Amazing how much of how we feel can affect the songs that we play. Here’s a short 45-secs clip that pretty much describes how we are feeling now as we prepare for our very first trip to the Dominican Republic. We’ve been praying to God to give us a great weather to enjoy His creation and just to be able to spend time with the family.

Without further ado, I give you: Sunny Day

Have fun, we sure will

That is me! As I’ve always been since the first time I saw him smile, crawl, talk, walk, run, laugh, asks question, and I mean tons of tough questions, brush his teeth. Even the first time he made a mistake, didn’t listen, became cranky, bump his head and cried for no apparent reason. And as I see my one and only son grow with the knowledge of God.

Today is Father’s Day. There are two things I can do to celebrate. One is to just close my eyes and think of all those things that passed. And I can just open my eyes and slowly see him come into his own being.

Indeed, I am a happy daddy!

And I am not talking about fashion. I’m referring to the image on top of this site. My goal is to update it within 2 months. And my hope is that I can have enough enthusiasm to keep it up.

Anyhow, here’s the previous one …

So check it out every once in a while, i might even do this once a month

Bass players are the most under-appreciated member of a band, especially in worship ministry. Most people don’t even know why the bass exist. To some, it doesn’t matter much if the band have one or not. I tend to disagree with this and here are some of things I noticed on how a lack of a “good” bass player affects the “rhythm section” of the band.

1. Drummers
Drummers main tasks are keeping time and providing groove. You can ask drummers how a bass player is essential to grooving. There are a lot of things that can be done with drums, but without a good bassist, it’s just doesn’t sound right. Drummers need the bassist to help enforce the groove and the feel of the song. A drum beat/pattern can easily transform into different things with different bass grooves.

2. Guitarists
As a guitarist, it’s easy to say that a job of a bassist is easy. But as guitarist who also plays a little bit of bass, I can attest that it’s not as easy as we think. I am often limited to what I can do without a good bassist. Inversions, chord substitutions, triads/diads and modes can easily be taken out of context without the bassist enforcing the key and chord changes. Most times, I find my rhythm patterns are also limited to some degree. Either I get stuck with a bottom-heavy tone and/or I’ll play more power-chords and arpeggio with the root all the time. Not a good thing for a guitarist.

A lot of people may argue with me on this. That’s OK. This is what I notice and experience whenever we don’t have a bass player. Some band may be lucky to have a keyboard player who can play the bass parts.

So there it is. This is an appreciation to all the bass players out there. We need you, you are important!

In conjunction with the Open String Exercise post, here’s another exercise incorporating open-strings. It was actually faster and different phrasing than this when I first started but I couldn’t find a drum track that would fit. So I just adjusted it to the drums and here’s what came out. I also didn’t realize that the delay mix was a little louder than I intended it to be.

Here’s the MP3: Open String & Double Stop

Have fun with it and if you do change it up, please be sure to let me know

Last night, me & my wife were watching a re-run of House where there was a conversation regarding prayer.

The atheist doctor asks, “Do you know why people pray to God”? And she continued to answer her own question by saying, “To let Him know how great He is, although He already knows that”. After a few more dialogs, Dr. House responded with the line, “They pray to their Gods so that they won’t be crushed like bugs”.

In my perspective, the writer got half the conversation right. Yes, we do pray to glorify and praise God even though He already knows that He is great. God enjoys the worship of His people. Unfortunately, the other half does not hold that much ground in Christian views. In the first place, Christians have already secured salvation by grace through faith in Christ. Therefore, there is no need to worry about being crushed like bugs. If anything, it should be the people who don’t believe in God that should be wary of this ever happening.

We, as a family, pray because we are thankful of the fact that in spite of us, we are still given the free gift of salvation. We pray for the many blessings that we receive and even for the trials that he allows to come our way. And above all, we pray to God to guide us to live everyday in line with His purpose and will.

I’m sure that there are many other reasons why people pray. But, because we are afraid is not and should not be one of them!

How about you, why do you pray? Or do you ever pray?

I’ve been having a new found fascination for licks that incorporate open strings these past days. And I am not taking about the licks on an open-chord formation. To demonstrate what I mean, here’s a tab of a simple, yet challenging, lick that I was playing with last night. Just a note that there are a couple of slides/pull-offs that I didn’t get the chance to include in this tab and also the phrasing is a little different.

It was so much fun that I decided to record it so that I won’t forget the phrasing myself.

So, without further ado, here’s the 30-second clip: Open String Exercise

Disclaimer: This is a rough take so please try not to judge the fluidity and/or tone!

If you have a lick that uses open strings, please let me know. I would definitely want to improve this technique!

Have fun!

I’m in a blog funk right now! Well, I can think of some reason why and it’s not that I have nothing to say. For those who know me, they can easily testify that I am a very opinionated person and that I always have something to say. Whether that is a good thing or not, they can be the judge of that. In any case, I just want to give an update to everyone on the other things that are happenning and have happened in recent days

- Sickness
Me and my son Gabby have been sick for about a week now. We are getting better but the weather here in Toronto hasn’t been cooperating. It has been fluctuating like crazy from very warm to almost freezing. Please pray for our speedy recovery.

- Moving
This Saturday, we will be moving to another unit down the hall from where we are now. Needless to say, we’ve been busy packing things. I can’t believe we’ve accumulated that much in the short 4 1/2 years we’ve been married.

- Music
Not much doing here. I was trying to revisit the scratch tracks I’ve laid down about a month ago or so. But that is also proving to be a challenge. I need to get a great realistic drum generator. I have the rhythm guitar down but no drum beats to match it. I am loving the tone I am getting from my rig right now. So that has been a real blessing to me!

- Church Ministry
We are in a big transition period right now. We lost very good musicians recently but also gained great ones. The problem is the getting used to and re-alignment of schedules. For the past 3 Sundays I’ve played, twice we only rehearsed 1 1/2 hours before service. Even good musicians will have trouble with that and I can tell you that we did have some challenges. But praise God for always being there to bail us out!

- Work
It has been a very busy month of May for me! With the new role of making sure that our storage infrastructure is running as smoothly as possible, it’s quite demanding. Although, it was fun working with PHP again to graph some performance metrics using GD library. Man, how I love scripts & automation

- Life
As always, it has been good! Praise God!

I did this horrendous techno-loop to satisfy my craving!

A fellow Christian blogger posted a “simple question” regarding the fine line between performing our very best and living out a “rock-star” dream when leading worship on a Sunday morning. You can read all about it here at Guitar For Worship’s A Simple Question post …

Personally, I’ve never really gotten into playing with a band outside of church. I mean, I did join some bands before and I still get invitations here and there to play outside of church. But as a whole, I’ve never really committed to any of it. My reasons to decline are always of time/availability. But my real personal reason is that I just don’t think I am good enough to be out there. Which on a Sunday morning, I can come and play music for God to the very best that I can play. I always try to remind myself of this passage from the Bible regarding offering …

Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a fraction of a penny. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.” — Mark 12:41-44 (New International Version)

Although, this is more of a verse used for tithing and financial offering, I believe it also relates to how much of what we have can we give back to God. For me, I always try to give my very best to God when I step out on that platform, when I play for a small group, and even for my own personal devotion.

What Karl asked is a very valid question. However, I think the more important question to ask is: How much of what you have do you really give back to God.