It’s been a big year, simultaneously one of the most challenging and fruitful years for me and my family. Started the year looking for a job, found one, then ended the year looking for a job and found one. God has been so graceful in how he’s lead our family, matured me as a father and husband and sustained us through many trials.

My wife is incredible and been just a rock of hope in the midst of stress and rough circumstance. We’ve been blessed this year and sheltered by God’s faithfulness and grace. Our family grew by 1 as we welcomed Adia Grace Campos to the family. That was incredible, born the day before Easter. Will never forget or cease to be amazed at the goodness God poured out on us then.

As we start 2010 I begin a new job that will change our family dynamic and rhythm, to what degree I’m not sure. But I’ve worked exclusively from home for the past 6 years or so and now I’ll be venturing back into office life. We trust God to work his goodness here and believe this will be an amazing year for us.

As for Our Rising Sound it’s been a great year. Here are some of the highlights:

• Topped the 300 RSS subscriber mark
• Loops downloaded/played 18,000 times … I’m really astonished at that figure
• Began doing custom loops. Really excited about this and thank you for all the requests that have come in for these. This has been really fun.
• Top post this year is still the dumb church sign debate (37,100 views this year, originally posted in 2008!). Crazy.
• One of my favorite posts from the year was “Worship Leaders: play songs your congregation doesn’t like“
• Most controversial post was probably “Jesus Culture we have a problem…your lyric“
• My favorite blog series of the year was “How worship music can be like bad hotel art“
• One of the most visited posts was John Mark’s explanation of the infamous “sloppy wet kiss”

I’ve had several inquiries about whether I’d do loops for hire, or custom loops for people. I’ve always turned down those requests because I just didn’t have the time. But due to recent unforseen changes in the job security landscape(ah hem), I have more time now.

If you or anyone you know is looking for some custom loops. backtracks or just wants to work together on some music projects please do contact me. You can browse my current freely available loops to get a sense of what my music sensibility is. I will still release loops for free as I have been, I don’t plan on stopping that. But any special requests would have some agreed upon fee.

I don’t have any set rates at this point for a few reasons.

1. I want to be flexible and be able to bless and help out in creative ways. I don’t want to only contribute to projects that have a lot of money.
2. I have no idea what people think my services are worth, if anything.
3. I would be open to accepting trades for gear and such.

If you would be so kind as to pass the word along, by retweeting, sharing on facebook, etc… that would really be appreciated. ORS just recently passed the 15,000 mark for downloaded/played loops, so thank you for the interest you’ve shown to this point. I sincerely hope this has been a valuable resource for you and your churches.

Yeah you read that correctly. I, Kyle Campos, took a vacation with the family, for a few days at least. Normal posting will resume shortly.

I’d like to bring your attention to a few changes around here. First up is the Top Loops widget in the right hand sidebar. This displays the top 5 rated loops that Our Rising Sound has released. If you haven’t voted please goto the loops and rate them. Honesty is the best policy, don’t give everything 5 stars unless you thing every single one of them deserves it. And I’m here to tell you not all of them do.

Secondly you may have noticed a new commenting system. I’ve been evaluating Intense Debate for quite some time and working out some issues. It’s up and running now and this allows for a lot more fluid conversation on posts so I expect all you sleeper readers to come out of the shadows and leave some comments. You can vote for comments, reply to specific comments in a thread fashion and now we have gravatar support so you can see pics of who is leaving comments.

If you read this blog, please leave a comment on this post introducing yourself. I know for a fact many MANY more people read the blog than comment, and I’d like to get a bit more interaction going here. Helps with post ideas and makes this blog more useful for everyone involved.

So please leave a comment and let us know who and where you are.

Here’s the thing about Christian music. Most of it sucks, I’m sorry if that offends anyone, but it’s just my opinion, take it or leave it. I’m just being a straight shooter. That being said there is some great Christian music out there that needs to be heard and I love finding it, sharing it and doing whatever I can to promote it. So to that end I have this new feature in the sidebar, a little MP3 widget that contains some of the great, lesser known artists and songs I’m digging. You can listen to it right there in the sidebar and if so inclined buy it right there for yourself.

After clicking on the widget the full list of songs will appear. The playlist will rotate. Go check it out.

I’ve been getting a lot of emails recently thanking us for the loops I post. I wanna thank you all for the feedback, it means a lot and is really encouraging to hear about churches across the states that are able to benefit from my loops. I even had a worship pastor from South Africa contact me, so that’s awesome. Keep the feedback coming and let me know if you have any questions on loops or anything else and I’ll respond as fast as I can and maybe even make a post out of it.

Additionally, Our Rising Sound is almost at 200 subscribers which is amazing considering it took us 14 months to break 100, now 2 months after hitting that mark we’ve added almost 100 more. That’s pretty incredible. The success of this site really depends on you sharing posts and telling others about it. If you haven’t subscribed please do so either through RSS or email.

I’ve been up in Seattle for the past couple days and won’t return until late tomorrow. Normal posting will return shortly. Thanks everyone for the great community and site you helped build here.

If you have not been to TheWorshipCommunity.com now is a great time to go visit and subscribe to their rss feed, twitter feed or via email. Fred McKinnon runs the site and it’s a great resource for worship leaders for training, discussion, encouragement and technical insight. I will be contributing some content there and helping where I can.

You can also join in the discussion at TheWorshipCommunity forums. Enjoy.

The loops area of this site keeps on growing. I’ve seen a lot of interest from more and more worship leaders, so in an effort to bring more organization and to keep it fresh I’ve added a rating feature. So if you would be so kind as to browse the current catalogue of loops (note there are 2 pages worth) and rate the loops with your honest opinion. I have no guidelines as to your criteria for rating, just look it up in your gut (and ears). Your rating is completely anonymous, so if you think the loop sucks I won’t chase you down, rate with confidence. You can see what it looks like below and no you don’t have to rate 5 out of 5, this is just an example

Once a good number of rating come through I’ll add a widget to the sidebar that shows the Top 5 user rated loops so visitors can quickly see what’s hot, excuse me, hawt…and what’s not. Thank you for your feedback and if you contact me and let me know you rated every loop maybe I’ll give you a prize, like a nice e-card or something.