I love making records

We've spent the past few days down in the studio working on a new EP for Chris Mason. It's been a really incredible time. It's only been Chris, Cason and myself, we've all been playing a little bit of everything, just finding things to fit the tunes. Chris has written a great batch of songs, and I'm excited for people to hear the really huge leap he's made as a writer and a singer. He's obviously been spending a lot of time on the road, and you can really tell. The last time we made a record with him, the vocals weren't the easiest part. This time, he's been getting first takes almost every time. Something I keep learning over and over is that good songs almost always produce themselves. These have been great songs, and so, either we're just the awesomest in the world, or the right parts have been suggesting themselves quickly and readily. I'll throw a couple pictures of our session today at the bottom of this post.

Ella has started "talking" and "singing" a lot this week. When you talk she will look at you and make noises back at you. She does the same when she hears music or singing. The other day at church she started "singing" during one of the songs. It's so fun to just sit there, hold her, and have a "conversation." She is just so happy and smiley when she gets in those moods. Not to get disgusting with new-dad baby-talk, but it's pretty exciting now that she's started to respond in ways that don't involve burping and pooping.

I've found a new restaurant that I really like here. It's a meat-and-three, which is Nashvillian for "a place where you get a meat entree, (usually something southern and fried), three veggies, (also southern and fried) and a biscuit or cornbread. Most of these places, the good ones anyway, have some old lady's name, like "Barbara's" or "Dorothy's". They're both great. This one is called "Vittles." We've eaten there probably every other day for the last two weeks. I'm trying to go straight down the menu until I get to the veggie plate and then start over at the top. My plan got put on hold today, though, because it was BBQ day.

I bought most of my original ProTools stuff over three years ago now, including my G4 tower. I have somehow got it into my head that I have a gig of RAM. It's been a little sluggish with some new plug-ins I've been using, so I decided to get some more. When I looked to see what kind I had, I found I only had 512. That explains the slowness. So today I newegg'd a whole 'nother gig of RAM and I'm pretty excited. I also found out that ProTools has just released some new graphic EQ's, and they're free. If you use ProTools at all, go download them. I think they're pretty cool.

Click on it and go to EQIII. Also, the free Bomb Factory compressors are pretty great, too. That BF76, the fake 1176, is based on one of the greatest compressors ever, so even a digitized version is more than worth free!

Ok, I think that's it. I keep thinking about getting good pictures of my new Elloree mando-guitar and baritone, but only when I pick them up to play them. They sound so good I just enjoy the tone and then forget to take the pictures. Hopefully I'll have those up tomorrow. Send me comments to remind me! All righty, here's a couple of shots of Chris and Cason in the Velvet Eagle. I took them all with the no flash and a long shutter, so they're blurry, but I dig the way the red lights vibed it all up.











Here are two of my favorite, old guitar amps: a '65 Gibson Falcon I bought when Mark and I were in Chico, CA with Derek and Sandra, and some weird Univox thing I got in a trade for a really awful, old chorus pedal. It's always fun to get to use the vibe machines...







and a blurry yours truly...

the big pedal board

All righty, if you are not a gear nerd, I would not even bother finishing this sentence, because I will put the phrase "signal to noise ratio" in it. Ok, now that that's over with, on to the good stuff. I know I've been threatening you with this for weeks, but that last pedal finally came in, and I got to finish it up and take some photos for you. I'll try to keep it simple and not go too nerdy, but if I do, please forgive me. I'm a lucky man to have my hobby as my job. (Although, I could probably do the job with less of the hobby, but that just wouldn't be as fun.)

Ok, this first picture will be of my old pedal board. I built this one for my first tour with Caedmon's, almost three years ago now. It's gone through some major changes. When I first built it, it had two levels, and last year I replaced it with one, flat surface, which worked better for moving things around. Now, in the left-hand corner there is a blue Line6 Modulation box, I just put that there for a few days. Most of the pedals that were there I sold, and I think all to people who read this. I had a Boss Tremolo, a DOD chorus, a Boss Delay/Pitch Shifter and my cousin Dean's Phase 90, which I should probably give back. Also, where the orange Phase 90 pedal is in this shot was my PedalDoctor.com Blu-Wah, which is a killer mod of a Cry-Baby. Money got tight, I had to sell it, and I will always regret that. Oh well, spilled milk, eh? Also, my old power supply went bad so I've got cables all over the top of it to keep it running. This shot was taken during the "Far Country" sessions for Andrew Peterson. All the sounds on that record were this exact board...

(Note the bandaged foot - bottom right)



Now this thing was WAY too heavy. That's one of the main reasons I'm not using it anymore. It's built into a DJ case, for two turntables. Todd put some wheels on the bottom of one side, which was nice, but at 95 pounds I couldn't fly it, and I hated even putting it in the station wagon. So I am switching to two seperate cases, which will sit on either side of my mic stand live. These are each about 2/3 the size of the old one, and have hard ATA flight cases around them. They are made by TM Cases, which I have linked to over on the side of this page. These are model 05, I believe. Here they are, one is open, and the other one is closed behind it. They use those big blocks of foam to protect the pedals and keep them in place against the velcro.



The boards themselves are made to be removed and set on the floor, but I modified them just a bit so I can leave them in their cases, and put a power supply underneath. I had to make small cuts in each board to allow cables to go in and out from the bottom of the case. Also, I put handles on the top of the boards so I can keep cables, strings, picks and capos underneath. Very handy. Here's the cut.



Ok, so I've taken all the pedals off the old board, cleaned up their velcro or replaced it, and now they're waiting to be placed.



Now, the hard part was honestly the planning. I worked on designs for months. I measured everything out, and tried to figure out the optimum signal path. I wanted to make sure it would work and they would all fit before I bought three hundred dollars worth of cases. I can't explain how helpful this was. I was able to solve almost every problem of placement and tone before I even started putting them together. This was probably my sixth overall design, so I'm glad I went through the other five stages on paper and not backstage or after soundcheck.



The hardest thing about putting them on two boards was figuring out what needed to go in what order. The main reason I need two boards is not because I have so MANY pedals, but because I use so many BIG ones. And a number of them I use in stereo, so I had to have them all on one board, lest I be going back and forth all the time. So I had to figure out which would go on which board. I eventually settled on basically a DRY board and a WET board. One of my biggest problems was then figuring out which would go on which side. All pedals have their input on the Right side and their output on the Left, so most boards usually go right to left. A big part of how I play is having on/off switches to each amp (I use two) right above my volume pedal, which I like at the front of my chain. This is too much information. Anyway, I decided that my right foot needed the Whammy-Wah and the volume pedal, so I based everything else pretty much around having them on my right side.

So here is the right side board...



I'll go through the pedals on this side, in their signal path order.

1. I go into the Boss EQ-20 at the top right. This is ten programmable EQ's and volume settings. I use a different setting for each guitar. I have numbers on the back of each headstock and they relate to the EQ setting on this box. That way I can go from a Tele, which is way too bright and trebly and also loud, to a quiet, darker hollow-body, to a mandolin, all without changing any settings on my amp or volume pedal. It makes way easier on the sound guy and the band because I'm not all of a sudden louder or quieter. This is a later addition to my rig, but one of the most worthwhile.

2. The Red Loooper. These are little bypass pedals. I use a few older, weird pedals that make a bunch of hiss and noise when they're not on. With this pedal, I leave the older ones on all the time, but the signal only goes to it when I have the loop on. This really quiets up the overall sound, so you hear more guitar, less other junk. Signal-to-noise ratio!! I had them made each in the color of the pedal it would loop, so it would be easy to tell what it was for. This one goes to the

3. Digitech Whammy-Wah. This has a bunch of different and weird sounds. It has four or five straigh wah pedal sounds. None of them are fantastic, but I don't use it that much so it's good enough for me. It also does pitch bends, where the pedal will take your note up or down one octave, two octaves, or anywhere in between. The "Even Better Than The Real Thing" opening riff sound. It will also add a harmonic and then shift it. Like if you play a C note, it will add an F, and then the pedal will slide it up to G. Very weird. My newest pedal. Very excited to use this guy. I keep it here, so the wah is before the compressor. They tend to make things jump around in volume quite a bit.

4. Ernie Ball Volume Jr. Just a straight volume pedal. This one's smaller than my old one, thank God. That thing was huge. I like it big enough that I can rest my foot on it while I play, though, and this lets me do that. Just a basic thing that's always handy to have.

5. Boss TU-2 tuner. The new standard. I'm a little worried that will be too far out of eye-sight when I'm singing, but oh well. It has two outputs, a bypass that's always on and a mute switch that turns the signal on and off. That main out goes to the DI, and the bypass goes to the Compressor.

6. L.R. Baggs Para-Acoustic DI. A great, phantom-powered DI, for acoustic instruments. It's very clean and has a nice EQ on it.

7. AnalogMan Mini BiComprosser. This is two compressors built into one box. There are two different types, voltage-controlled, like the old Dan Armstrong Orange Squeeze, with just one knob, and optical, like a Ross, Keeley or DynaComp. The optical works off a little LED light, don't ask me how. This box has one of each. I use the Ross side, the optical, for most stuff, and then the Orange side for when I play without a pick. I use them about half the time in the studio, but I don't do a song without them live.

8. BadCat 2-Tone. This is a two-stage tube overdrive pedal. I use a BadCat amp quite often, and this is basically two of its front ends. I have one set for a basic overdrive and the other for a more lead or distorted tone. I used to have a lot of different overdrives and distortions, but I also use a lot of guitars, and I just had too many options. Now, if I want a different tone I change pickups or I change guitars. This has really allowed me to be more free to just play and not analyze that much. I LOVE this pedal.

From here it goes over to the other board, and then comes back to the

9. End Loooper. This just has two ins and two outs. One for each signal to each amp. This way I can turn on one or the other, or both with the same foot that's working the volume. This is at the end of absolutely everything, so if I have a bunch of delay and want to make sure it's dead quiet at the end of a song or something I can just shut them off. It's also nice to have so there's no extra buzz or hiss in between songs.

And here's the other board:



1. Boss Noise Gate. I put this one on this side, because the cable from the other board is a six-footer and if it picks up any extra noise this will knock it out. Basically this is set so that it kills the signal below a certain volume. Basically, if I take my hands off the string, it shuts it off. Keep the quiet even quieter. It's really a huge help. I keep it after the overdrives, since that's where all the volume is.

2. Yellow Loooper. This one goes to the...

3. Digitech Space Station. One of my all-time favorites. I pretty much use this whole thing for one sound. It does this great Achtung Baby-ish string pad, where it follows your top notes. I just love it. I try not to use it all the time, but it's tempting. You can hear it on the tune "Mother India" if you're curious.

4. VisualSound H2O. The only pedal, besides the TU-2, to be found on each of my boards. This has an analog-ish delay and a nice, warm chorus. They can be used separately or together, and it has two outputs, one with the effects and one without. This I use as my stereo splitter. So from here on out, there are two signals, one wet and one dry.

5. Line6 modulation modeler. Those wet and dry outputs go into the Left and Right inputs of this thing. It has all kinds of sounds but right now I'm using it for one hard tremolo, one soft tremolo, a stereo phaser and a Leslie simulator. This one is new to me so we'll see what I think after a few shows. I'm still a little on the fence. It has L and R outputs which go to the...

6. Line6 Delay modeler. This is the only pedal one this board that I had back in the Normals. I try hard not to like modeling stuff, just because I don't want to think it can replace the real things, but this does a great job live, and has a few specialties all its own. I mainly use it for a straight tap-tempo delay and for the auto-volume swell delay. I use that all over Andrew Peterson's stuff. It slowly brings up your note, without any of its attack, and adds a bit of delay to it. I also use the ping-pong delay, which sends different echoes to the L and R channels. Really swimmy. From here the Dry signal goes to the Loooper on the other board and the Wet goes to...

7. Silver Loooper.

8. Electro-Harmonix Deluxe Memory Man. Don't be fooled by any imposters. This is the single greatest guitar pedal of all time. Every modeling pedal has a fake one, but you just can't capture this guy. It's so weird. It's an analog delay, no tap tempo or blinking lights, and it adds either a Chorus or a Vibrato. I keep it on Vibrato. You can easily overdrive this thing for weird Radiohead sounds and sonic madness. I will never do a record without this pedal. I'm thinking of mounting it to my mic stand for shows so I can more easily mess with the settings. It's also noisy as heck, so I have to use the loooper. From there it goes back to the loooper on the other side and out to the Wet amp.

And just so you know, I like the sound of more than one delay at a time. I think you get more interesting patterns. That's why I have three different delays on one board. Maybe I'm crazy, but I just don't care. I love them. Laugh if you must.

Some of these pedals have wall warts or power cords, but most of them take regular 9V plugs. Under each board I have a small 3 plug extension cord which powers two pedals and a Voodoo Labs Pedal Power 2. These are great, stable, and very, very quiet power supplies. They also power Line6 stuff, which is super handy. I have one on each side, and they're worth the price. This board is so quiet because of them. It just kills any weird grounding issues. Here's a look...



So here is the whole thing...



and here it is, with my cool, red studio lights...



and here it is next to Jason, who came over while I was taking these pictures.



Jason has a great cd out called "Goodnight Moon" and his site is over on my links. He was our guitar tech for the second leg of the Share the Well tour. He's my friend.

Ok, well, that about wraps it up for the board. A few things I want to say to finish up.

First of all: The best tone is that of your guitar straight to your amp. As much as possible, I try to keep things out of the way. That's why I use the looopers and the George L. cable for every connection. Any pedals that aren't in a loop are true-bypass.

Secondly, the key to having a lot of pedals is, honestly, not using them. Some of the worst sounding guitar players have the most, and the most expensive, gear. I typically only have EQ, a compressor, overdrive and a delay or two actually on at one time. I have lots of things to help me make tricks and whistles and all that, but try to use them as sparingly as I can. The goal is to make music that is beautiful and powerful, not just having a bunch of lights on.

A lot of people look at my gear and say, "Whoa, look at all those pedals, he must be great!" They are wrong. A lot of pedals doesn't make you great. At best it gives you options, at worst they get in the way of the music. Other people look at my board and say "look at all those pedals. He must need those cause he can't play guitar." They're a lot closer, but again, I try to just use a few things here and there, and having all the pedals at my feet just allows me the option to be creative in that direction. The longer I play, the more often I find I'm doing half the set with nothing on but a compressor and a delay.

Ok, that's it. Thanks for reading this disgustingly long post. I hope that at least one of you finds something here interesting and worthwhile. The goal for me, really, is to be able to be the best that God created me to be, and to be as inventive and creative as I can be to honor that. I hope you enjoyed reading it. The geek in me really liked writing it. All right. I'm going to bed.

my second post about church

Ok, so I've been needing to write this for a while. About a month and a half ago I wrote a big, long post about my problems with finding a church family here in Nashville. In my rantings and ravings I said a lot of things I believe and a few things I didn't. I also wrote a lot of things that I should have said to a few specific people, and not to the entire world of the internet. I won't lie, we have had a hard time finding a church. I also won't lie, that's not all the church's fault.

A friend sat me down a few weeks after I wrote it and told me that a few people who are heavily involved in one of the churches I talked about read my post and were deeply hurt. And I know why. I said some pretty rough things about the church. Some of them were exaggerations, some of them weren't, but none of them was said lovingly, and none of them probably should have been said on here. I quickly realized my lack of wisdom in writing that earlier post and removed it.

The friend and I went on to have a really good talk, although it wasn't an easy one. He wasn't mad about what I wrote, but he was hurt. He was also a little worried for me, and why I would be quite so angry and unhappy. If I really believe that the Spirit lives within us, and is changing us each slowly and surely, and that we are all created and loved equally, then why was I so unloving in my public critique? I realized that I have been carrying a lot of anger and bitterness towards some people, people who I have associated with the church, and haven't really dealt with it like I thought I had.

A lot of stems from the weird relationship I have with the church because of my job. The last seven or eight years, I've been in hundreds and hundreds of different churches, and each time, or most of the times, I've gotten paid for it. The church to me can quickly become a marketplace and not a strong tower, once I start thinking about it that way. Also hard for me is how the more I understood the Gospel and wrote songs and albums reflecting that knowledge, the less records I sold. I think I got more angry about that than I really realize. Which is not right, I need to emphasize. Still, it has been a challenge for me to know when to be critical and when to surrender. I also need to do both of those with love, something I don't do when I get hurt and lash out. That's exactly what I did the other day. Instead of lovingly talking to the people involved around me, I lashed out and hurt people who I love and who love me. And after all, isn't that what the church is?

Anyway, I ended up calling the people who read the post and apologized. I met with each of them and apologized again and had good talks with each of them. If I offended anybody else who reads this or knows of anyone I offended, please let me know. I owe them an apology, too.

The thing is, we have become a consumer society. This is not news. And judging by how many people responded favorably and encouragingly to my post, I know that I am not alone in wishing this were not so. And I really do believe a lot of what I wrote. I want the church to be a place of community and inclusion, not hipness and sexiness. I want old people, young people, fat people, skinny people. I really didn't mean for those comments to all sound like they were attacking one specific church, but looking back, I see how people made that connection.

One of the many glorious things about the church is that it is an institution that God loves and lives in, despite that sometimes it doesn't love him or live in Him very well at all. Even the most dying of churches has a spark of the truth, the divine love of God, alive in it. The churches we have been a part of here in Nashvillle, whether or not they were for us, are really great churches. They are full of people who love the Lord and seek to serve Him. Not only am I skewing who they are through the bitterness of my heart, but I am not allowing them to love me, and that is my own fault and sorrow.

That being said, we are still praying about where the Lord is calling us. We have visited that Anglican church I told you about a few times and have enjoyed it. I've also had some great conversations with the leadership of a church I had written off, and though we don't know if we belong there, I really enjoyed and valued those times, and their care, and forgiveness, of me.

Sorry this is so rambly, I'm pretty tired. I have wanted to say these things since it all happened. One of the best things that came of it, though, was those conversations. I had to humble myself and seek forgiveness, and I was forgiven. It was really an eye-opening, humbling experience. So please pray for me as we continue seeking the Lord's heart for our family, and for me as I try to work through some of my issues with what and who the church is. I will try to be praying for those of you who wrote me saying you identified with my struggle to find a body who accepts us and loves us as we know Christ loves us. The church will never succeed perfectly, but She is loved by her Groom who is faithful to complete every good work He has started. And we are a part of that. Wherever we do find we belong, we will try to make the church better, and sometimes we'll get it right, and sometimes we won't.

Thank you for reading this, and I hope it makes sense. I hope you have all had a good weekend, and that I'll start seeing you again on the road next weekend. I start a project with Chris Mason tomorrow, so I'll write again after our session. Good night.

insomnia...

yeah, 4 am, and I haven't fallen asleep yet. I've been reading, looking at Jeff and Nils from Wilco's pedalboards, watching Celebrity Justice and learning amazing things about the paparazzi and Tom Cruise's fake new love. Fascinating. You know, the Normals DID have a song on Dawson's Creek once. The only episode I ever saw. Our song played while Dawson was painting a fence. Every now and then I get a $6 check from reruns in Taiwan. No lie. It's always hilarious. I bet we're going to start selling tons of records over there any day now. Man, I'm tired. All right, going to try to sleep again. Oh, and here's a cute picture I took of Ella after her bath with my phone the other day...



And I'm just waiting on one really late pedal to come in the mail and my new pedal board will be done. I'll have pictures of that up as soon as it gets in. Also, Rick from Elloree guitars just built me a 12-string mando-guitar and a baritone. They're pretty great. I'll try to get some shots this week to show off his great work. Ok, here goes... Good night???

running out of titles for these things

This week has been a pretty fun one. I've had three different projects in the studio on different days, and they've all been unique and interesting. Monday, Randall, Garett and I began a new track for the Caedmon's record. There's this song that Randall wrote a while ago, that we've sung at church for years, and at the last minute the band decided to do it. In our version, I played bass and guitar, Randall played piano, and Garett played some killer tabla and shaker stuff. Danielle is going to sing it and I think it's going to turn out beautifully.

Then Billy Cerveny came over with a half-finished project of a friend of his. Basically, this older woman, who is an inner-city social worker who writes folk songs like Joni Mitchell, started a little album with somebody down in Florida. The recording was pretty rough, so Billy, Cason and I spent two days trying to clean it up, and adding little bits of love on it here and there. The songs were pretty cool, even if the source recordings were at times a bit frustrating. I know nothing about this woman, but I know from her songs that she loves other people pretty incredibly, and that she does it because Jesus loves her. It was a pretty humbling experience, and I hope I get to meet her someday.

Yesterday I started a record with a singer-songwriter from Knoxville, TN named Greg Adkins. I typically don't work on records without knowing the person first, (the few times I have I've had a couple awkward experiences) but this guy wrote me an e-mail and directed me to a website where he had been tracking an interesting project of his own. He decided to write and record a new song every week for a year. They're all up there, you can download all 52 of them. I just thought that was so cool that I should talk more with him. He came over to Nashville yesterday and we went through pre-production, which is going through each song and editing and arranging and making sure you have the right songs in their right places. It was a lot of fun. He's a cool guy with some pretty great songs. I think it's going to be a fun project.

Last night, Alison and I worked on our guest room/study/library room for a while. It's been a tornado zone since the baby and toe. I had a pile of books about three feet tall and three feet wide that needed to be shelved. All through high school I worked at a library, so I'm very anal about making sure all my books are in the right order. I use a fake junior dewey decibal system, because I'm so weird. Before I got married I was a pretty avid used book store junkie. I'd spend three bucks and come home with ten new ones every week. I'm trying to get back into it. I've found a used bookstore not too far from us that's pretty great. It's called Rhino Books. It's run by a couple old songwriter hippies. They wrote some huge song in the 60's, I can't remember which, and used the royalties to open the bookstore. I love Nashville.

Anway, in our cleaning we found old journals and notebooks, and spent quite a while reading them out loud to eachother and laughing at how awesome we were back when. We found some great early references to each other that were pretty funny. My favorite was when Alison had written that she and I had talked every day for a week, and maybe it's because "he likes me, or maybe he's just bored." We also read through our freshman years of college, and couldn't believe all the people that had been such big parts of our lives, or that we thought were so cool that turned out not to be, and all those early college relationships. It was a funny little walk down Memory Lane. Unfortunately, all my old journals were sprinkled with lyrics to songs that were, how should I say it, "not quite good enough for Better Than This" which means they were vomit-inducingly awful. She decided to make up new melodies and sing through them all. Little Mrs. Ten Toes was too fast for me to get it away from her, so I eventually had to give up and revel in my eighteen-year old songwriting awesomeness. And no, none of you will ever hear of these lyrics again. Forget they exist. These aren't the droids you're looking for.

Well, Greg's coming over in about 45 minutes and I need to shower, eat breakfast, and get ready for my day. Eggo's here we come!