WorshipGuitarist

I bought a new iPod this week - a Nano with 4 GB of storage.

My music library is much larger than that, and I’m used to carrying around my entire collection with me, so this requires me to change some things. I’m a shuffle listener, and it seemed like I was skipping 4-5 songs for every song that I actually listened to on my old iPod.

On this iPod, I don’t have the luxury of syncing my entire collection. I have to go into iTunes and be selective about the songs that get put on there. I have to actually think about these songs and decide whether I like them enough to put them on there. I’m discovering that there’s a lot of music that I thought that I liked, but I guess I really don’t.

I still need to pare things down a little, but it’s getting to where I don’t want to skip anything when I hit shuffle. Could you limit yourselves to 4 GB of music?

Let’s talk about power supplies.

Up until last week, I had been using a Visual Sound 1spot. It’s one of those high power digital switching power supplies that you can hook up a daisy chain to and power 5 pedals with. It worked fine at the time, so I thought, but it went out on me during the first service on Sunday morning.

After the first set, an recurring popping sound started going off during the message. The guy preaching, who also happens to be one of our sound guys (one of the good ones) said something like “Phillip’s heart is beating over here” and unplugged the pedals from the amp.

I did some troubleshooting during the gap between services and discovered that the 1spot was the culprit. I put fresh batteries in my pedals and everything powered up.

During the second service, I could swear that my tone was better. Everything was crisp where it used to be muffled. It sounded like someone took a blanket off of my amp or something.

What’s more is that the noise was gone. Sometimes, when stepping on pedal to engage it, I would get a loud pop. Apparently, that was due to some AC noise that was getting mixed in with my signal.

I did some research and ordered a Voodoo Labs Pedal Power II+. It has 8 isolated outputs so that if you have a noisy (digital) pedal somewhere, then it won’t interfere with your other pedals. It’s supposed to be dead quiet, and I’m looking forward to checking it out. It’s not cheap, but it’s the choice of pros.

Well, Radiohead made their US tour announcement official this week, and here are the stops:

May 5 - West Palm Beach, FL @ Cruzan Amphitheatre
May 6 - Tampa, FL @ Ford Amphitheatre
May 8 - Atlanta, GA @ Lakewood Amphitheatre
May 9 - Charlotte, NC @ Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre
May 11 - Bristow, VA @ Nissan Pavilion at Stone Ridge
May 14 - St Louis, MO @ Verizon Wireless Amphitheater
May 17 - Houston, TX @ Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion
May 18 - Dallas, TX @ Superpages.com Center

SWEET!

8 dates (so far) and one of them is in Houston. Tickets go on sale Saturday morning, and you can bet that I’ll get mine.

My wife is a photographer, and she has been working with Photoshop for quite some time now, but I never really saw the need to do anything with it myself. Until recently, that is.

I have been going through a lot of tutorials and stuff over at psdtuts.com. I am quickly becoming a PS addict. It’s just a fun program to play with - and I haven’t even begun to play with manipulating photos.

I created a new banner for this site based on one of the tutorials at the aforementioned site. Here’s a direct link to the one that I used.

We’re playing Hillsong’s Mighty to Save this weekend, and I was looking for a way to make that repeated three note lick a little easier on the fingers. If you don’t know it, there’s a pretty big stretch that gets pretty tiring after a while.

Anyway, I was experimenting with some harmonics and stuff when I remembered this little lick I saw in an Eric Johnson lesson a few years ago.

I couldn’t really figure out how to notate it properly in Sibelius, but the way you play this is to tap the harmonics 12 frets higher on the A, D, and G strings, causing them to ring an octave higher (the little diamond symbols in the notation indicate harmonics, btw).

I use hybrid picking to play this kind of thing. I pluck the harmonic notes by holding the pick between my thumb and middle finger and touch the string at the 19th fret with my index finger. I pluck the B and E strings with my ring finger. It’s kinda tricky, but it sounds really cool.

The final product sounds like this (pardon the crappy recording on the built-in mic on my MacBook):

Of course, this doesn’t work at all for Mighty to Save, but it’s still a cool little trick.

Not to get overly political or anything, but I really don’t like our choices for the upcoming election. McCain vs. Obama vs. Hilary? Wow.

I guess I’ll leave it at that. Discuss. 

Check out this screen capture from the new Iron Man trailer.

Apparently, the Iron Man suit was made with a Mac. Go figure.

Last night, my wife and I went with some friends to a church in Houston called Ecclesia. We’ve been there before, but it’s always good to go back. Pastor Chris Seay is such an engaging speaker. He’s obviously a very sharp guy, but he never comes across as condescending, like he’s trying to show off his seminary credentials or something.

Last night he spoke a lot about preparing for Lent. I was raised as a Baptist and I’m pretty ignorant about the whole liturgical calendar thing, so I’ve never really given much thought to Lent. I mean, I’ve always heard about people giving up chocolate or caffeine for a month, but I never really understood (or cared to understand) what it meant.

Normally, Robbie Seay (Chris’ brother) leads worship, but last night Jeremy McCasland led. I’ve met him before, as manager for the Robbie Seay Band, but I didn’t know that he was a musician himself. It was really good - he played guitar and sang several of Robbie’s songs. It was cool to hear them in that context - stripped down to the bare essentials. The songs held up very well.

It was a good night.

I got my new hard drive today. It’s a Hitachi 200 GB 7200 RPM with a 16 MB cache. I installed it in a USB 2.0 enclosure this afternoon and used Carbon Copy Cloner to duplicate the contents of the old drive. That little task took almost 2 hours, but once it was done, the rest of the process took about 10 minutes.

Apple made the new MacBooks much easier to deal with in terms of upgrading the RAM and hard drive. You just remove the battery, remove three screws, take off a little L-shaped bracket, and you have access to the upgradeable components. It literally takes minutes to do this stuff.

I was already very pleased with my MB, but now it’s a much more competent little beast. Apple would have charged me over $2300 (including tax) to configure a similarly spec’ed machine, but I was able to get mine together for $1400 ($1100 for the MB + $100 for 4MB RAM + $200 for the HD).