Revamped Live Setup

I’ve redone my live setup again, thanks to some new gear. My new setup has some minor issues with the software that I’m still working out, but it’s designed to be a lot easier to expand and tweak on the fly, as well as making actual performance easy.

Great Keyboard Playing – Recommendations Wanted

As a developing keyboard player, I’m realizing I haven’t had enough exposure to great examples of how to play. I’ve developed my own piano style, but am trying to figure out how to fit into a rock/pop/gospel/funk/reggae setting (our music at church is typically rock/pop with the odd song played in one of the other styles), and don’t have nearly enough exposure to B3 and Farfisa organ, Rhodes, Wurlitzer, and synth music.

I’m looking for recommendations of music in any of those styles. I’m not at all interested in jazz at this point: I have a pretty good handle on what jazz pianists, organists, and keyboard players are doing, and most of it is far beyond my skill. Ideally, song titles are best, since I don’t have the budget to buy a large number of albums (and my iPod is relatively close to being full). I’m not necessarily looking for blazingly fast solos (although those are good too), but more for groove and background parts and examples of innovative sounds. I’m open to suggestions from any genre, although the stuff I’ll use most at the moment will likely come from rock, prog rock, and pop. For organ, rhodes, and wurlitzer music, I’m especially interested in songs that use the instruments in less conventional ways or use effects, as I already have good examples of those instruments played clean or, for the organ, with heavy distortion.

As a secondary goal, music that best captures the band as a whole is good too (for example, Smoke on the Water shows off Jon Lord’s organ playing somewhat but is also Deep Purple’s best-known title).

Let me know what I should listen to!

Lara Croft: Armed Gunman

I came across this article this morning. It describes a UK man who was arrested and held in jail for 13 hours because police officers, responding to a nuisance call he’d placed, mistook a Lara Croft dummy for a gunman.

Six Degrees of Wikipedia

A programmer at a Dublin university wrote this code. It queries a cached version of the Wikipedia dataset and finds the shortest distance between two pages. Very interesting for anyone who appreciates graph theory or likes to play “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”.

Playing on a worship team

I play various instruments on worship teams at church, and as such, was involved in a discussion last month about the things we were doing right and things that could be improved on. As follow-up, someone e-mailed a link to some YouTube videos by worship leader Paul Baloche that raised some interesting points, as well as many that I disagree with.