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!

Setup

So my beloved acoustic is currently in the shop. In the two or so years that I've had it, I never had it set up, aside from my own clumsy attempts to adjust the truss rod to keep it from buzzing. But it's in the extremely capable hands of a guy named Skip Goez, who is the best tech in St. Louis, and has reportedly worked on the guitars of all of the biggest names to come through (Clapton is a name that stands out), and, oddly enough, my dad and his brothers were friends in high school. St. Louis really is the biggest little city in the world...

Anyway, not much else to talk about just yet. My loopmaster stuff is awaiting shipping, and I've been working more and more on piano. Maybe leave you with a cool new song? It's a band that John Mark McMillan has been digging and gigging with, and they're pretty sweet. This acoustic version is INSANE!

Squier Classic Vibe 50's Telecaster

Ok, so after like a year of never being able to find one of these in a Guitar Center (a.k.a., the devil), I've found two in two different ones over the last week. This is extremely exciting for me, even though I have a fantastic Tele in my ASAT, and even though there's no way, musically or economically, I could justify owning two Telecasters at this moment, I just had to try it out. There's been a lot of internet hype about this particular guitar, so I figured I'd add to it.

First, I saw the one I really like; the original one they came out with, in a vintage white with a black pickguard. I believe that it differs from the newer model, which is sunburst with an alder body and a rosewood fretboard, by having a pine body and maple fretboard. I was in the South County Guitar Center (here in STL, we like to descriminate based on where you live. I live in prestigious West County, where the wine flows and every other area looks upon us and dreams. I only go to South County to do missionary work, and to teach the indigenous peoples the ways of culture and grace and civility. Also, I work there.) and I saw it, and so I did what came naturally; I plugged straight into a Blues Jr., this being the time of day when all Guitar Centers are quiet (around 1 p.m. during the school year), and I felt alive. So alive that I didn't think to do a side-by-side comparison with, say, a '52 reissue Tele, which is the same sort of feel that Fender has been trying to cop with the Classic Vibe series. But I did get one of the workers to ask me to turn down. At a Guitar Center? I was playing tasteful rhythm with a divine set of tools. How dare thee! I could have been ripping it up with Crazy Train 10 times in a row, like every other day in Guitar Center. I guess they don't like good music.

Anyway, about a week passes, and I find myself once again at a Guitar Center, this time in North County (where I have also been known to conduct works of charity. Also, my grandma lives up there.) and they had the other CV Tele; at the time, I couldn't remember what distinguished them, but I like Telecasters, so I wasn't too picky. As I had a lot of free time, I thought things out a bit more, but I couldn't find a RI Tele in the store that day, so I settled with another sort of standard, the American.

The issue I have, looking back, is that there's really nothing to distinguish the two at this point, other than electronics. The cool think about the blonde Tele is that it's made out of pine, and you can really hear something special in the tone. This alder version, it was certainly different from an American Standard tele, but not really in any way that I would say was better or worse. Noticeable right off the bat, the CV was significantly louder. The pickups seemed to be at a good height on each guitar, so it would lead me to believe that the CV's pickups are hotter than the American. The CV was a lot more unfocused, so while turning it down a bit gave you back some clarity, the tone remained a bit all over the place and messy. Again, not necessarily a bad thing. I've been thinking about guitar tone a lot lately (as usual), and I'm coming to find a lot of value in that sort of broken-in-half, messy, falling apart kind of tone. Like a good fuzz pedal, or an amp that's breaking up. Or me, before God. Tight and focused is great if you're in control, but I find myself, when really praying, just falling apart, so there's a sort of beauty in a guitar that's a little all over the place. Not sloppy, and not poorly played, but almost like the guitar itself can't help but tremble before God. That's ridiculous. That's where I'm at right now.

Which makes a nice segue into something I discovered on Thursday night: I will always* play electric in sandals, because it makes it easy to turn certain knobs on my pedalboard with my foot in a controlled way. The certain knobs I speak of would be the drive knob on a Tubescreamer, or maybe the repeat knob on a delay. I was playing How He Loves for the youth group kids on Thursday, leading from electric, and I felt compelled to end with the chorus by cutting out the rest of the band, doing some arpeggio work and turning the repeats up on the delay (that has of course been going the entire song) so that it just starts to feedback, then fading back out. I love delay.

Anyway, back to the review. Love. Love love. I don't need another Tele. If you do, get one, but try out both, because they are different. I prefer the blonde one (though my first and only mod would be to swap out the black pickguard for a white one, because I think that looks boss), and you might too, but the newer, sun-bursted model is not without it's charms. Biggest charm: $350 new. A 52RI tele will cost at least $1600 new. The Classic Vibe line is just great in sound and, honestly, in build quality, so as long as you don't mind having a big Squier logo on your headstock (which, let's be honest, we've all been that guy, and some, like me, still kind of are), you're getting an amazing tone-to-dollar ratio. If you don't have a Tele, now you don't really have a good excuse to not have one. I already have one. I'm considering getting another. If I had a wife, she'd kill me.

*probably not always.

Is anyone else using this song?

How He Loves. It certainly seems to be the next new thing, what with DC*B having covered it on Church Music (and playing it live at a lot of shows, which is just awesome), but like a lot of people who have any inclination to read this, I'd heard it years ago. I talked to a worship leader that I respect, and he said that he had to hear how Crowder did it live before he'd play it, and that struck me as kind of odd, but again, I really respect his opinions. Now that he has started playing it, he's in love with it (as is everyone), and he can't believe he'd never done it before.

Long story short, this weekend I played it for the meditation song for both of my Masses, and it was incredible. The line that blows me away, even years later, is "if His grace is an ocean, we're all sinking". I don't do the little Kim Walker giggle, but usually there's some kind of crack or vocal break in there. I can't help it. I also tend towards the "emotional" side when I lead worship...

I also love the DC*B music video. I can't embed it, but you can find it here. It's messy and it's real, and it's so faithful, musically, to the band's style, both in the way that they play it there, and the way it's shot. Just wonderful. But I will leave you with the original, because it's also messy and real and beautiful.