Rhythm of Life

1 year ago

Amazing.

1 year ago from bookmarklet

Notes: 7 / 1 year ago from maryzhang

maryzhang:

So good.

“[the church is] not a museum for good people, it’s a hospital for the broken.”

1 year ago

This is the sound of the redeemed…

Notes: 1 / 1 year ago

Here’s a photo of a typical acoustic setup for me nowadays. Djembe, cajon, shaker, tambourine and cymbal. Occasionally I’ll incorporate the hi-hat, snare and kick-trigger (as mentioned previously) as the need arises.

Notes: 1 / 1 year ago

Worship Tracks

Although I like being back in LA, I’ve realized that one of the things I miss most about being in San Diego is the worship culture and the musicianship of the people there. I have half of my closet dedicated to storing most of my music-related stuff (all of it won’t fit) and it saddens me to realize that my instruments don’t get the attention they once got in SD. My djembe, cymbals, hardware, etc. all just collect dust in my room now; my piano and bass get the only playing time when I’m at home.

I was truly blessed to be able to worship, jam and grow with the musicians in San Diego and luckily I have snippets of memories to look back on. Every time I play at Coast Vineyard (my SD church) I try to ask the sound guy to record it. This isn’t an egotistical gesture or anything; It’s not that I like to listen to myself play. I do this for three reasons:

It truly helps me grow as a musician to be able to hear from an outside perspective what works and doesn’t work within a worship set. Recordings don’t lie.
I like to have a recording to reference to if maybe a song is trying to go in a similar direction or evoke a similar feel. It’s come in handy in the past and reduced practice time immensely.
It makes a great audio memory of the entire set. You can look back and remember all the moments of that set (good and bad) and reminisce. Plus I still genuinely worship to these tracks when I hear them.

Typically I’ll get the raw sound file from the sound engineer and do some post-production on it (adjust EQ levels, add compression and reverb, split into individual tracks, etc.). The songs aren’t GREAT quality because I don’t have control over each instrument, just the sound file as a whole. However, I do my best to try to make them sound as good as possible.

The end result is nice individual songs from the worship set that usually end up getting lost in my itunes library. Although I don’t really listen to them often, they will occasionally come up if my library is on shuffle and it usually results in about 3 minutes of laughing at myself playing and asking myself “what was I thinking there?!”

The point of me sharing this is that over the course of the next 5 days, I wanted to share some of my favorite moments from coast worship that I have on recordings. I would do it all in one post, but tumblr only lets me share one song per day. They’ll be in no particular order; I’m just going to go through my library and pick some of my favorites. It’s going to be tough because honestly, most of these recordings are awesome thanks to the musical talent that Coast has at its disposal, but I’ll do my best.

Although I can’t foresee anyone having a problem with this, if anyone in the recordings has a problem with me posting, let me know and I’ll remove it. However, if I post it, it’s because I think is a good recording and there are good memories behind it.

1 year ago

I recently discovered this genre of music and I LOVE it!!! It’s called electro-swing and, as the name implies, the basic idea is taking old school swing (which I’ve always liked) and layering electronic-type beats over it. Such a fresh sound.

EDIT: I think a better description is they SAMPLE the old swing music and then remake it.

1 year ago