This blog examines, reviews and discusses how worship is being lived out in culture and in the church. We tackle everything from songwriting techniques in corporate worship, to interviewing worship leaders and pastors, to reviewing the last big rock concert.
Took a shot of my live setup with my iPhone this past Sunday. Thought it might be fun to diagram exactly what I play with.
Apple MacBook Pro (GR) - this is my workhorse. In addition to running Guitar Rig I use this for most all my personal work. It’s an older MBP but it gets the job done. 2.33 Ghz Intel Core Duo, 2GB RAM, 120GB HD
Guitar Rig 3 - After leading worship and playing lead guitar in a lot of worship bands in smaller venues I was sick of dealing with stage volume issues. I was having to turn my amp down so low amp didn’t have the chance to get to the warm part of the tubes. Literally I was having to have my amp down at 1 so the FOH guys would stop complaining. So I was really limited in my tone and sound. All direct options whether software or multi effects had such poor quality and weren’t an option until I found Guitar Rig. I experimented with it on some recording projects, then tried it live and was very happy with the flexibility and sound quality. So this is my rig for small venues and I highly recommend it for congregations 300 or smaller.
Behringer FCB 1010 Midi Foot Controller - I don’t particularly like the foot controller that comes with Guitar Rig, so I just got the software edition and got my own midi foot controller. 2 foot pedals is a must, dedicated volume pedal then the other for trem speed, wah, what have you.
Presonus FireBox - “2 out of 3 musicians recommend Presonus for their firewire audio interface needs.” I’m one of the 2.
Apple Macbook Pro (Reason) -My newer machine. 2.4Ghz Intel Core Duo, 4GB Ram, 150GB HD
Reason 4 - I talked a bit about how this came to be in an earlier post. Slowly been integrating more synth tracks, live and recorded.
M-Audio Oxygen8 v2 - wanted something small and ultra portable with a decent amount of assignable controls and transport. This fit the bill. Great controller for Reason.
The best part is all this was originally $200 at goodwill but my bro just happened to show up on 50% day. Apparently $200 for all of this was just too much, they got to move product after all.
Adding it all up this is $3,700 worth of equipment bought for $100 at goodwill, with no guns involved, no threats of any kind, this was a peaceful transaction. I NEVER find anything good at goodwill much less this kind of treasure. Usually I start feeling sick after 5 minutes smelling the musty old clothes and run out screaming after seeing old men pick out someone else’s dirty underwear from the $0.10 rack. Leave a message on my brother’s facebook congratulating him on this robbery.
When playing recorded intros in Reason there’s something you don’t want to do, unless you intentionally want to screw up the song and distract the entire congregation. I of course didn’t intentionally do this yesterday, but unfortunately intentions mean jack squat in music. No there is not going to be any video going up on You Tube so you all can laugh at me. Below is a screen shot of the intro I used for Ready Now, see if you can spot the problem. Hint: this is just an “intro”.
I saw this a while ago but I guess it’s been officially released and is catching on. Seems more like a novelty than a useful instrument. It’s not doing anything more complex than your normal sequencer except that it has really pretty lights. I expect nothing less from Japan. Check it.
I literally have nightmares about this. I play with 2 macs on stage so I guess my chances of this happening are double. Poor lil mac, I hope he woke up from his panic shutdown.
I have for quite some time been hoping for a Abelton Live/Reason/synth/jack of all trades musician to come to our church. I love working with it in the studio but I’ve always wanted to get it integrated into our live worship sets. Sadly that person has not walked through the door yet so I got myself a midi controller(M-Audio Oxygen 8), installed Reason and started hacking away.
I was very impressed with how easy Reason 4 was to work with. I was able to make some real progress really quick, the transport features are similar to standard recording software (Logic/ProTools), the mixer and components are all easy to work with. The patches it comes with are plentiful and give you plenty of avenues of creativity. So I was off and running there. I started looking at Abelton but it felt very Windowsy to me. Being a completely saved man (mac man) I can’t be havin that. So it’s just Reason for now.
This Easter we tried out our first go at playing with a Reason track. We did a stripped down acoustic version of Mighty Is the Power of the Cross by Chris Tomlin and integrated a reason track I recorded. I think we’ve been reasonably well paced in the progression of musical style in our church and I hope we haven’t left many behind. This was another leap forward and I must admit, my first try at it so it wasn’t all that great but it was a start. For the first time in a long time I was nervous. I was panicking that my computer would shut down or the track would pause or something funky. Thank God it went smoothly, giving me a bit more confidence using this live going forward.
So here’s a 2 minute cut from what we used on the outro. This of course had live vocals as well as an acoustic guitar.
Gibson has released a self tuning guitar, they gave it the unfortunate name of ‘Robot Guitar’. How that name passed any level of critique is beyond me. It’s so very typical of the first iteration of any tech advance, where the name overplays the hand. Sooner or later this feature will probably be standard in most guitars and the name won’t make any reference to it. But for now we’ll be stuck with this I suppose.
I’m glad Gibson took a crack at it. If done well it could be a very useful feature. They packed it into a Les Paul which makes sense, with a name like Robot Guitar you’d almost expect a new model. Gibson claims Billy Corgan and Peter Townshend are already ‘using’ it. Using could mean Gibson sent them a free one and they opened the box and said it looks pretty. So I don’t know how much weight you can give that claim.
Robot Guitar Ultra Machine Deluxe auto-corrects strings out of tune and can store up to 6 different tunings. Also has a really cool way of setting intonation. You can checkout videos of it in action on Gibson’s website. I’m really impressed actually, looks well done. Robot retails for $2,900 which is pretty dang hefty. I’ll wait for the feature to become more standard.
Our church is in the middle of a new building buildout that includes a significantly larger sanctuary. This required some new gear and an entire new set of sound issues. I’ve been in bands, and behind boards since I was a young man and I have what I consider to be a “passing” knowledge of how to mix. I certainly know my limitations, and this project was way out of my league. We needed a professional.
In God’s divine wisdom and grace he planned for my path to cross Jeff. I met Jeff in my smoothie shop while we were bumping some Whiskeytown. He asked if I enjoyed Whiskeytown to which I replied “heck yes I do”, one of my favorite bands and Ryan Adams has to be one of the preeminent songwriters of our day. He let me know he used to run sound for them and Ryan Adams. It’s moments like these that I use as proof of a good and loving God.
I asked(begged) Jeff if he might be willing to help us out and boy has he ever. He came and did things I’ve never seen and certainly have never heard. It sounds amazing in there and I am so grateful for Jeff and others of his ability around the world. God bless you professional sound men and God bless you Jeff! I want to cry I’m so happy…I think I will….excuse me.
Figure it’s time for some gear talk on here since I’m really excited about my new foot controller purchase. A couple years back I switched to Guitar Rig(GR) for my live rig. I never imagined I would be using a complete software rig ever in my life, but that was until I heard Guitar Rig. I used to be, still am I suppose, a collector of as many classic pedals as I could get my hands on. With my Matchless Hotbox being my pride and joy. All multi-effects pedal boards, amp simulators, software solutions I’d heard up until GR sounded sooo bad, I never even considered them. Then my brother begged me to start using GR on a few recording projects we were doing and I was really impressed. My huge complaint with multi-effects units and software apps has been that the sound is so obviously a digital signal, there’s no cabinet breathing, no warmth, no peaks that you can pick out. It’s just all washed and over compressed and just too cute and nice.
One thing GR lets you control in addition to any combination of amps and cabinets you wish is mic placement. I can’t tell you how important that is for sound and GR really hit it out of the park there. So once I realized that the amp/cabinet selections were actually really good, I then got to enjoy the wide selection of other effects. It’s super handy being able to get such a wide tone swing during a live gig. Not to mention the flexibility afforded by the other effects. But sound quality is of the utmost importance and I can honestly say that GR is the only software/multi-effects unit I’ve heard that makes me say “wow” (yes those are quotes around wow). And GR2 has made me even more pleased, but I’m upset that they continue to release major upgrades at a blistering pace, GR3 already is out. Ever heard of minor FREE updates Native Instruments???
So now onto my purchase. I originally bought GR 1 which came with a 4 button (not really banks) 1 expression pedal foot controller. 2 of those buttons are reserved for switching presets, so really you’re left with 2 buttons. That really made things tough, lots of preparation needed to be done on the presets making sure from song to song you could quickly get to each preset. Not an enjoyable situation. So I needed a bigger foot controller and found a Behringer FCB 1010 Midi Foot controller (actually a lot of them) on ebay for dirt cheap. 10 button, 2 expression pedals AND 2 dedicated preset/amp switches. So now I don’t have to use any of the 10 buttons for switching presets and the 2 expression pedals is huge. You always want volume control but many times I need tremolo speed or wah control or other such timings that can’t be tapped out. I can’t wait for it to arrive and get it all setup.
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I have for quite some time been hoping for a Abelton Live/Reason/synth/jack of all trades musician to come to our church. I love working with it in the studio but I’ve always wanted to get it integrated into our live worship sets. Sadly that person has not walked through the door yet so I got myself a midi controller(
Figure it’s time for some gear talk on here since I’m really excited about my new foot controller purchase. A couple years back I switched to 
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