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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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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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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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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During this podcast, I used the songs: “Hosanna”, “Mighty to Save”, and a new song called “Forever”. We’re doing it for the first time at church tomorrow. It’s a great song and it’s not the one yall might be familiar with – it just happens to have the same title. Some of the songs are repeats, but we’ve done them recently at church and it just seemed right. It was truly a joy to sit down at the grand and worship our Savior today. I hope and pray this podcast inspires you to spend some time in His presence. God bless.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:31 — 72.2MB)
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This one is a little longer than usual. I just didn’t feel like stopping. I used a number of familiar melodys and chord progressions in this week’s podcast. I hope you enjoy it.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:38 — 81.6MB)
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The bi-weekly podcast is here. I decided to get it done today so that I can focus on studying for the CCIE tomorrow after church and group. I missed the “record” button again. I ended up playing for over an hour today so that I’d have something to post. The first 30 minutes may have been a little better than the later 30 due to a little bit of frustration after realizing the first 30 minutes didn’t get recorded, but hopefully it doesn’t show in the podcast. I used “Mighty to Save” and “Lead me to the Cross”, with some original stuff. I’ve been meaning to blog about all the home improvement that’s been happening here at the Johns residence, but haven’t had the chance. I should get to it either tomorrow or Monday. God bless!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:10 — 71.4MB)
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I’ve gotta make this quick – Don is out there working hard without me and has been for the past couple of hours while I finish up this week’s podcast. I used a few songs from Sunday morning service – “You Said”, and “There will be a day”. I also used a Soundwave song since we had practice on Friday. Live free! Pray hard!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:58 — 66.3MB)
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Today after church, we had group, left there a little after 3:30, Sanban fell asleep on the way home, so we took a nap for about an hour and a half, then Yoko and I sat down for a while to talk about what to do about our house. We have lots of repairs to do – electrical outlets on the outside of the house are dead, fence was blown down by the strong winds we had the past couple of days, etc., then my dad called me and we chatted for a little over an hour about the beautiful property surrounding the Austin area. Yoko and I came really close to buying a house on a postage stamp lot in Buda, and decided not to because it didn’t make sense financially. My dad did convince me that a better investment would be a home on some acreage. At any rate, we’re putting SanBan to bed right now and we haven’t even eaten dinner yet. It doesn’t look like I’ll be able to do the podcast today, which kills me. Something else I haven’t blogged about – one of my goals is to get the CCIE certification by November, which is going to require practically every spare moment I have studying. I’ll blog more detail about this sometime in the near future. I know the podcast is eternally important, and I do plan on continuing it, but I feel that it is necessary to cut back to once every 2 weeks since it is a 4-5 hour commitment of my free time on the weekend, and free time is very scarce right now with family, church, studying, and the band. I hope you understand, and I do plan on going back to a weekly podcast as soon as I obtain the CCIE certification later this year. When August hits, I may have to go to monthly podcasts through November or December since my studies will pick up the closer I get to the test date. If all goes well, I’ll start January of ’10 with weekly podcasts. Another personal goal is to compile an album of “The Best of Music to Pray By”, and get it mastered, duplicated, and professionally packaged with album art and everything. I hope to have that album available by the middle of 2010. That will require an enormous amount of time since it will involve listening to hours of the MTPB podcasts, going back to the original uncompressed files, and preparing about an hour’s worth of music for mastering, but I believe it will totally be worth the effort. Please let me know what you think – good decision, bad decision, priorities out of whack? I’d love to hear what ya’ll think! At any rate, This would be my weekend off (involuntary 😉 ) so I will put the podcast at the top of the priority list for next weekend.
Actually, the site hit 10,000 a little over a week ago, I just haven’t had a chance to blog about it till now. Yoko and I have been pretty occupied with house hunting. We’ve decided to wait it out and save as much as possible right now with the current condition of the economy though. Maybe in a few years we’ll look at picking up some land. Anyway, just wanted to shout out a big “Thank You” to everyone who is subscribed to the podcast or uses the website regularly for prayer. There have been over 10,000 plays and downloads of the podcasts since I launched the website late July of ’08. One of these days I’ll have to blog about the different countries all over the world I’ve seen download the podcast. It is truly amazing – they don’t call it the “world wide web” for nothing! I hope and pray the music continues to be a blessing to you – that is reward enough for me. The plan is to have “Week 28″ posted by tomorrow evening. Thanks again, and God bless!
Sunday morning worship was awesome this morning! We had a new guitar player who rocked the house! What a great sermon by Cole too! This week, I did some familiar songs: “Revelation Song”, “Love Story”, “Abba Father”, and “Here I am to Worship”, and all I can say is what a wonderful way to end a great weekend. I had loads of fun chillin’ with the ‘lil one while Yoko took a much needed break with her friends Saturday, and we went out to eat at the greatest Tex Mex restaurant in Texas after church and spent most of the day looking at new houses. Good times…. Hope you enjoy the podcast!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:00 — 73.3MB)
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I just finished a 5 day fast that was required for the clense I decided to do, and that is the longest I’ve ever gone without eating. All I had from Wednesday to Sunday afternoon was apple juice, water, some coffee, green tea, and the herbal suplements I purchased from Blessed Herbs. My brother, David suggested it to me. I do feel a lot better today, but felt horrible over the weekend. That is why I was unable to do a MTPB podcast. I think it was worth it though. Sorry for missing last week. I’ll do my best to make this week’s even better!
Keeping it short this week – I used the songs “I Can Only Imagine”, and “God of this City”. I know I’ve played these songs before, but we did them at church today so I decided to do them again. God bless!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:40 — 65.7MB)
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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!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:59 — 73.2MB)
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I 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!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:46 — 72.7MB)
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I have developed the worst sinus infection I’ve ever had so I slept a lot of the weekend and barely made it through church services on Sunday. I went to the doctor’s office on Monday and they put me on antibiotics. Please keep me in your prayers.
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. 
God bless!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:20 — 64.9MB)
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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
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:04 — 66.6MB)
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