This podcast, I used “Beautiful The Blood” and “You’ll Come”. The rest of it is original. I tried some different editing and mixing tools so it may sound a little different than previous podcasts. I hope this isn’t distracting.

The following songs were used in this podcast – “Tear Down The Walls”, “Your Name High”, and the Soundwave original that we just recorded in the studio, “Confidence”. There are some original melodies as well. I feel like this podcast turned out really well. I hope you enjoy it. The new template helped this time – no issues with the balance thankfully.

I’ve been meaning to give an update on how Soundwave recording went – it has been a very full week and I still have a great deal of tracking to do with the keys now that everyone else has their parts down. I hope to make some progress this upcoming week, but a lot of that depends on how work goes since I’ve been out since the Friday before last. I will do my best to make it a point to post about the upcoming Soundwave show we have in Lockhart. It should be a lot of fun since we’ll be doing a good number of songs off the new album coming out next year. Stay tuned, and if you’re in the area, be sure to check us out!

There may be a few melodies in this podcast that you might recognize.  One is from the original Music To Pray By album. I believe a couple of contemporary worship songs are in this as well, but listening back, I couldn’t recognize which ones I used.  I started with a fresh Logic Pro template this week since there seemed to be some automation or something in the last podcast that was affecting the balance between left and right. Thankfully, the new template fixed this.

The only familiar song used was “Glory to God”, and I mixed in some original stuff. There are some pieces of some new Soundwave songs that’ll be on the next album we’re working on currently. The rest is original – there might be a familiar melody or two.

The following songs were used in this podcast: “Your Grace Is Enough”, “Marvelous Light”, “Sing, Sing, Sing”, and “This is the Air I Breathe”. Throughout recording, the mic placement changed slightly so there are some noticeable variances in the tone. The next podcast will have a more consistent tone throughout since I believe I’ve found the “sweet spot”.

Felt a little rusty recording this one after 6 months off. It’s great to be back at it. There’s a pretty even mix of original melodies and contemporary songs like “God You Reign”, and “God Of This City”.

I Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. We certainly did hanging out with the family. I just realized that we didn’t take any pictures. We really need to designate someone to do that next time we get together because there are so many memories to be captured. This is the last podcast of 2009, and it is all original. I hope you enjoy it.

This podcast, I used a completely different setup to record. I’ll blog more about it later. I used a number of familiar tunes. It was basically our set list for church this Sunday, and I think it turned out okay. There are some sounds in the background that got picked up by my new setup in the beginning, but they shouldn’t be too distracting. I hope this podcast inspires you to spend more time in prayer. LORD knows we all should be when you consider these crazy times we live in.

I decided to change the naming from “week” to “podcast” since these will no longer be weekly. However, I will attempt to record one every other week.  This podcast was actually recorded last Monday, but I wasn’t able to finish editing and mastering till this evening. The only recognizable song used is “Revelation Song” which I think I’ve done a few times. I also had issues with the R-09HR so I’m about to move to a traditional recording platform, which I will blog about sometime this week. This podcast is probably not as inspiring as previous podcasts partly due to the sound issues. If it’s used during prayer, it probably won’t be that noticeable, but I apologize for this. Just know that the best is yet to come.

This was supposed to be posted yesterday, but it has been a very busy weekend.  I thought that after the exam, I’d have a lot more time to do stuff, but that certainly is not the case. At any rate, it was certainly a change in pace to sit down at the freshly tuned grand piano and worship for 30 minutes. I played a number of familiar melodies, but they’re all kind of mixed together so I won’t try to mention them all. It sure is great to be back to living life! Have a great week!

This day last year was my first post to the Music To Pray By Blog and now, a year later, there have been close to 30,000 downloads of 16 hours of recorded piano music to pray by.  This is truly a God thing.  This week was kind of a half-way point between when I started really studying for the CCIE and the dredded date of October 2nd so I took a break.  Since mid-May, I’ve put in right at 300 hours of study, and I’ve made a great deal of progress. It may not be the 40 hours a week I was shooting for, but it’s the quality of study that has helped. This podcast, I used the following songs: “Audience of One”, “God With Us”, “Mighty to Save”, and a small piece of “The Motions” at the tail end. It’s been so long, I’m starting to feel a little rusty. Gloves will be off after the exam.  Jeremy has already booked some Soundwave gigs right after so I’m looking forward to getting back to my normal life.  2 more months to go!

During this podcast, I used the songs:  ”Hosanna”, “Mighty to Save”, and a new song called “Forever”. We’re doing it for the first time at church tomorrow.  It’s a great song and it’s not the one yall might be familiar with – it just happens to have the same title. Some of the songs are repeats, but we’ve done them recently at church and it just seemed right. It was truly a joy to sit down at the grand and worship our Savior today. I hope and pray this podcast inspires you to spend some time in His presence.  God bless.

This one is a little longer than usual. I just didn’t feel like stopping. I used a number of familiar melodys and chord progressions in this week’s podcast. I hope you enjoy it.

The bi-weekly podcast is here. I decided to get it done today so that I can focus on studying for the CCIE tomorrow after church and group. I missed the “record” button again. I ended up playing for over an hour today so that I’d have something to post. The first 30 minutes may have been a little better than the later 30 due to a little bit of frustration after realizing the first 30 minutes didn’t get recorded, but hopefully it doesn’t show in the podcast.  I used “Mighty to Save” and “Lead me to the Cross”, with some original stuff. I’ve been meaning to blog about all the home improvement that’s been happening here at the Johns residence, but haven’t had the chance.  I should get to it either tomorrow or Monday. God bless!

I’ve gotta make this quick – Don is out there working hard without me and has been for the past couple of hours while I finish up this week’s podcast.  I used a few songs from Sunday morning service – “You Said”, and “There will be a day”. I also used a Soundwave song since we had practice on Friday. Live free! Pray hard!

Sunday morning worship was awesome this morning! We had a new guitar player who rocked the house! What a great sermon by Cole too! This week, I did some familiar songs: “Revelation Song”, “Love Story”, “Abba Father”, and “Here I am to Worship”, and all I can say is what a wonderful way to end a great weekend. I had loads of fun chillin’ with the ‘lil one while Yoko took a much needed break with her friends Saturday, and we went out to eat at the greatest Tex Mex restaurant in Texas after church and spent most of the day looking at new houses. Good times…. Hope you enjoy the podcast!

Keeping it short this week – I used the songs “I Can Only Imagine”, and “God of this City”. I know I’ve played these songs before, but we did them at church today so I decided to do them again. God bless!

Sorry about getting this posted a little late. I recorded it this afternoon after church, but had to head over to the Petreas for our small group Super Bowl Bash. It was a blast, but left a little early so I could mix and post the MTPB blog. This week I used the songs “Audience of One”, “Your Name”, and “None but Jesus” all of which we played during this Sunday morning worship  service which turned out to be completely awesome! In closing, I’d just like to say how disappointed I am that the Cardinals couldn’t hold off the Steelers offence the last few minutes of the 4th quarter. Ah well. Either way, this year’s Super Bowl was historic. The Steelers are the first to win 6 Super Bowls, and this is the first Super Bowl the Cardinals have ever made it to. I was kind of hoping that the Dallas Cowboys would be the first to take 6, but they sure did blow it this season. I can see my collegues at work laughing while they read this post because they really know how ignorant I am when it comes to football. Anyway, probably should have made all the football talk a seperate post, but I pray this podcast blesses you, and hope you have a great week!

I just couldn’t resist!  There will never be another podcast that is Week “24″. For those of you who are 24 fans, you know why I’m so hyped up about it! Don’t worry, the theme song or the clock ticking effects are NOT included in this podcast.

I don’t know where to begin. This week was almost a no go because of work, but I just couldn’t miss another week of Music to Pray By even though I missed Soundwave practice yesterday and church today because of the network outages and hardware failures we’ve been having all weekend… At any rate, this week was all original, and runs a little more than 30 minutes – I hope it inspires you to spend some time in prayer. For Jesus!

This week I used the chord progressions of some of the songs we played today for worship. I used a different position for the R-09HR, which caused it to pick up more from the sound board rather than the strings. I’m going to go watch 24 now. God bless!

Happy new year! I was going to do a seperate “happy new year” post, but never got around to it. For the first podcast of the new year, I used the songs “Your Name”, and a little bit of “Thy Word”.  I know I’ve played “Your Name” in a previous podcast, but we did it for church this morning, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. The rest is original.  ”…Pray without ceasing!” 1 Thessalonians 5:17

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas. The songs I used this week are, “All Over the World”, “One Life to Love”, and “How He Loves”. They may not be very recognizable, and I kept wanting to go from 4/4 to 6/8.  In fact, most if it ended up being in 6/8. This is the last podcast of 2008! Until next year…

The only song I used this week was “Mighty to Save” somewhere in the middle. The rest is original. I kind of got in the habit of picking songs out of The Connection Church worship set list, but since we’ve been doing mostly Christmas songs the past few weeks, there hasn’t been much to choose from lately. I actually recorded yesterday but decided to edit, mix, and post today. This podcast is the closest I’ve ever been to 30 minutes. I could do a special podcast of Christmas songs. I actually have a little bit of time on the 24th for this. If there are at least 5 comments to this post requesting a “Christmas Podcast” by the end of the 23rd, I’ll do it.  Otherwise, my next podcast will be a week from now.  I hope all of you have a blessed Christmas!

Even though I only missed 1 week, it feels like a lifetime. It really felt great to sit down at the piano and worship today. I kept the podcast original this week with the exception of a different variation of the song “Love Inside” that Jeremy introduced to me yesterday. I’m just blown away at how great God is and by how He can love us the way He does!

Once again, this week is all original. The same thing happened again where the recorder wasn’t actually recording for the first 10 minutes which was very frustrating since that probably would have been the best part of the podcast. I hope my frustration doesn’t show through in what was actually recorded. I ended up making more mistakes than usual which increased the editing time, but I think it still came out okay. On a positive note, I think I’ve found the best way to mic. I barely used the EQ and this has to be the fullest sound I’ve gotten out of the R-09HR. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you had a great Thanksgiving!

This week is completely original. I didn’t use any songs. I also used a different position for the mic. It still picked up some lower frequencies better than the mids and highs, but I was able to fix this with an EQ. I know that I’ve been bad about blogging even though the election is over. Quite a bit has been happening at work lately. We found out shortly after the election that AT&T decided to buy the company I work for – Wayport. Since then, our department has been preparing for when the deal closes likely in December. It’s pretty exciting, but it has also been quite a bit of a distraction. Please keep Yoko, SanBan, and I in your prayers. We truly appreciate it!

The songs used this week are “You are my King (Amazing Love)”, “Enough”, and the rest isn’t really any particular song. I realize I’m a day late this week. It’s because there was a network outage yesterday at work and I ended up working from 11:00 AM till 1:00 AM this morning. Just a heads up – I may try something new this week. I think if I just sit down for 5 or 10 minutes every day this week and record a small portion of the podcast it may turn out a little more creative. I’m going to give it a shot and see what happens. I hope you all had a wonderful Sunday. I know I did! You can check it out here.

Wow – another day of problems, but at least there is a podcast to post this time. I’ve never had anybody come to the door and ring the doorbell while I was recording, but that happened today. I hope I wasn’t too rude to the visitor dropping off cookie dough that Yoko bought from her for a fundraiser. Also, the batteries in my audio recorder died before I was done so this week is a little short again – a little less than 2 minutes shy of the 30 minutes I normally try to do. It would have been a little longer if the batteries would have lasted just a few more minutes. Because of this, the ending is cut short pretty abruptly – my appologies. From now on I won’t trust the battery indicator on that thing and just swap out the batteries every month. One day I will have thought of everything and will post a perfect podcast every week! Um… well… actually… probably not, but it’s worth a shot. God bless!

The songs used this week are “He Reigns” and “Hosanna”. I think I’ve done “Hosanna” before, but this should be a different variation. If you listen to the podcasts very much, all of it may start to sound similar. I hope this is okay, and if used as intended, prayer will be the focus rather than the music. I’m listening to it right now and it’s obvious especially in the octives that tuning is definitely needed. It must have something to do with this last cold front that came in.  As soon as I’m done with this post, I’m going to call the tuner and make an appointment. Also, I apologize for not blogging more. I’m pretty wrapped up in the elections right now so that is pretty much eating up a majority of my spare time. I should be back to my old blogging and twitting self a week or so after November 4th hopefully.

Today I used the following songs: Great God, You are My King, and Day after day. I haven’t been blogging much the past few weeks, which should change in the next couple months. A quick note on the tuning – I checked it today and the grand seems to be holding tune okay. I think it has a lot to do with mic placement, which should be resolved since I took more time to work on this today, and I believe I’ve found the right spot.

Sorry I’m a day late in getting the podcast posted this week. Yoko, SanBan, and I spent the entire day out visiting family in the Houston area on Saturday. This week I tried a different mic placement and I’m not sure if it came out as well as I thought it would. Plus, I think the piano is finally slipping a little out of tune. I’m going to try to get it tuned either this week or next. The songs I kind of used this week are: “When All is Said and Done”, and “How He Loves”. Pray continually!

As promised, I played around a little with mic placement and believe I found a good spot. I actually used 4 songs for the first time. They are: I Can Only Imagine, From The Inside Out, Who am I, and Amazed. I really enjoyed playing this week. I normally have the lid of the grand piano closed, but I had it wide open this time, and the sound was wonderful. God is good!

I’ve made it 10 weeks straight! That’s something to celebrate! Sorry this week’s podcast got posted a little later than usual. Thursday was Yoko and my 9th annversary so we’ve been sort of celebrating over the past few days. I used the following songs this week: God Of This City, You Said, and All for Love. The R-09HR seems to be picking up certain frequencies more so than the R-09 when I have it positioned on the piano music stand. I’m not sure what’s causing this – could just be the difference in the internal mics. I did EQ a bit so the end result isn’t too shabby. Next week I hope to spend some time finding the “sweet spot” for the R-09HR so hopefully Week 11 will sound better. Also, I think the cooler weather is starting to affect my piano. The lower register is beginning to sound out of tune. What do you think? It was tuned March of this year and I normally can go a year between tunings, but I figured this would probably change once I started this blog. I’ll see about having the tuner over sometime in October after we get a couple of more cold fronts.

The R-09HR still seems to be picking up a great deal of background noise. I’m not sure what the cause of this is, but I apologize in advance if it bothers you. I still need to play around with the sample rate and limiter functions. I hope to get to this before next week’s podcast. Also, from here out I’ll wait till after 9:00 or 10:00 PM to record since mornings and afternoons end up being too noisy. This week, instead of me mentioning the songs that influenced the MTPB music, I’m going to ask if anybody recognizes any of the songs that were used – just leave a comment if you’d like. I pray this week’s podcast is a blessing to you. Take care!

The first recording ended up being a mess for some reason. I figured it was a bug with the limiter so I upgraded the firmware on the new R-09HR and turned the limiter off. I recorded another 30 minutes which ended up being a mess as well due to all of the settings being restored to factory defaults. The third recording went okay, but I don’t think it sounds like it should partly because of all the background noise. At one point you can hear my iPhone get a text and it was upstairs in the theater room. When it went off, it sounded like it was sitting next to the recorder. I guess I still have some learning to do with this new recorder, but I made some good progress the past couple of days. Also, I think my piano is starting to get out of tune which doesn’t help matters any. All that aside, this podcast should definitely suffice for some good prayer time which is what this is all about anyway. This podcast is all original – I used some worship songs the first couple of passes, but ended up leaving them out the third time. God bless!

I tried to incorporate more of the requests from a while back, but things didn’t really work out as I had planned. I did play a “Ron” version of “Somebody” which Micah requested, but didn’t really get to any of the others. In fact, the request fulfillment process for me has been kind of a distraction so I’ll probably stick to playing what comes to heart from here out. I did also play “We Fall Down” and “Amazing Grace” – the Chris Tomlin version.

I finally got to the song suggestions. Sorry it took so long. I only used 2 of them – one from each comment left in the blog posted a couple weeks back. The songs are “El Shaddai” and “You Raise Me Up”. It was fun working these two songs into this week’s podcast. Thank you Micah and Cindy for your suggestions – I will try to use the other songs you mentioned in future podcasts.

This was another full week for me so I didn’t get to incorporate last week’s requests in this week’s podcast. This is just me playing a new song to the LORD. I feel that the past two weeks may have suffered a little bit due to my crazy schedule. Studying for the CISSP has consumed every ounce of free time I’ve had the past week or so. My test is in less than 48 hours and I still have a ways to go on my study. I wasn’t going to let this exam keep me from doing a podcast though. The tempo is a little faster than what I normally play which somewhat reflects what’s been happening in my life lately. I hope you enjoy it – if not, there’s the other podcasts and the old album Till next week!

I wasn’t able to incorporate any of the song suggestions from last week – I am very sorry. This week was one of the busiest for me so far this year. So much stuff is going on right now in my life. Lots of really big changes potentially. I’ll have to blog about it sometime after the dust has settled. Well, I didn’t really have time to select any songs to play. I just sat down and started playing, and aside from a few distractions here and there, it was really nice to slow down, relax, and offer up some worship to my LORD.

Once again, there were no song requests so I picked Mighty to Save, Beautiful the Blood, and Shine. I didn’t really play Shine – maybe the chord progression of the chorus, but I really feel that this podcast is the best so far. There were probably a few more mistakes than the past two weeks, but I really felt the Presence of God while I was playing, and I truly believe that you will experience God’s Presence as well while you listen to this week’s podcast and pray…

Since there were no song suggestions, the following were randomly chosen: God in this City, Hosannah, and Undone. It may be a bit challenging to sing along since the songs are barely recognizable within this week’s blog/podcast, but the whole purpose of this is to inspire prayer anyway so I think we’re good. Be blessed, and I hope you enjoy listening to this week’s music. Till next week!

Please keep in mind that this music is meant to be used during prayer time, and please excuse any background noises or mistakes you might here. I pray that this music ushers you into the presence of God as you pray. I know it has for me. Be blessed!