Loose Ends

If you know me at all, you know that I’m not the best conversationalist in the world… and I’m not the best at conveying my ideas by talking about them.

I like to surprise people with the things that I do.  Rather than talking about something for a couple of years and slowly making progress toward it and have people get bored with my ideas, I’m more of one to quietly work toward something and then one day say “look what I did,” or “look what I can do.”

This is good in some ways, and not so good in others.  I think it’s less overwhelming do do things this way… I am working on multiple things at once, and rather than having everyone know everything that I’m working on, I’d rather keep things compartmentalized, some people know some things, others know other things, but very few people get the whole picture of what all I’m doing.

This one month at a time thing has been very good for me, however, lately I’ve found myself falling into the same trap that I was in when I started this a year ago (I think it’s time for my one year assessment.)

Even though I haven’t been writing about it as much, I have been trying to focus on one thing a month, but I’m slowly starting to get different projects building… I work on something for a month, and don’t quite finish it, and then I start working on something else the next month, and don’t quite finish it.  And somehow now, I’ve got lots of unfinished projects and commitments.

I was thinking of starting something new for the month of February, but after starting to write this entry, I’ve decided to spend the next couple of months working on finishing projects that I’ve started before starting anything new.  This includes more than just things that I’ve started as monthly focuses… but things that I’ve had going on since before I ever started this.

First, I need to prioritize the projects that I have outstanding (this list may change if I think of something that’s not on here)… Let’s begin:

1. ProAcademy Series: Event Lighting DVD/Website
2. Thesis/Getting my degree
3. Adrienne and AJ’s Wedding Video
4. More Secrets ;)

In order to get this done, I plan on not working on one thing on the list until all of the things before it are completed.

I need to use my free time to do this, which I’m sometimes bad at so I need to lay down some ground rules:

1. No watching television or movies alone, I can watch them with friends, but not alone.  I’m really good at being unmotivated and sitting down and watching a movie… also, the new season of Lost is coming on soon, and I do follow Lost, but this will require me to watch it with friends… this could be hard, because Lost is a television show where you can’t miss an episode… so I’ll have to know a couple of friends watching it.
2. Do not make any new commitments.  This one is huge… I’m really good at making new commitments, which is what holds me back from finishing the commitments that I already have.

I do have a few things that I am currently committed to that I will need to work on in the meantime.

1. Work
2. InterVarsity Volunteer Work
3. Church Worship Team
4. AFP
5. The Victor
6. Day After Valentine’s Day Dinner
7. Horace May Spring Play
8. Sonshine Music Festival - Campsite Infinity Organization (I already own tickets that I will need to sell)

The first three things on my current commitments are ongoing until I leave Bemidji or get married, the fourth thing is a long term project that I am working on, starting out with a documentary (which could be the reason that I leave Bemidji,) and the last few things are once a year events that I have already committed to.

Wow, where does the time go.  Over the summer it was a lot easier to take the time to keep this up to date.

In my free time over the last few months I’ve been working on things like, financial responsibility, guitar (again,) and this month, my free time is going to producing a DVD series called ProAcademy Series.

A local business owner of a sound and lighting company approached me with the idea of producing a DVD on event lighting.  We have since filmed it and I’ve edited it, and just have a few finishing touches to put on it before we can start shipping it as a finished product.

It’s funny how a few “finishing touches” can take longer to do than the rest of the editing process of the entire video.  In total I’ve got over 20 hours of film for this project, and the final video will be about two and a half hours.

My goal is to be done with this before the end of the month.

Jalapeno Cheese Brats from Stittsworth's Nymore Food Mart

On July 2, I decided to stop in to Stittsworth’s Nymore Food Mart, a local meat mart that is just a few blocks from my house.

I have friends that have had high reviews of Stittsworth’s brats, so I decided to try them for myself.

I do enjoy some flavor to my food, so I decided to go for the Jalapeno Cheese Brats.

I grilled them on a medium heat on the grill until they had nice grill marks and were starting to burst (I’d rather have them burst on the grill than in my mouth when I take my first bite.)

I sprinkled a little extra shredded cheese on the top and added a small amount of ketchup.

I enjoyed the fact that there where full slices of jalapeno (the full diameter of the pepper, but in quarter inch thick slices.)

The cost was a little more than I would plan on paying for lots of brats, but for feeding just myself, they were priced fairly.  It was about $10 for six brats.

Zuppa Toscana - Based on the Olive Garden's famous soup!

For the month of July, I am focusing on improving my cooking and baking skills!

This is a really fun one, because I love good food, and this gives me an excuse to eat really well.

On July 1 I was able to go over to some friend’s apartment and make them a wonderful soup, based on the Olive Garden’s Zuppa Toscana.  It was a great time of hanging out and eating together.

I think that the social aspect of cooking is one of my favorite parts… I love hanging out with people, and everyone (that I know) loves eating!  So what a better way to spend an evening than cooking for friends and getting to know them better!

Here is the recipe to the soup:

Ingredients:

1 lb ground hot Italian sausage
2 tsp crushed red peppers
1 large diced white onion
4 Tbsp bacon pieces
2 tsp garlic puree
10 cups water
5 cubes of chicken bouillon
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1½ lb cubed Russet potatoes (about 6 potatoes)
1/3 of a bunch of kale

Directions:

Sauté Italian sausage and crushed red pepper in a large pot. Drain excess fat, refrigerate while you prepare other ingredients.
In the same pan, sauté bacon, onions and garlic for approxiamtly 15 mins. or until the onions are soft.
Mix together the chicken bouillon and water, then add it to the onions, bacon and garlic. Cook until boiling.
Add potatoes and cook until soft, about half an hour.
Add heavy cream and cook until thoroughly heated.
Stir in the sausage.
Add kale just before serving.

Atlanta based photographer Zack Arias 6 degrees of separation experiment

On a random note, I was reading Zack Arias’s blog today and thought I’d throw this out there for him.  He’s doing a little social networking experiment playing with the 6 degrees of separation theory.

He’s got two goals that he’s working on:

1 - He wants to shoot a portrait of Coldplay.

2 - He wants to hang out for a day and shoot Diddy.

I doubt that anyone that stumbles across this blog will be of any help, but Zack’s teaching on off-camera lighting for photography have helped me enough that he’s worth the shout out.

Check out his post.

Boss RC2 Looper

Earlier this month, I decided to get a new pedal, the Boss RC2 Loop Station.  This is a fun little pedal.  It can be used for live performance, however, practice is the main reason that I decided to get it (so far, it’s been a great way to make practice fun.)

For those of you who don’t know what a looper is, the concept is fairly simple (and the name should give you a pretty good idea.) A looper allows you to record a portion of sound, and play over and over again, creating a loop.

There are many different loopers out there. When I was looking at which one was right for me, I had to stop and ask myself what my needs were.

One of the reasons that I went with the RC-2 was that I already have the DigiTech RP500.  Since the RP500 already has built in delay effects, I didn’t need delay effects built into my looper.  The RP500 is also already taking up quite a bit of space, so I wanted a small looper.  Even though there is only one footswitch on the RC-2, it does have the option of plugging in two other unlatched switches for the added features of a tap tempo footswitch as well as a phrase selector.

Since I am going to be using the looper for practice, I did want some drum beats and patterns that I would be able to use.  The RC-2 does very well at this, you can select the pattern you want, record a phrase.  It is nice to have two separate volume knobs, one for the drum pattern and one for the recorded phrases, so once you record a phrase, you can turn the drum track off if desired.

Overdubbing is another feature worth making note of in most loopers.  Overdubbing allows you to record phrases over existing phrases, and in effect, layering the sounds.  Just like in painting, the artist usually starts out by painting the background, from there he/she is able to add foreground objects, and then add detail from there.  Overdubbing allows you to set a base rhythm down first, then fill in the details from there. With a total of 16 minutes of record time, the RC-2 does a great job allowing me to be able to record long phrases and add layers on top of that base without having to worry about running out of space.

The RC-2 also features an auxiliary audio input that allows me to plug an iPod or CD player into it and record phrases of songs that I want to work on.  You can also slow and saved phrase down, allowing practice at slower tempos without affecting the pitch of the original song.

Anyway, those are a bunch of the key features of the RC-2 that I liked, there are more, and I could go into more detail of the acctual opereation of the device… but I think you get the idea.

Is my practice getting too routine?

I need some motivation.  I’ve been trying to practice my guitar every day, but it’s really easy for me do the same things over and over, not challenging myself to try and learn new things.

The last week or so, for my practice time, I’ve been grabbing my guitar, turning on a television show and working on the same picking techniques, hammer-ons and fret board positions over and over again.

In some ways this can be a good thing to do, I want to get a good grasp on the concepts and fret board positions that I have learned before trying to cram more concepts into my mind.  Besides, building muscle memory is one of the biggest things that helps learning to play the guitar…

Normally, I may let these excuses be justification to keep doing what I’m doing. However, the purpose of focusing on guitar this month is to stretch myself.  I say no more!   ;)

I’ve made the decision that I’m not going to watch any more television or movies by myself for the rest of this month (although, I am more than happy to still watch movies with friends, because I believe that developing friendships is a lot more valuable than learning to play the guitar) as I’ve been making my guitar practice time into an excuse to catch up on my favorite television series… and, I don’t feel that I’ve been stretching myself very much at all.

Another way that I’m trying to motivate myself is by practicing with my the worship team at my church.  Last night was the first night that I joined them and it was definitely a stretching experience.  I was comfortable sticking with the basic chord shapes that I’ve known for years, but when I tried to play stuff higher up the neck, I had a hard time, plus the fact that we use sheet music, it was really easy for me to get lost.  I spent a lot of time focusing on my fingers and where they were on the fret board, then, because there was so much on the page, I couldn’t find my place in the music.

I do hope to be able to practice with the team consistantly and hopfully, things will improve.

DigiTech RP500

If I were to have chosen my effects, I probably would have gotten individual pedals and built the effects that I wanted, however, I signed up for Musician’s Friend’s Weekly Gear Giveaway and won the DigiTech RP500. (Unfortunately, Musician’s Friend no longer does the Weekly Gear Giveaway, which is sad, because it’s always fun to get an email saying “You won!” no matter what the prize is.)

I am very impressed with this pedal.  It is made out of a cast metal chassis and has very sturdy “vacuum-style switches.”

When in preset mode, each of the five buttons on the bottom of the board can recall an assigned sound preset.

At the press of a button you can enter into pedalboard mode, which allows the board to act as a bunch of individual pedals so that you can individually control a distortion, chorus/fx, delay, reverb, and a compressor.  When in pedalboard mode, you can also access all of the programmed presets via the up/down footswitches, which will then change the tones, effects, etc. that the bottom footswitches control.

The RP500 can be set to emulate the sound of any one of many great sounding amps, which is good for going directly into a sound system.  You can also bypass the amp modeling to send a clean signal to an amp (or wherever you want to send it.)

The expression pedal can be set to control volume or by taping the toe side of the pedal can instantly be changed into a wah pedal.  Depending on the presets used, it can also be used to control Whammy and other effects.  And there is a tap tempo switch for time-based effects.

The bypass button on the top left of the board allows you to completely bypass the entire board to send a clean signal through to other effects or your amp/soundboard.

By pressing and holding the bypass button down for two seconds the board enters tuner mode, which allows you to tune silently using the built in chromatic tuner.

The board also gives a good variety of output choices.  It features stereo XLR and 1/4″ outputs, or you can use just the left channel for a mono signal.  There is push-button toggle button that allows you to switch between an amp or a mixer feed as well as a ground lift switch.  And there is a headphone jack allows you to practice without an amp of any kind.

One nice feature of the RP500 is the USB port on the back of the unit.  The USB connection will stream the audio to a computer for recording and also allows easy editing of all of the presets in the board through DigiTech’s X-Edit Editor/Librarian software.

There is an aux in on the back of the pedal which allows you to feed an auxiliary source such as an iPod into it.

There are a couple of things missing in this pedal, the first being an effects loop which would be an output that would send the signal out any other pedals that you may have after the effects were added to the signal but before the amp modeling and then an input back into the board which would allow the amp modeling to be added.  This is not a huge deal for me because I plan on bypassing the amp modeling anyway and using a decent amp (which I still need to purchase.)

The second thing that the RP500 is missing is a looper, that would allow me to record loops that I would use to practice with.  I have a Boss RC2 coming tomorrow which should take care of this problem, I will write about it when I get.

From what I’ve read, the newer DigiTech RP1000 has solved both of these problems.

This pedalboard has been fun to play with, it was easy to figure out straight out of the box, but beyond the simplicity, there is a lot to learn through experimenting with it and figuring out all of the ins and outs of how to effectivly use it in a live situation by setting up exactly the effects that I want to be able to have easy access to.

My electric guitar.

Welcome to the month of June!  I couldn’t wait for this month to get here…  As you may know, every month I pick a topic to focus on.  Meaning I spend my free time and money trying to learn or improve myself in one specific thing.  This past Sunday night, May 31, I was so excited to move on to this month’s topic that I jumped onto the computer and started ordering things to help me out in June.  After all, the money wouldn’t come out of my checking account until this month.

So, what am I focusing on for the month of June?

If the photo here hasn’t given it away, for June I am working on electric guitar.

I’ll be doing individual posts going into more detail of my gear soon, but for now I’ll just say that I like my set-up but need to learn how to use it much better.  I’ve taken the money to invest in the equipment, now I need to take the time to invest in learning to play it well.

The things that I plan on focusing on this month are fret positions, triads, power chords, scales, arpeggios, and picking techniques… I know it’s a lot, but I don’t want to cheat myself.

Online Guitar Trainer

Yesterday, I found a tool on the web to help me learn my fret board, the “Guitar Trainer” tool shows a fret position and then has you type the corresponding letter on your keyboard, for sharps and flats just hold the up/down arrow keys.  It seemed a little too easy with the names of the strings listed on the side and the notes listed at the bottom, so I put the fret board in the bottom left of my screen, cutting off the string names and notes.  I’ve decided to only use this tool when I don’t have a guitar handy, or when I don’t have any projects to work on while at work.  Last night while I was babysitting my niece and nephew, I set the trainer to 12 frets and went through 100 positions, getting them all correct, but it took me way longer than I would have liked.  I want to get to the point where I know what the notes are without having to sit there and think about it.

I am also using two of Paul Baloche’s training DVDs from his Modern Worship Series Collection.  The Electric Guitar DVD, which has great insight and exercises for electric guitarists on worship teams, and the Music Theory Made Easy DVD, which teaches simple music theory.

I do plan on talking to the worship leader at my church to see if I can practice playing guitar with the worship team on Wednesday nights… However, I think it will be a while before I join them on Sunday mornings.

All of this along with my regular weekly guitar lessons that I started in February and I should be able to improve my guitar skills by spending a few hours a day working on it… I’m excited to see what I can learn this month!

I had been doing really well, riding my bicycle to work every day this month… at least until the weather started getting cold, rainy and windy… then I was out of town for a week doing video production work at Pursuit ‘09 for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.

Granted, I did bring my bicycle along to Pursuit, however there were only two out of the five days that I was there that I took the time to go for rides.

I where I have been doing well is keeping a record of my calorie intake each day… I have a goal and try to stick to the calorie count that I set… but again, I’m realizing that I’m coming to the end of another month and haven’t gotten as much done as I would have liked to, part of me feels like I need to spend more than a month focusing on each topic, but at the same time, I feel totally ready to move on to something else but at the same time continue to ride my bicycle to work whenever possible… so maybe moving on is the best thing.

I am excited for next month becasue I will be working on improving a skill again.  I think that that was one of the things that I missed this month… I was bettering myself, but I wasn’t excited about it as I should have been.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got for now, but, I thought I’d throw it out there.