"Home Work"

I produced my first worship record this last fall for a leader named Neal Mabry. Neal is the youth worship leader at Fellowship Bible Church in The Woodlands. I think the church actually calls itself something else, but that's how I know it. Anyways - it turned out great and I am really proud of it. Neal myself and a couple of other guys worked really hard on it. We also had the help of some great musicians from Nashville and Houston.

Producing for me was a lot of work. Producers look at every aspect of the song: From the melody, lyrics, arrangement, tempo and key to the instrumentation. Working out of my house was great, but also hard to be disciplined enough to work in the morning and be done when Linz got home. Here's a pic of my studio below.

Working on so many aspects of the songs I ended up co-writing with Neal and a friend of ours who also recorded the bulk of the guitars on the record (Andy Watson) quite a bit. It was a ton of fun and very fulfilling. So on top of working on all the songs independently, demoing them, re-working and re-writing certain parts - I then had to record them. We started at Red Tree Studios in Magnolia with my friend Harold Rubens (Audio Engineer for Robbie Seay and Caedmon's Call) who engineered drums for me as I tracked drums first. Below is a video of the session.

We recorded the EP in stages. There are different ways to record a song/record: you can either put a lot of guys in the same studio and record at the same time or you can do things one at a time which is called "overdubbing". Overdubbing means that an artist or musician can lay down scratch material (some kind of instrumentation that will later be deleted in order to form a road map or guide for the song) with a click track (a metronome that is digitally played alongside the musician who is recording to ensure that the tempo stays the same). Drums and Bass usually go first in order to lay the foundation of the song and the dynamics.

I met a bass player and keys player in Nashville when I was recording drums for Jackie Key's record which will be released this year. It will be great. I asked those two guys to record on Neal's project. It was a lot of fun. Tony Lucdio played bass and Cason Cooley played keys. Tony has played on just about every Christian record you have ever heard and so has Cason. Cason also started the band "The Normals" with Andy Osegna.

Anyways. If you would like to check out some mp3's of Neals EP go to www.myspace.com/nealmabry

It should be on itunes in a month or so.

J

A Message to Jay

If your cereal comes with a toy in it, I think you're too old to be eating that specific kind of cereal.

Update: The same rule applies if there is a cartoon character on the box (he bought Cinnamon Toast Crunch yesterday because I made him self-conscious of the toy that comes in Lucky Charms).

Posterity = Overrated

Growing up, my mom would let us keep mementos in a "posterity box." When they moved into their new house, my parents gave me the box, along with several other boxes I had left at their house for several years. Revisiting the posterity box, I've discovered that most if it is just crap and I have no idea why I thought I should keep it (like 4 t-shirts from my 1 year of cheerleading and anything I ever wrote in the third grade). Combined with my own "posterity" items that I just haven't thrown out since moving out of our apartment, we have a lot of crap. A roomful, people.

So I decided that life is just too short to worry if I'll ever wear some shirt again that I haven't in 2-3 years. So now I'm getting ruthless. We've almost filled up 3 trash bags worth of stuff for Goodwill and 2 trash bags of true trash. All of Jay's t-shirts once again fit in his t-shirt drawer. All of our documents are neatly organized in labeled binders (bought a labeler - I love it) that all fit on a single book shelf. And the boxes are dwindling.

Side note: I was telling a friend about throwing stuff out and she said I should donate all of it. When I told her a lot of what I was throwing out was class notes, she said you never know...someone might need that kind of stuff in a movie...like in the background of some sort of classroom scene. What?!

I still have 2 boxes to go, and it's the hard stuff I haven't been able to make a decision about. [Plus both mothers have said they have more...] And we'll keep the posterity box (cleaned out of course), though I'm sure in a few years half of what I put in their today will just be crap.