Deja Vu (Project Serve Welcome Tea)

It wasn't so long ago that a fresh-from-Sydney graduate was introduced to a parachurch organization, and auditioned for a place in the performing arts ministry's Project Serve. I was mostly charismatic with little knowledge of the bible. I head-banged, jumped at least a foot off the ground, and believed that distortion and worship could co-exist....

Read More

Pedalboard Revisions (aka The Never-ending Story Part 20-something)

A moment of tonal dissatisfaction, a touch of OCD, and realizing that a compressor after the EP booster actually cuts out too much of the nice frequencies gave me the impetus to rearrange my pedalboard. And behold, I finally did it; I squeezed my entire overdrive section onto the first row. While having better visual appeal, the process flow is...

Read More

The Good, Bad, and Ugly

I had a rehearsal with the incredible Jordan Wei and Richard Tan, and took the opportunity to try out various combinations of my guitars/pedals/amp. I thought running the acoustic into my pedalboard, and running the compressor will help keep the acoustic in the mix. I also thought of running my Variax through the analog pedalboard to A/B against my...

Read More

Shredding on a Tele

God is gracious and good. Even in the midst of the wrist injury in my picking hand, He continually provides ways for me to continue playing the guitar, and even improve on my technique to be a player who can play more cleanly. I've only recently realized that my left hand is far stronger than I had previously taken notice of.  Its legato...

Read More

Snippets

Every weekend is a great time of serving, gigging, fellowshipping, and just living in general. Oh to treasure these days. Friday: Christmas Under The Stars, Poly Ministry Saturday: Shema live at Olive Vine Sunday: Playing at service feels like "Don't Forget The Solo" "You can either keep Jesus and lose the sin, or keep the sin and lose...

Read More

Dialling PODX3 Tones

The little black corner of the room I was a devout multi-fx user for a great bulk of my life as a guitarist. I figured that it was possible to get by with emulation While the stock tones were usable in only certain situations, they were nowhere near as organic as what the PODX3 clips were suggesting through my guitars (I suppose that's the beauty...

Read More

Simplicity

One guitar into one amp. The purest signal possible, with no pedals to suck tone, no power supplies to generate noise, and no patch cables waiting to die on you at the most inopportune time. I occasionally play with this setup when I know that the venue provides a decent amp (which is a pretty broad category in my book; I'm content with both solid-state...

Read More

Reviving Jennifer

My acoustic is getting old. As of this year, she's been in my possession for the past 10 years. I practically grew up playing this guitar; I learnt many radio pop songs from the Backstreet Boys, Savage Garden, Richard Marx and N'Sync. I learnt my first worship songs from Hillsong, Sonicflood, and Avalon. I got hooked on the alternative sound forever...

Read More

Tech Noob Moments

I don't know what happened. Poof! My top navigation bar just disappeared, and for an hour I just couldn't get it back. I must have mistyped something in the HTML (which, at this moment, has been modified beyond recognition from its original code), and now, no matter how much I try to use the Blogger menu to change the layout style, it just won't show. There...

Read More

Restringing Order

A quick tip for restringing guitars: the order you string them makes a difference in maintaining or derailing your setup, depending on your guitar. I have had the good fortune of owning guitars with decent necks that don't change with temperature fluctuations, and I keep them in a pretty dehumidified environment. Even my Yamahas, the cheapest of...

Read More