Linda's Blog

For those of you who know Linda as the "commentor" only, she is now a blogger. Please frequent her site often and comment that she isn't posting enough if a day goes by without a new one.

Linda's blog

Welcome Linda!!!

Today, We Rock!!!

Today was quite a day. We had the Surfari's come play at our church. If you're wondering who the Surfari's are, they wrote Wipeout. I'm sure they did a few other songs too but it's 60's surf music, so they're pretty cool.

I wanted to help out Steve and get there as early as possible. But since we stayed out until 1:00am last night, I made it by 6:30am. The Surfari's played outside in the pavilion so there was a lot of setting up to do. I tried to help out Steve as much as I could but I was fairly worthless. I basically ended up looking for extension cords and finding out how many outlets we can plug into. I was also a little worried about where I would plug my stuff into and where I would set up but everything worked out great.

One thing about having a concert is it's LOUD. Since their set was loud, we got to play a lot louder than normal, too!!! I finally got to turn my amp up past "2" and hit "3". I'm hoping we can continue this trend for next week. Everything sounded great. I also had to sing this morning and being out late, while having a few beers, didn't help my voice. That coupled with not having any stage monitors made it a little difficult but it was all about just worshipping and rockin' out!!!

Anyway, it was fun. Here were the songs that we did this morning.

Majestic
Love The Lord
Everyday

I know this isn't much of an interesting post, but I'm not really that interesting.

Worship Guitarist Confessional - June 10

I'm not a worship leader, and this is not going to be a video confessional, but I wanted to give a little insight into my gear each week, as well as my thoughts on how the service went.

First off, I was a little late (as always), and noticed that our drummer wasn't there yet, either. I get everything set up (which is a lot of stuff this week), take a look at my phone to check the time, and realize it is 8:15am. We should be rehearsing by now and the drummer still isn't here. Steve tries to call him a few times and can't get a hold of him. Steve even spoke with him yesterday and confirmed that he'd be there. I tried to call him as well and just got voicemail. Another week without drums and without Steve getting advanced notice to program drums on his keyboard.

As we start playing, I realize that the bass guitar is slightly off the beat. He forgot to bring his headphones so he is trying to listen to the beat coming from the mains (pointing away from him) and seems to be picking up the slap back sound coming from the back of the room. Steve was playing with his new electric guitar and was excited to play it for the first time in service, but figured that his acoustic would be better for everyone to pick up the rhythm, so he changed guitars.

First service comes and goes, and we play pretty good and energetic considering the lack of drums. The second service gets ready to start and Steve picks up his acoustic guitar and nothing comes from it. His guitar is silent through the mixing board. So he puts on his electric and strums it once and realizes it is slightly out of tune. He doesn't have time to tune it so we just all come in together. Luckily, there were only 2 songs before the announcements so Steve had time to swap out batteries in his guitar and it worked the rest of the service.

So, if you were wondering why Steve didn't post his worship confessional this week, it probably was he just needed to let this week go (for good reason). Pray for Steve a lot. It seems like he has had a rough couple of months with Sunday morning worship and he needs to be lifted up. Pray for the drummer that has missed multiple times without notice that he can find what it is he is looking for in life, and in music. And finally, pray that more drummers find their way to our church.

Now onto my rig...

This week, I changed out my pickups in my Stratocaster. I got the Tex Mex pickup set and they sound great. So here is my chain:

Stratocaster (guitar) - Boss SD-1 Overdrive - HAO Rust Driver Distortion - Fulltone Fulldrive 2 Overdrive - Fender Tuner to 2 separate outs (1 out to PODxt Live direct to board; 1 out to Fender Hot Rod Deluxe Amp - speaker out to isolation cabinet with 1x12" speaker - mic'ed to mixing board)

I use the Boss SD-1 primarily as a boost for leads since I have the distortion level turned way down but it works well for some very slight overdrive sound. The HAO Rust Driver is a great high gain pedal that I used for Your Grace is Enough. The Fulldrive 2 is just about the perfect overdrive to keep on all the time.

Here was our setlist:

Love The Lord (With All My Heart)
King of Majesty
Only You
Before You
Only Grace
How Great is Our God
Your Grace is Enough

Next week, we have our fill-in drummer coming to play so that will be fun. Also, another guitarist who plays with us once a month will be playing, too. It's going to be a good time!!! I will try to take a picture of my rig next month so you can see how many power cords and cables there are. It's pretty impressive.

Fort Ryan

I love this guy!!!

Ryan, fetch me my beer

Ok, he's not quite fetching me beers yet, but...he can now climb up onto the Lovesac ottoman and get me a movie. I have him on video getting me Caddyshack off the DVD rack. Unfortunately, as you will read below as well, I have no clue how to put the footage on my computer. I think I may need to do a little research this week to show off this cool kid.

Here are few pics.

Ryan the Rock Star

Ryan and I were hanging out on Friday when he decides that he wants to start a KISS cover band.

I have him on video cruising through our living room and when I'd say to him "Ryan, show me your Gene Simmons" he would stop and drop the tongue like he's been rocking for years. Unfortunately, I'm too stupid to figure out how to get the video onto our computer.

I've been bumming lately because it seems like every kid around his age is doing tricks except for him BUT now, he is impersonating Gene Simmons on command, and showing off his intelligence (see post above!!!)

New Guitar

**WARNING** Technical talk advisory. For those of you quick to comment as "boring", this post may be uninteresting to you.

So, I wrote a while back that I had to send my new guitar back for a refund. I was pretty bummed since it looked so sweet and sounded fairly nice. My sadness is no more. I was at Guitar Center checking out the Epiphone Les Paul Juniors and realized I just had to have one. This is basically the most inexpensive guitar in the entire store, but there are a lot of positives about the guitar.

One, the quality of the body is pretty good. It is a laminated body (kind of like a firmer plywood - which is not ideal) but it is still really solid and has a great finish to it. Two, there is only 1 pickup. To some, that may be a negative, but when you're replacing the stock pickup with one that costs almost as much as the guitar, it's better to just have one. Also, the style I got this guitar for is for that one sound - ROCKIN'!!!!!! Besides, once I get my Strat all fixed up, this guitar will be the backup. Three, it's cheap.

So, after buying the guitar, putting in a new pickup, and changing out all the electronics, it came out to be cheaper than the previous guitar I bought (which I wasn't completely satisfied with the sound anyway). So here are some pics of my new baby.




Now, my only project left is changing out all the electronics in my Strat (new pickups should be in any day now).

I'm also working on another idea. I'm really starting to dig the sound of my POD running stereo without an amp in front of it, but there is still something to be said about a cranked tube amp and how it sounds. So, my next idea is running 3 inputs into the mixer (if Steve will let me - at least sometimes). 2 will be coming from my POD (stereo) and 1 will be coming from a mic in my speaker isolation cabinet with a tube amp cranked in front of it. Since my Fender amp weighs a ton and would be a pain bringing back and forth, I think I can sell off enough stuff to buy a Valve Junior Tube Amp Head. But before I get ahead of myself, I will see what it sounds like with my Fender for at least one week. Anyway, if you've read this far, thanks Steve and Bobby!!!