New Goals:

1) To read something new every week, to further my development as a human being. This week, Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven, but Nobody Wants to Die by David Crowder and Mike Hogan. It's infectious and I couldn't put it down, mostly because it's written in a style that means that, if I went off and thought about something else for a while, I'd completely lose the strain of his/their thoughts. It further convinces me that David Crowder is a genius of great magnitude, mostly meaning that he thinks like me. Drawing from varied sources and not being afraid to ask the question. Awesome.

2) To write something new every week, to further my development as a musician. In this sense, meaning, developing a fully-formed composition every week, not just throwing some stuff together and calling it good. In my experience, this usually takes between 1 and 10 hours of concentrated effort, so it's definitely not too much to ask of my infinite "free" time. Also, did you know that Bach wrote 1126 compositions throughout his lifetime? Not just keyboard and organ works either, but fully-conceived orchestral works. I can manage a few minutes of original music a week.

Basically, this all boils down to, "do something and don't sit around all day on the internet and playing video games." Which I'm good with. Also, of a general note, I need to find at least an hour a day in which to be musical. Piano, guitar, writing, doesn't matter, so long as I'm getting better.

Bits and Pieces and Guster

Played my ASAT at Mass this last weekend. Haven't played that guitar in a while. It was the tone I was going for all along, particularly on the closing song "Your Grace is Enough". Neck pickup, tone rolled off about 95%, Fulldrive 2 on light mid-humped drive and with the extra boost engaged during the solo, with some untimed analog delay going to make it sound huge. Perfect. I love playing electric. Can't believe I've been neglecting my fancy Tele for so long!

Which sucks because my constant opportunities to play electric may be numbered. Not sure yet, but I may be picking up another Mass to lead on Sunday morning, meaning I won't be able to volunteer anymore. I'll be lucky to play electric (without being the worship leader, that is) once a month!

Oh yeah, and I picked up a Boss CE-2 that looks like it's lived a hard life but sounds spot-on. Not that I use chorus all that much, but it really is a great, iconic pedal so I couldn't pass on it! So far I'm mostly using it to add some depth to my delay when I'm playing pad work, and using it on a heavier setting on occasion when doing some lead work. I really need to listen to more music that uses chorus, because it's not something I've got a natural affinity for, a lot like my tremolo. Though I did recognize some nice light chorus on an acoustic rhythm guitar that was being picked on a song that was huge in the 90's (and naturally I can't remember what song it was, but think of all those great bands from the late 90's).

And last point, I recently re-discovered Guster, after having listened to them almost nonstop in High School. I love that they don't take themselves too seriously, and their sound is so diverse and unexpected from song to song. A great band.

I'll leave you with one of my favorites:



Typewriter. Classic.

Book Review: What Women Wish You Knew About Dating

by Stephen W. Simpson, PhD.

I need to read more. When I was little, my family would go to the library every week and we'd spend half an hour, an hour, two, picking out books to read over the coming week. I read voraciously, on trips, sitting around the house, didn't matter. I'd read books about sharks when I wanted to be a marine biologist (which I think everyone does at one point). I'd read scary novels like Jaws and Jurassic Park, and everything Stephen King has ever written, after seeing the movies and wondering why everyone always said that the books were better. I'd read all sorts of Tom Clancy novels, because something about his details-oriented writing style really pulled me in; you could tell this man had spent his life in the military simply by the serious precision and details-oriented prose. I (eventually) read the J.R.R. Tolkien Lord of the Rings saga and the Hobbit after it was recommended to me by my uncle, and after about six false-starts. My favorite books had very few words in them and were made by a man named Stephen Biesty. They had a lot of different things that hand been cut up and shown in excruciating detail, and I would spend hours looking at these incredible pictures and imagining how it all fit together, seeing how everything had a place. This won't do it justice, but here's an example:

I learned a lot about the world from pictures like this.

None of this has anything to do with the book in question; I sort of just realized that I don't read anymore, and need to. Donald Miller, author of a lot of great Christian life books like Blue Like Jazz and Through Painted Deserts, recommended to me that I read this one. Because I talk to him all the time and we are all sorts of friends. Seriously though, he put up a quick review on his blog, saying "if you're a single guy in your twenties, just buy the book and read it as soon as possible." And I thought to myself, "Hey, I'm a single guy in my twenties." Perfect.

The thing that I kept thinking as I was reading it was, I already know all this. Kind of. It's the same phenomenon that I get when I talk to girls about what guys think. We're not that complicated, but women insist on reading thousands of things into our motives, in viewing our actions through their own girl-colored filter. And they're always wrong! I think the fact is, it's very difficult to make sense of things in any other way than what makes sense to us. If it's not something we've experienced, then it's not the way that we're going to see something. I'm bad at examples, but here's a try: a guy goes out with a girl, and she drops all sorts of subtle hints to him that she's not interested in him (not calling him afterwards, making excuses about why they can't have another date, talking about other men with him) that, to her, are blatant. It's not that the man is oblivious. It's mostly that, when a guy doesn't like a girl (which is, admittedly, pretty rare), he doesn't communicate in hints. He's direct. If a girl wants a guy to know that the ship has sailed, she has to be direct, because for a lot of guys, it's all he's going to understand.

What's most important is that I knew all of this stuff about dating already. Kind of. Simpson puts it all in language that is understandable to guys. The book is written in a very straightforward, logical way, taking you through the process of getting a date and the why's of what's happening during that date. It's not dumbed down. It's written in a way that men naturally understand. I love it.

I also love that he speaks from a very sound position, psychologically. He definitely brings in the theology at times, but it was easy to tell that he's a psychologist, first and foremost. I really respected that, because frankly, it's needed. I've been on countless guy's retreats, listened to talks on male sexuality and relating to women, and it's all been somewhat helpful, but I need more than just "because you should." This book is bold in that it points out the gray areas that most people just sort of tapdance over, like all of the space that exists between a kiss and sex, and how to help yourself navigate that space. It's a much, much healthier explanation of human sexuality from a Christian perspective than I've ever gotten, outside of Pope JP2's Theology of the Body. The difference is, I read this in about four hours and it's easy to break down.

The best part is that this book tells you what you already kind of know. There's a difference between being a boy (here, he uses the term "guy") and being a man, and he gives a lot of good advice on how to take yourself from boy to man. This is particularly needed in our culture today. Quick aside from...I think it was Developmental Psych.

In the early part of the last century, lives were lived quickly. The Great Depression and the World Wars, and especially the fact that people weren't living nearly as long, so shortened things that many people lost a childhood. You'd be a kid at the age of 9 and working in a factory at 10. You'd go to war at 17 and come back 45. Now, we're rebelling against this in a huge way. Most people my age won't consider actually starting a "career" (meaning, more than just a job that pays the bills) until they've been out of college for a few years, if ever. We bum around Europe for a while. We go to grad school because we don't want to go to the real world. We play videogames well into our 30's. We don't move out and find our own house until we're good and ready. We date a lot of girls but marry almost none of them. Whereas my mom had kids when she was 21, and her mom when she was 17, most women I talk to say that 28-30 is the target. We have this expanded period of adolescence, almost entirely because we can, and there's a great desire to just not grow up until you have to.

For people my age, that blurs things a lot. There's no advice on how to live this period of my life, mostly because we're the first generation living it. And I've noticed that it's taken a negative (my opinion of my own life) turn, in that I'm still a boy when it comes to relating to women. I don't want to be. I want to be the guy who doesn't "worship and fear" women, but who's comfortable talking to them on a one-on-one, person-to-person basis. I was just starting to figure some things out about how to get there when I came across this book, and it gave me clear insight into what I've been going through the last year or so, and has further defined, in my mind, what I need to do from here on out. It's stuff I already knew. Kind of. I just wish I'd read this book when I was like 16. But the author said that a lot of what he's drawing from came when he was 26, so I guess I'm still about a year or two ahead of the curve.

And the thing that will always make me laugh is, if I gave this to my dad or my grandfather, he'd laugh right in my face. He never had to deal with this stuff, and he'd see it as silly crap. That's okay. That's so okay. And it's why this book is needed, because it's just so foreign to anyone that we have as a source of advice on how to be men. For them, "just grow up" might have worked (or might have caused long-lasting emotional scars that no one wants to talk about), but it's a little more complicated than that for us.

If you're in college, or high school, or in this weird post-college, pre-career place, read this book. You'll probably learn a lot about yourself, even more than just how to get a date or how to talk to women. It's a snapshot of life in a place where everything is "okay" and nothing is clearly defined. It's a life-jacket.

A question to the worship leaders out there:

Which may be foolish to ask, seeing as how the vast majority of the hits that this thing is getting is for people searching for ways to cheat in MLB 2K10, but I may as well ask it anyway:

How do you balance volunteer worship leading with paid? Even though I'm still pretty new, I've taken a pretty strict little-to-no volunteer attitude for a number of reasons, but I'm interested in everyone else's opinion.

I hate Christian rock.

First, so that everyone's on the same page, I love Christianity. I love God. I love worship music. I am a music minister who loves to pray with music and connect to God through music. In no way is anything that I'm about to write going to undermine my beliefs in the use of electric guitar to worship God. Keep all that in mind.

Ok. So the back story is this. St. Louis has had a classical music station (Classic 99) for better than 60 years, but recently they sold their station (99.1) to Joy FM, a local Christian music station. There are literally novels that could be written as to how much of a tragedy it is to lose a free source of classical music, but that's another story. Because I now have access to an entire radio station that previously was very static-filled and otherwise not valid, I've gotten to listen to some Christian rock that I'd previously only heard tell of. And let me tell you, I'm not impressed.

What's spurred this recent post is that I just heard a song where the lyrics were "the beauty of Your majesty, the wonder of Your glory". What? Could you possibly pick a set of words that are any less cliche or made any less sense? I mean, I liked that song way better when it was called "Beautiful One" by Jeremy Camp (who is another serious offender...). But seriously though, what do those lyrics even mean? You can't just go "the (adjective) of your (adjective)" and call it a day. It's lazy, and complete nonsense.

I also hate that "Christian Rock" is called thusly because of the presence of electric guitars, but those guitars are being played...boringly? There's no aggression, no edge, no distortion of any kind. Just a generic, inoffensive wall of sound set way back in the mix. How is that rock? Soft rock, maybe, but soft rock sucks. I mean, when I'm real before God, it's pretty damn offensive. I'm a sinful dude. I don't like it, but hey, I am what I am, and by the grace of God, I'm trying to make myself more presentable to God, but no matter how well-dressed I get, He knows me, knows my faults, knows my ways, and knows my heart. I hate that "Christian Rock" is "family friendly". It's just too squeaky clean to be real. And I hate fakes.

And that's why I hate popular Christian music. You're writing music that is, frankly, bad, bland and uninteresting, and it's being sold solely based upon the merits of being "Christian". It's got all of the lyrical depth of a Ke$ha song, but because you're singing about God, it's legitimate music that sells records. That wouldn't fly in literally any other industry, but apparently it's okay for Christian music, because the average Christian likes bad music. And the average Christian feels better about themselves because they're not listening to "that crap on the radio". Come on.

(Pictured: That Crap On The Radio)

I'm with Michael Gungor on this one. If you're making good music, no matter what you're singing about, you're glorifying God. If you're making bad music, no matter what you're singing about, you're not glorifying anything. You might as well be singing about brushing your teeth with a bottle of Jack, for all that God cares. Harsh? Music is music, and it's either good, or it's bad. No label or name of a genre will convince me otherwise.

Some light recording

I've been in Toronto for a whole week, but I thought I'd throw this up real quick.

The pastor of the parish where I've been LifeTeen Director for the last few months has been reassigned, and tonight we celebrated his last Mass. It was a really emotional night, and we had a lot of bittersweet worship time, and said goodbye. Literally the day that my flight left last week, I did a quick recording of a Catholic classic, Here I Am, Lord to be used in a video for him, since it's been a really powerful and important song in his life. And, because the teens are awesome, the video is up on YouTube. It's Redman's You Never Let Go, then my recording, complete with a few pictures of me rocking it mid-Mass, along with a whole lot of pictures of Fr. Tom being awesome. Enjoy!



...I need to buy/make a pop filter.

MLB 2K10 cheats.

I love baseball. I love videogames. For the longest time, the only baseball videogame I had was R.B.I. Baseball II for the Nintendo Entertainment System. And it is glorious, except that Ozzie Smith and Nolan Ryan aren't still in the major leagues. So now that I have a sweet PS3 slowly sucking my time away from me, a while back I decided that I wanted to get a baseball game. For those of you who aren't as well-traveled as I am, there are two basic choices: MLB The Show and the MLB 2Kx franchise. I went with the latter, though I find myself regretting it a bit.

I have a problem with sports videogames in general because of simple economics; it's not necessary for a game developer to put much effort into a sports game, as the competition simply isn't there and, frankly, sports fans are plenty happy with a mere simulation with pretty graphics, and on top of that, you need to release a new game every year. For reference, some of the best games ever, such as the Final Fantasy series and Fallout, take many years to develop and perfect, and the result is a stunning game that crosses the boundary into "art". But as a result of the economics of the sports game market, you usually get the same game year after year with slightly better graphics and updated statistics. But a lot of the most important parts of playing a game, namely, gameplay, sometimes get left in the dust.

And so it is in MLB 2K10. Each player has stats, which is good. What that means is, in any given play, a pitch from a pitcher to a location will result in some sort of hit or a swing and miss from the batter. All of these calculations are done in the background, but the results are sometimes not convincing. Like when you're working a batter inside, and somehow he manages to hit a fastball that's in on his hands and drive it to the opposite field. That's pretty much impossible in real life, but because the game said "this batter will hit the next fastball", location doesn't seem to matter much. Or, even worse, if you're a great pitcher, you're only going to give up little bloop hits or shots up the middle. Because the game doesn't know how to realistically portray a strong ground ball through the defense, since the defense seems to cover the entire field at times and none of the field at other times, depending on who's batting. All in all, you get the feeling that some batters are going to reach base no matter what you do, and that's a very helpless, depressing feeling for a videogame.

Way, way worse is their My Player mode. Way worse because I was so excited about it. You get to make your own player. I want to be a pitcher, so now I can be a pitcher. And it is cool that you have to slowly work your way up through the minors to get to the majors, and develop your skills as you go. What is completely and utterly frustrating, however, is that you have no control over when you leave a game as a starter, and the AI tends to handle managing decisions with all of the tact and strategy of, well, a crack-addled 12 year old. Some situations that I have encountered: I'm pitching a complete game shutout into the 9th inning, and it's not really a close game (say, 4 run lead). I'll get two guys out, then give up a base hit and be taken out. I'm in the 7th inning, have just given up two runs to make the game a 2-2 tie with the bases loaded, and I'll be left in to get slaughtered (when you're in a tight spot, your control gets terrible and sometimes you can't even see the strike zone, so you're pretty much screwed). I'm ahead in a 9-2 game with a low pitch count, and I'll get randomly taken out in the 8th after having retired the first batter I face that inning. All of those managing decisions are, objectively, wrong, and they're just some of many.

Now, it used to be easy to pitch complete games in this game. Batters have no patience, so I would routinely throw complete games with my pitch count below 90, but then they made a patch. Now, it's become extremely difficult. And it's difficult to throw a complete game in real life. For one, batters take a lot more pitches, meaning that most starting pitchers will reach 90 pitches somewhere between the 6th and 8th inning, depending. But what I hate about this game, what drives me absolutely crazy, is that it cheats. In real life, if a pitcher is having a good game, but not a great game, he will be taken out in the 7th or the 8th, and the bullpen will get the final outs. In MLB 2K10, the game checks on the 26th out, does a calculation to see how good of a game you've had as a pitcher, and how close the game is, and will either leave you in or call in the closer to get a one out save. In real life, if the game is close in the 9th, unless I've only thrown like 90 pitches, for the love of everything holy, bring in the closer to start the inning. Don't let me get two outs, tantalize me with the possibility of a complete game, then jam the closer in there in the last minute. That's just mean.

The problem is that this game bases everything on the almighty pitch count, which is something that bad managers rely on. Back before they kept track of pitch counts, starters would routinely throw 140-180 pitches a game, and would sometimes touch 200. Now, you're lucky to throw 100, in part because I think that human beings like round numbers. A better system, and one of winning managers (read, Tony LaRussa, manager of the World Champion St. Louis Cardinals...), is to actually look at what's going on in the game, have a job for every pitcher in the bullpen for all possible situations, and use them accordingly. If you consistently gave a major league closer one-out saves, he'd do terribly because it communicates a lack of trust.

Also , when I throw a 98 or 99 or 100 mph fast ball, you should not be able to catch up with it. My current pitcher has an electric fastball, but guys are getting hits off of him all the time. When I go from a 99 mph fast ball to a 77 mph changeup, they swing and make contact like it's nothing. That should be causing serious problems to all kinds of batters, but it seems to only be the pitchers that I can strike out with three straight 97+ mph fastballs (with good movement!), which is not very realistic.

Also also, if you're going to make a baseball game where players can be called up from the minor leagues mid-season, then please make sure that you have actual players in the minor league affiliates. I'm tired of seeing generic players with weird names show up on major league rosters.

You have one job to do: to simulate a real-life game, with real players who actually exist. And you have a whole year to get the stats right. Do it. I'm not going to buy another game from the MLB 2Kx franchise unless they prove they can fix these issues, because it just frustrates the fans who want to play through a whole season or a whole player's career. And, for the record, the St. Louis Cardinals (or any team at all, for that matter) would never let Albert Pujols slip through to free-agency, and yet, that's happened each of three times that I've played My Player mode for a few years and there's nothing I can do about it. Twice, no other team even picked him up. Really? No team wants the greatest baseball player currently playing, and perhaps one of the top 10 players of all time? No one?

Sorry...I just had to get that out...

With everything, with everything...

Just had an incredible adoration time. Played with my favorite youth music minister, Adam Bitter, at a Timothy 4 retreat. Played, among others, How He Loves and With Everything. Played my heart out, then played some more. Played electric, and really put my new pedal board through it's paces. Just. Awesome.

I don't really have a lot of words, so sufficient to say, it was a great, incredible worship experience. I really love being the sole electric guitarist in a band, because I have complete freedom to either add something pretty or interesting over the top of a song, or to take the song where it's going by really driving it rhythmically. And, it also leaves me free to throw up my hands and just worship sometimes.

What a great night.

Drink Spotlight: Gin and Tonic

I realized yesterday that it's probably been several months since I've even thought about putting up any booze-based information, and while the vast majority of my (imaginary) audience is way more interested in guitars than in gin, I felt I was being untrue to the spirit of this place! So I decided I'd share with you one of my all time favorite cocktails: the Gin and Tonic.

What? Way too simple? Pedestrian, even? I'm okay with that. As much as I appreciate a well-crafted cocktail made with foreign and difficult to obtain ingredients and mixed just perfectly, there's a lot to respect with the simple G&T. For one, in the modern-era bars where service is defined as speed at all costs, one of the very few cocktails that is "safe" to order is the beloved Gin and Tonic. It's really, really difficult to screw up, particularly in most bars where the hand holding the liquor bottle is a bit on the light side. It's one of very few cocktails that you can order in a bar that will turn out exactly like you'd expect, no matter what bar you order it in. And, well, gin is delicious.

That's not a popular opinion, but it is mine. Whenever I try or get a new gin, the iconic Gin and Tonic often does as much for me in telling me about the gin as taking it straight. The other litmus-test cocktail for me on the gin front is, of course, the Martini, but there are a lot of gins out there that simply aren't balanced well for a Martini, some of which will give you a truly awful drink no matter how you mix it. Tonic is forgiving, however.

So, let's talk about it:

The Gin and Tonic:

• 1 1/2 oz gin
• tonic water

In an 8 oz glass filled with ice, build gin and top with tonic water. Garnish with lime.

Extremely easy, but there is one detail that is very important, and is often missed or misunderstood by the beginner. The term "top" is a very dangerous one, as any recipe that involves topping a cocktail with something needs to pay very, very close attention to the size of the glass. In an 8 oz. glass, as I've suggested, this will tend to work out to around 3 oz of tonic water, which is just about perfect, once the ice melts a bit. A bigger glass will require more gin, a smaller glass, less, but always try to account for the volume of ice, and attempt to get your tonic:gin ratio to 2:1, as that's where the magic happens with this particular drink. Once you've found a suitable recipe for any particular glass, this actually makes dispensing Gin and Tonics extremely easy, as the only ingredient requiring measuring is the gin.

This drink, perhaps more than any other, is summer to me, so wherever you are, as the temperature begins to approach that of the ninth circle of hell, enjoy!

It is finished.

Well, it finally got here.

I put my order in just about six weeks ago, and my Loopmaster bypass strip, tap tempo and pedal board bypass arrived today. I had about ten things to do today, but upon finding a long, thin package on my doorstep this afternoon, I put aside non-childish things and spent the better part of the day getting things set up. Step one (cut a hole in the box?) was to take a side trip to the he-who-must-not-be-named and pick up some more patch cables. And by some, I mean lots. I ended up going with a kit (or three) made by LiveWire, simply because I needed to get the biggest number of cables at as cheap a price as I could, and I got these for around $6 per cable. And it's DIY, meaning that I got every size I needed without any guesswork, which was a huge plus. I am planning, some day, maybe, on getting some really nice cables of the solder variety, simply because, well, I could have paid just a bit more and gotten fantastic cables instead of generic ones, but I also play on a weekly basis and could not have waited for shipping. But first impressions are that they conduct signal passably well. I did have a digital multimeter on hand to check them after assembly, and had to re-assemble two of the twelve I made, so that saved me tons of stress.

The little box next to the strip is a tap tempo. I used the Boss FS-5U for a long time, and it works perfectly, but I could never get velcro to stick to it, and it took up an awful lot of space for a tap tempo, so I went ahead and got one while I was ordering. All the functionality, 1/4 of the size. The box next to that, with the fun stickers on it, is called a pedal board bypass. Basically, I've got everything routed so that I have one consistent and easy-to-reach place to plug in my guitar and amp (marked G and A, respectively), instead of having to find the right place on the bypass strip or to track down which pedal is last and first in my chain. A small touch, but I really like it. I was also going to try to zip-tie it to the bottom of my pedal board, underneath the wah in my picture here so that the I/O ports would seem to almost be a part of the pedal board, but there wasn't quite enough clearance. Still good this way, though, because I can see what I'm doing.

And so, for the last time (until I completely change my setup again...), my chain is:

Guitar -> Strymon OB. 1 -> Loopmaster bypass strip:
1. Vox Wah
2. Boss GE-7
3. Fulltone Fulldrive 2 MOSFET
4. Keeley DS-1
5. Voodoo Labs Tremolo
6. Ernie Ball Volume Pedal
7. Line 6 DL4 -> Boss DD-7 (with tap tempo)
Tuner out: Hardwire HT-2 tuner
-> Amp.

The logic here is that the Strymon compressor is always on, and is true bypass anyway, so it doesn't need to be in a loop. The bypass strip has a master bypass switch, so I can clear out everything and go guitar -> compressor -> amp when I feel like it, and it has a tuner out so that's not in my signal path anymore (though I really don't mind that particular tuner's sound when it's off). The only other thing I have to say is that it's almost like Loopmaster makes their stuff specifically for Pedaltrain pedal boards. The bypass strip fits perfectly on one slat, with the right angle cables hanging neatly down through the first open space. Very orderly and awesome.

I'll leave you with a spaceship shot, since I've never done it and I now have like twice as many LEDs looking back up at me. Happy pedal board day!