Archive for the “Robbie Seay Band” Category

I don’t typically listen to Christian music. Rob Bell says that Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective. What does “Christian music” mean anyway? Is it enough for the songwriters to be Christ-followers? Do the songs have to be about Jesus? Anyway, it doesn’t matter.

In general, I find most Christian music to be pretty annoying. It’s overly simplistic, saccharine, and it just rings false to me. In spite of my aversion to “Christian music,” I really like Robbie Seay Band. Robbie seems to be a pretty authentic songwriter and he’s not really interested in writing über-catchy praise and worship anthems.

Anyway, Robbie Seay Band released a new single today. It’s called Miracle, and it’s pretty good.

I wrote out a lyric/chord chart if you’re interested. I’m sure that it has a lot of mistakes in it, but it should be pretty close. Check it out, proofread it, and let me know if you see any mistakes.

Here it is.

I have really been neglecting this blog during the past week. So, if you anxiously refresh this page hoping for some new content – I apologize.

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My Tascam US-122 showed up today. I installed the drivers from the CD and my MacBook didn’t recognize the interface. I went online and realized that the old drivers don’t work with Leopard, so I downloaded the new driver and everything works now. I haven’t recorded anything yet, but hopefully I’ll be able to do that tomorrow. If I get a chance, I’m planning to record a demo of my amp. Check back for that.

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I have been experimenting with the clipping section of my Tube Screamer clone. Basically, you can mix and match different types of diodes to get different levels of overdrive. I’m currently using a combination of MOSFETs, 1N914 germanium diodes, and 1N4148 diodes. I’m not sure how it compares to the other settings that I’ve tried because I don’t really remember what the other modes sound like. I need to put several of these things on a switch so that I can go back and forth between different clipping types to decide which ones I like best.

For the record – I don’t really understand the technical aspects of what I’m doing, so don’t ask.

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I have been noticing some issues with my strat lately. Specifically, it’s too bright overall and the volume and tone knobs have some weird things going on with the taper. I opened it up last night and was kind of shocked. I’m not an artist with the soldering iron now, but I’m way better than I was when I wired this thing up the last time.

Another thing that I noticed was that I used 500k pots on everything. I’m not sure exactly why, but that’s one thing that’s making the pickups too bright. I also wired it so that the first tone knob is a master tone that controls all three pickups. It was a good thought, but the bridge pickup is too bright to use the same setting as the neck pickup. I think I’m going to rewire it so that the first tone knob controls the neck pickup and the second knob controls the bridge.

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We’re playing Rise by Robbie Seay Band this weekend at church, and it sounded pretty excellent at practice tonight. The lineup for this weekend is really good. We have a new guy playing drums for us and he’s pretty stinking good, even if he talks too much – just kidding, kind of =). Our bass player (and sometime drummer) is nailing the bass part, which is probably the most important part of the song. Maury and I are playing guitar, as usual. It’s a solid band.

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We went to the beach today. I can’t wear my contacts at the beach because of the sand, so I wore my glasses. I was wading with Jack (the water was up to my chest so I was holding him), and we were letting the waves hit us. There were some pretty decent waves and one of them caught me by surprise and knocked my glasses off. I guess I’ll be shopping for new glasses. Awesome.

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I guess that’s pretty much it. Oh yeah, I’m on Facebook now, so check out my profile and feel free to friend me.

Jenny & I (and a couple of friends) went to a church in Houston called Ecclesia last night. We’ve been there a lot, and we would probably make it our home church if we lived in (or a little closer to) Houston. I won’t lie, the music is a big part of the reason we like it so much. I know that music isn’t necessarily a part of the biblical model of church, but that’s a discussion for a different day.

Anyway, the main reason that we made the trip last night is that Robbie Seay was scheduled to be there. Robbie is the worship pastor at Ecclesia, but he’s usually touring so we never really know if he’s going to actually be there or not. Fortunately, he recently started including the Ecclesia dates on his schedule on his myspace page, which takes the uncertainty out of the whole thing. I kind of expected it to be an acoustic set with just Robbie, but I was pleasantly surprised to see the whole band.

Taylor Johnson (he has played on a lot of their recordings) was on electric guitar. He sounded really great last night. He’s not a flashy player – he’s more into adding space, depth, and texture. He had this really huge delay going and everything that he played just fit in the song. [I need to experiment with bigger delay sounds, but I'm always afraid that things will get too mushy.] As far as gear, he played what looked like an American Deluxe Tele into a /13 (Divided by 13) amp. He had the standard Line 6 green and blue boxes (delay and modulation), and some other stuff (Fulldrive 2, EB volume) that I didn’t really get a good look at.

They played a good mix of originals, modern worship songs, and even a hymn. It was a really good night of music.

Chris Seay is their main pastor, but last night Doug Pagitt was there. I don’t know much about him, but my friend Tommy was geeking out when he saw him. I may write another post about him later on, but maybe not…

We’ve played this song a few times in the last couple of months, so I thought I’d share it here.

  1  2  3  4  1  2     3  &  4  &
E------------|--------------------|
B-12-12-12-12|12-12-12------------|
G-15b16-15b16|15b16-15b16r15-13-11|
D------------|--------------------|
A------------|--------------------|
E------------|--------------------|

 1  2  3  &  4  &  1  2  &  3  &  4  &
|---------11------|---------------------|
|---12-14----14---|---17----17----16----|
|13-------------16|---------------------|
|-----------------|14----14----14----14-|
|-----------------|---------------------|
|-----------------|---------------------|

There are other ways of playing this, of course, but this feels the most comfortable for me. You could play the opening m2 unison bend on the E & B strings in 7th position, but it doesn’t feel quite as natural. It may be different for you.

Bending with precision is really critical. If you put too much pressure on the strings you will bend too far. It’s really easy to overcompensate on the bends, so you’ll need to work on developing your muscle memory.

I have currently written charts for 3 songs off of Robbie Seay Band’s latest release Give Yourself Away. Since they played New Day on that Oprah show last night, I’ll probably try to get that one up in the next day or two. Here’s what I have done so far:

Song of Hope
Rise
Shine Your Light on Us