WorshipGuitarist

I have a few questions for you all regarding new music in worship.

How often do you add new songs to the rotation?
How much advance time do you give the band before doing new material?
How many rehearsals do you spend on a new song before using it in a service?

Discuss.

As I may have mentioned previously, I am the proud owner of an RMC Picture Wah, made by Geoffrey Teese. It is the finest wah that I have ever played. I used to own their Wheels of Fire Wah, and it was pretty cool, but it ultimately proved to be too tweakable for me.

The Picture Wah has one adjustment - an internal trim knob that controls the “fuzz-friendly” buffer. Basically, this knob controls the output level of the wah so that it’ll work with fuzz pedals. Up until this weekend, I had that knob set too low, minimizing the effective sweep of the wah. As a result, I was pretty lukewarm about the wah until this weekend. However, after giving that little knob about a 1/16 clockwise twist, it’s a totally different animal. It quacks like crazy. It sounds like Hendrix - seriously. I can get Burning of the Midnight Lamp or Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) tone with no problem. It’s just sick.

If you ever use a wah, you owe it to yourself to try this one out. It’s not exactly cheap, but it’ll blow those Dunlop or Morley pedals out of the water.

Barber Electronics has a new fuzz pedal out called the Trifecta. As you can guess, it has three fuzz circuits - the Big Muff “Triangle” Pi, Jumbo Bender, and Suppa Bender. It looks to be insanely tweakable, and like it says on the website, they give you “too much control” over the sound.

This looks like it may be the fuzz to own. I won’t be getting it anytime soon, as I’m not a big fuzz guy and there’s no room on my board anyway. Besides, I’m supposed to be saving up for a new Macbook.

Anyway, here are some sound clips.

Color Bender

Triangle Pi

Suppa Bender with flat mid pulled

Starts with each of the three toggle positions, then goes through adjustments to show range

Click the link.

Wow. This movie looks bad for so many reasons. First of all, the animation is horrible. Seriously, how dated does this look? Secondly, who chose this cast? Christian Slater as Moses? Alfred Molina as Pharaoh? Elliot Gould as the voice of God?! Now, I like Elliot Gould sometimes - he was really good as the rich casino owner guy in the Oceans 11 movies - but he’s probably the last guy that I would pick for the voice of God. Well, Andy Dick would probably be my last choice, but you get the point. The voice of God should be someone with a powerful, resonant voice that commands respect. Elliot Gould is not that guy.

Wasn’t this movie already made like 10 years ago with better acting and CGI? Oh yeah, it was called Prince of Egypt with Val Kilmer and Ralph Fiennes. It wasn’t great, but it’ll surely be better than the new version.

Hit shuffle and post the first 10 songs that pop up. Don’t cheat.

Here’s my list:

Stereophonics - I’m Alright (You Gotta Go There to Come Back)
Tom Waits - Bride of Rain Dog
The Flaming Lips - Yeah Yeah Yeah Song
Mogwai - Friend of the Night
Mute Math - You Are Mine
Kings of Leon - Molly’s Chambers
Bill Frisell - Racoon Cat
Coldplay - Fix You
The White Stripes - White Moon
Los Lobos - Maricela

This list is actually fairly representative of my listening habits. There are a lot of things missing (Radiohead and Wilco are inexplicably absent) and there are a couple of bands on here that I don’t really listen to all that much anymore (Stereophonics and Coldplay), but there it is.

Post yours.

I’ve been a Mac convert for a couple of years now. I bought an iMac G5 and never looked back. I love not having to worry about getting spyware or viruses. It’s also nice to be relatively crash-free. I’m not going to be one of those fanboys who says that Apple is the greatest company on Earth and that Macs are perfect and never crash. However, I will say that Apple just happens to make the perfect computer for me.

Anyway, my iMac is starting to show its age and I’m starting to think about a replacement. I want a laptop, and the new Macbooks are really speaking to me. I would love to get a Macbook Pro, but they are way out of my budget. On my teacher discount, I can get a 13″ Macbook (2.16 GHz, 120 GB HD, Superdrive) for $1200. The Macbook Pros start at $1800. Granted, the Pro has several impressive upgrades (15″ screen, faster processor, more memory, much better graphics card), but I don’t think I can justify the extra $600.

At any rate, it’ll be months before I can scrounge up the cash for a new computer. I could sell my Reverend that I posted about last week, and that would get me a pretty good start. I guess it’s time to look for stuff around the house that I can put on eBay.

Question: When you guys learn worship songs, do you use the recordings as a reference? How closely do you follow the arrangements?

Usually, I try to follow the recording pretty closely. Unfortunately, we only have about 1.5 hrs. of rehearsal during the week, so there isn’t really time to hash out a new arrangement during rehearsal time. It may not be very original, but following the recording seems to be the easiest way to confirm that all of the band is on the same page. Otherwise, you’ve got 4-5 different instruments doing their own interpretation of the same I-V-vi-IV progression, which kinda sounds chaotic, and not in a good way.

This approach requires a certain amount of individual practice time, which is the real kicker. The instrumentalists in our band are either adults who have full time jobs, kids, etc, or they are students. It’s hard to find time away from our other commitments to spend a couple of hours during the week individually hammering out the parts and practicing them. It’s not like any of the Tomlin/Crowder/Hillsong stuff is especially difficult technically - it’s just time consuming.

The fact that most of these recordings can have about 7-8 layers of guitar can further confuse the issue. At times you wonder how the guitarists cover all the parts since it’s mixed so well on the CD. How do you do what Hillsong does live with only 2 guitars? Don’t they have like 5 guitarists on stage? It becomes a challenge to decide what stays and what goes.

Anyway, how do you guys do it? Do you follow the recorded arrangement, do you come up with your own, or do you just wing it?

This is pretty freaking hilarious.

I’ve been experiencing a love/hate relationship with my Reeves amp lately, but it was definitely working for me last night at practice. I have come to realize that the Custom 6 is a very midrangey amp, and I hadn’t really been setting the EQ right. Last night, I decided to try to settings that would probably sound like crap on any other amp. I set the bass at about 12:00, the mids at about 8:30 (almost all the way down), and the treble around 3:30 (almost all the way up). The gain was at 1:00 and I was using the low input.

I was getting a really rich, chimey tone and it was very touch sensitive. When doing light picking or strumming, I was getting nice Tom Petty-ish (for lack of a better word) tone. If I really hit the strings hard, I could almost pull off “Back in Black.”

I’m still trying to figure out my distortion pedal situation. For a lot of songs, I’m able to go without pedals, which is nice. Other songs really need a kick in the pants to really take off, and I’m struggling with how to set my Barber pedals. I have the Small Fry, which excels at high gain stuff, and I have the LTD Silver, which has better low to medium gain settings. I’m thinking that the SF will be my heavy rhythm/palm-muting pedal, while the LTD handles lead tones. I’ll probably change my mind 30 times before this weekend, though. Both pedals are awesome, I’m just not sure if they’re redundant.

Did anyone catch ACL this weekend? This week, they featured two bands that I like - The Decemberists and Explosions in the Sky.

The Decemberists’ music could best be described as hyper-literate progressive folk-rock. I’m not really going to go into that, but spend some time with them and you’ll find that it’s a pretty accurate description. Suffice it to say that their lyrics are peppered with words that you’ll have to look up in a dictionary. Their performance on ACL was pretty good. Most of the band members are multi-instrumentalists, so they were switching between guitar, bass, cello, violin, etc.

Explosions in  the Sky is an experimental instrumental quartet from Austin. The instrumentation is like a typical rock band - guitar, bass, and drums. The bass player was playing a baritone guitar on several tracks. It was awesome. The music is hypnotic and minimalist, with the guitars playing interweaving counterpoint that ebbs and flows, always changing. I can’t really describe it - you owe it to yourself to check them out. As a guitar player, it was really fun to watch.

I wish that I was in an area where I could play music like this with some like-minded individuals. I’m kind of in a cultural vacuum right now. [sigh]