio. It’ll be available for download on iTunes soon:
Many thanks to all who attended, and I pray you’ll stay on fire for God!
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.
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!
I know this somewhat of a short notice, but Soundwave is opening for the Robbie Seay Band tomorrow in Lockhart. If you’d like to go, you can buy tickets at the door or at lockhart.org for $12. I’m looking forward to seeing Michael Lisenbe in action. I believe they call him “Tank” now… We used to serve together a while back at The Ark Family Church. Please come if you can – it is going to be freakin’ awesome!
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:
Run:
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!
Last night, Soundwave played at a “See you at the pole” rally at the First Assembly of God church of Lockhart, and the place was packed! As we ministered with music, you could almost see the life change happen right before your eyes. This is why even with my family, work, church, this blog, and everything else going on in my crazy busy life right now I cannot turn down the opportunity to be a part of Soundwave. God put me on this planet to use my gift to glorify Him and bring people closer to Him through music, and I will jump at any opportunity to do just this. There is nothing like being amongst hundreds of youth on fire for God!
Please excuse the quality of this pic. It was provided by Micah, who is the official “Soundwave” sound dude, and all he had was his Motorola Q. Lighting wasn’t very good either.
Joe, a good friend of mine from church, was able to record this past Sunday’s service at The Connection Church, and the audio and video turned out surprisingly well. He used external mic’s placed on either side of the auditorium, so there is a lot of “room” sound.
Connection Church 092108 from The Connection Church on Vimeo.
Last night at practice for church, there was a fellow keyboardist there who showed a bit of interest in my setup and was impressed with some of the sounds, so I thought a blog about the “gig rig” might be interesting to some of you.
The guts: I do something very few live keyboard performers do, but more and more are moving toward. I trust a standard computer to produce live, real time sounds as I play. I use a program called Main Stage by Apple. It is bundled with Logic Studio 8, and has literally changed the way I think about keyboards. It is fully customizable based on the controller hardware you have and comes with a huge selection of software synthesizers and samplers. You also have the ability to add 3rd party software synths for even more sounds. I was given IKMultimedia’s Philharmonik which has some beautiful orchestral sounds as well as some very real grand piano samples. The install is almost 50 Gig, but the sounds that are produced are the closest to the “real thing” I’ve ever heard to date.
The computer: A very solid Apple MacBook Pro with a 2.4 Ghz Intel Dual Core proc, 4 Gig of RAM, 160 GB 7200 RPM HD, and a high res 1920×1200 display. Even with this much power, Main Stage can still buckle if too many sounds or effect plugins are layered so there is still a balance to maintain. Part of the problem with processing power is the USB audio interface built into my VX8. If I were to move to firewire, this would help substancially, but so far I’ve been able to work within the constraints.
The Bottom Stack: My main controller is the CME VX8 88-key controller with a lot of nice features, but it weighs a ton! This doesn’t really make it ideal for a gig rig, but it does help me stay in shape. The weighted action has a good feel, but it makes a clicking metal-on-metal sound when certain black and white keys are played in sequence which can be annoying. I swapped this keyboard out 3 times and every one of them did the same thing so it appears to be a manufacturing defect. Another problem is the USB ports. I’ve only been using this keyboard for about 6 months and I can already tell that the USB ports are going to wear out eventually and I’ll be forced to move to another audio interface, which will likely be the Apogee Duet. Other than these flaws, this keyboard has served me well so far.
The top stack: A Korg Triton Extreme. Ever since Korg came out with the Triton over 7 years ago, I’ve owned one. It started with the standard Triton Pro x, then to the Trinity, then the Triton Studio Pro, and now the Triton Extreme. This keyboard makes up for the heaviness of the VX8 weighing much less, but only providing 61 keys – enough to play organ riffs all night long! My favorite thing about this product line is the synth pads you can create. This also can be used as a backup if my laptop decides to stop working, which has happened once or twice when I first made the move to this rig back in December of ’07. It also has a USB midi out so I have it configured it as a controller in Main Stage as well.
The Sound: I prefer to use my Westone ES2 in-ear monitors if the venue permits, but if not, I use some Yamaha MSR100’s. I run everything through a Mackie 802-VLZ3 mixer which opens up a number of options. One of the options is to restrict the output to only my keyboards if I have an overall mix being fed into the mixer or if I feed the output of my R-09HR to hear the “room” when I use the Westones. The mixer also has XLR outs which eliminate the need for direct boxes.
The stands: For the keyboards, I use the Ultimate V-Stand. I do have the laptop attachment, but the vibration was a bit much so I moved the MacBook Pro over to an insTand, which has worked out nicely. For the Yamahas, when I use them, I have some standard 45 degree angled guitar amp stands. They’ve held up pretty well so far. The one thing that hasn’t held up well is the second tier of the V-Stand. The adapter to attach the second tier stripped out after about 6 months of use.
Well, that about covers it. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them. I’d be happy to answer any questions or discuss any of the parts that make up the gig rig with you.
I enjoyed service so much this morning I just had to blog about it! It is truly amazing what can happen when a few people who are serious about their faith get together and worship. My former pastor in Okinawa used to say that you can have all the talent in the world, but without commitment, your talent is worthless. I also belive this is true in part when it comes to your heart and your attitude. EVERYBODY that was part of worship this morning has a good heart and a GREAT attitude, and I honestly believe that this morning’s service was probably the best we’ve ever had at The Connection Church because of this very reason. Renee, our drummer, has grown into an amazing player. The beat this morning was rock steady, and the tempos were not too fast or too slow – they were just right! It is also so wonderful to have our new bass player – Shel on board. He has a true heart for God and worship has just been awesome with him playing. And… Chris… oh man… That dude is amazing. It is truly an honor to have him as part of the team. He has to be one of the best sax players I know. I am continually blown away how God provides for The Connection Church musicians with bucket loads of talent. God gives us the talent, but it is up to us as individuals to make the commitment and keep our attitudes in check. It is really nice to see the beginnings of that within the worship team. I am just so excited to see where God takes us from here! If you live in the Kyle/Buda area and aren’t in a church, you have NO idea what you’re missing out on! Oh, and I have to give Micah a shoutout. He sung his heart out this morning. Dude – you rock! Bryan and Pam were singing their hearts out as well. I LOVE IT! On a side note – it totally stinks that I have to miss next Sunday because of an exam I have to take… My week just won’t be the same without TCC service on Sunday morning…
I’ve added a calendar of all the events I will be playing at throughout the month. As you can see, August is going to be a very busy month for me – probably one of the busiest with regards to playing piano/keyboard. I’ll do my best to keep this calendar updated. There is one event in particular I wanted to bring to your attention. Soundwave will be playing at The Grove in Southpark Meadows at 12:00 PM next Friday, August 15th for an event hosted by 102.3 “The River”. We will be playing for 45 minutes and there is a small chance that some of our show may be on the air so please be sure to listen in if you can’t make it in person. This is going to be a great show!