Music To Pray By

Four weeks in. Podcast 74 is up, and the cadence I’ve been hoping for is starting to feel like it just is — not something I’m muscling into existence anymore. Same compile as Podcast 73: live worship piano from the morning streams, stitched into a single listen. This week’s episode is drawn from the streams on April 13–15 — we’re running about two weeks behind in the release cycle, and that’s honestly fine. The point is the rhythm of getting one out each week, not which days the recording happened. If you’re new here, the launch-week post walks through what Music To Pray By is and the tech behind it. Cleaner Audio Coming for the Church Shorts A handful of times a week I post a short clip from one of our services at The Connection Church — me serving keys at Sunday morning, our Wednesday gathering, or our Saturday gathering. If you’ve watched any of those, you’ve probably noticed the audio quality on the church clips never quite matched the morning streams from home. That’s about to change. This past week we finished a cutover at TCC from an analog signal chain (Mainstage → Apogee Symphony I/O → analog runs → Allen & Heath board) to a fully-digital Dante network. End-to-end, my keys now travel from Mainstage on my MacBook Pro out to the Allen & Heath board without ever leaving the digital domain — no analog-to-digital conversion to color the signal, no cable noise floor, no impedance loss. The bonus: I can record the stream mix straight into Logic alongside an isolated track of just my keys. Going forward, the worship shorts from every service I serve at TCC — Sunday, Wednesday, and Saturday — should sound dramatically cleaner. Same Disklavier-grade signal philosophy, just from the church side. What I’ve Been Noticing Monday I rolled out the next batch of 15 Prayer Shorts — built from Podcast 73’s MIDI, played back through the Disklavier as the actual instrument under the scripture and the prayer. With this batch we’ve crossed 44 prayers published since this started. Two a day, every day, 8 AM and 8 PM CT. By the time you’re reading this they’re still rolling out, with the last one of the week landing Monday evening. What I keep noticing is the shape of the loop: every Friday morning of playing eventually becomes a week of small prayers — first the podcast that compiles the recording, then the prayer shorts built from the same MIDI. Nothing is wasted. Every session God gives me at the piano gets a second life carrying scripture into someone’s morning or evening commute. That’s the part that humbles me most about this whole project — I just sit down and worship, and somehow He keeps multiplying it. If you’ve been praying along with the shorts — thank you. If you haven’t found them yet, search musictoprayby (one word, no spaces) on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or X. Pick whichever platform you already use. The Next Album — Hallowed Be Your Name One thing I haven’t talked about here yet: I’m working on the next album. Working title is Hallowed Be Your Name, and I already have two candidate songs in early shape. The goal is to have it out by the end of the year — Lord willing. I’ll share more as the songs take form. For now, the big rock is just keeping the morning rhythm faithful and letting the album come together in the margins. If God wants it out by December, He’ll make the time appear. Closing — A Prayer of Faithfulness I’ll leave you with one of last week’s Prayer Shorts. This one has been on my heart all week. It’s drawn from Lamentations 3, written from the literal ashes of Jerusalem — and it’s still the verse that produced the hymn we sing every Sunday: Great is Thy faithfulness. Lord, my heart is weary, but Your mercies are new this morning. The faithful love of the Lord never ends! His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning. I say to myself, “The Lord is my inheritance; therefore, I will hope in him!” The Lord is good to those who depend on him, to those who search for him. So it is good to wait quietly for salvation from the Lord. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Great is Your faithfulness, Lord. You have not changed — and You will not. Amen. — Lamentations 3:22-26 · Hebrews 13:8 (NLT) Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying.

Three weeks in. Podcast 73 is up, and the rhythm I’ve been hoping for is starting to feel real. The 6 AM streams are still rolling every weekday, and I’m more convinced than ever that this morning hour belongs to prayer. Podcast 73 is compiled the same way Podcast 72 was — the past week of live worship sessions stitched into a single listen. If you’re new here, the launch-week post walks through what Music To Pray By is and the tech behind it. Logic Pro’s Auto Tempo — the timing problem, solved The thing that’s been quietly eating my time every week is timing. The piano sessions are recorded to MIDI off the Disklavier, and that MIDI is what feeds that week’s podcast, which in turn becomes the source for the Pray the Bible Shorts — the Disklavier plays the part back as real piano underneath the scripture and the prayer. The catch: I don’t play to a click. I sit down and worship. So when the MIDI lands in Logic, the bars and beats are nowhere near what I actually played, and tightening it up by hand — dragging notes, slicing measures, fighting the grid — could easily chew up an entire day or more, and up to this point — still learning the new tool — I’ve spent a minimum of 10 hours on each podcast from start to finish. This week I finally sat down with Logic Pro’s Auto Tempo. Instead of manually correcting perceived timing issues by hand, Auto Tempo listens to what I played and bends the project tempo to match — no dragging notes, no slicing measures, no fighting the grid. I haven’t taken a full podcast through with this knowledge yet, but based on what I’ve done so far I’m estimating it’ll cut a minimum of 8 hours of MIDI editing down to roughly 3–4 hours, and probably less once I get more fluent with the tool. That’s a quiet, unglamorous tool change, but it’s the kind of thing that decides whether a weekly cadence is sustainable or whether it grinds me into the ground. Claude Cowork + Claude Code — the editing pipeline A smaller slice of time savings — maybe ten percent on top — comes from the AI pipeline I’ve been building. Between Claude Cowork on the desktop and Claude Code running headless, the entire post-production chain — silence trimming, the album-art intro card, the 1080p re-encode, the MP3 extraction with a clean fade to silence at the tail, the WordPress publish to musictoprayby.com, the cross-publish to piano-music.org, the Cloudflare cache purge, the social fan-out to YouTube, X, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook — all of it now happens from a handful of commands. Auto Tempo is what really moves the needle on time. Claude just keeps the publish steps from becoming the new bottleneck once the timing work is done. I’m mentioning this not because the tools are the point but because removing the friction is what makes the consistency possible. If publishing took twelve hours every week, this would have died at episode three. Because it doesn’t, I get to keep showing up. What Matters Music To Pray By has been in my heart for a long time. The tech I keep writing about — Auto Tempo, the AI workflow, the Disklavier, the MIDI — is in service of one thing: giving you a quiet place to meet with God, every morning, on whichever platform you already use. The podcast is the heart of it — a full week of worship, gathered into one listen. From it, next week’s Pray the Bible Shorts are drawn, scripture set against the same playing. The week after, another podcast, and another set of shorts drawn from that. One body of work feeding the next, and Lord willing, a steadier and steadier rhythm of prayer woven into ordinary mornings. Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying.

Two weeks in. Podcast 72 is here, and a rhythm is starting to settle in. The morning streams have kept rolling at 6 AM every weekday, and each one teaches me something new — about the piano, about the prayer, about what it looks like to sit down at a grand piano and worship while the rest of the world is still waking up. What started as “can I even pull this off?” has turned into something I look forward to every morning. Podcast 72 is compiled the same way Podcast 71 was — live worship sessions from this past week bundled into a single listen. If you’re new here, the launch-week post walks through what Music To Pray By is and the tech behind it. The Prayer Shorts — Pray Often, Pray Scripture The biggest new thing this week: the Prayer Shorts. Every Monday I’m publishing a batch of short 1–2 minute videos, each one built around a single passage of scripture and a short prayer. The idea is simple — twice a day, take two minutes, read a verse, pray it back. Morning and evening. That’s the rhythm I’d love to see take root in all of us, and these shorts are my attempt to make it easy. The music underneath those shorts is Podcast 71. After each podcast is finished, the MIDI from those sessions gets cleaned up and played back through the Disklavier so the shorts get the real instrument in the background rather than a sample. Quiet piano worship, gently carrying the scripture and the prayer. Going forward, this is the pattern: every week, the latest podcast becomes the soundtrack for the next week’s shorts. Podcast 72 will live under next week’s batch. Podcast 73 under the one after that. One body of work feeding the next. If you haven’t seen the shorts yet, they’re on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and X — whichever platform you already use. Pray along. What Matters A lot of what I’ve been writing these last couple weeks has been tech — the Yamaha DC7XE3 Disklavier, the MIDI pipeline, the signal chain, the automation. All of that matters, but none of it is the point. Music To Pray By has been in my heart for a long time. This chapter is the next iteration of it — more consistent, more reachable, and finally landing in front of people who weren’t around when this started. When I sit down at 6 AM, the goal is to give you a quiet place to meet with God. Everything else is in service of that. Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying.

This is it — the first official podcast from the new era of Music To Pray By. Podcast 71 is compiled from the first three live worship sessions, recorded Good Friday through Easter Sunday 2026. If you’ve been following along, you know that we launched live streaming on Good Friday, and those first three sessions hold a special place — recorded during the most sacred weekend of the Christian year. There’s something about playing worship music during the passion and resurrection of Christ that carries a weight and an intimacy that’s hard to put into words. The music is mostly original — pieces that came out of those live prayer sessions as the Spirit led. You’ll also hear a few familiar hymns and worship tunes that I naturally fell back on during the live recordings. When you’re playing live for 30 minutes straight, you go where the music takes you, and sometimes that means leaning into melodies that have carried the church for generations. A note on quality: you’ll hear some imperfections. The good news is that each week the quality improves as I refine the automated MIDI cleanup and processing pipeline I’ve been building. Every iteration of edits I work through gets incorporated back into the automated tools, so the post-production process gets smarter over time. What you’re hearing in Podcast 71 is the very first pass of this system — it only gets better from here. Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying. This ministry exists because God called it into being during Holy Week 2026, and I’m grateful for every ear and every heart that joins in. Soli Deo Gloria.

This comprises of the songs left out of the Music To Pray By album "My Father in Heaven". This is the first podcast recorded on my new Yamaha DC7XE3 Grand Piano as well as all new mics and pre-amps. I believe it is the best sounding piano audio I've ever captured. I hope and pray it inspires you to pray and spend time in our Heavenly Father's Presence.

The last podcast to be recorded on my Yamaha DC3M4. It goes away tomorrow, and though it’s only been 4 years, I feel as though I have a tremendous amount of history with that wonderful piano. I actually had to pick and choose from about 2 hours worth of recordings since I’m not sure if the old format will be supported on the new piano. I’m truly excited about the capabilities and the sound of the new Yamaha DC7XE3Pro, but it’s also sad to see my old piano leave the studio. I’m sure it will end up in good hands! About the podcast – it’s all original except the last song. I had to choose between two really good covers and ended up going with “Oceans” by Hillsong United. It is one of my favorite songs, and though I feel like I barely did the original justice, I hope to do another rendition in a future podcast.  I did a lot of playing with this mix, which will likely change noticeably with the new piano. I wanted to make sure the last podcast from the DC3M4 was as good as it could possibly sound, and I think I accomplished that. I have a number of things to share with you so I apologize in advance for all the non-music posts that are to come over the next week or so. I pray this podcast is a blessing to you.

Yet another all-original podcast. I did use some pretty familiar chord progressions, but I also tried out some new styles. I’m definitely looking forward to trying this podcast out tomorrow morning during my devotional. Sorry this came a little late. I spent way more time editing than I have in the past largely due to Logic Pro X, the new version of pro audio software I use. Some of the editing techniques I use don’t work the same way unfortunately so I spent bit of time finding workarounds. May the Joy and Peace of our LORD overwhelm you as you listen and stay your mind on Him!

You may not hear any familiar melodies as this podcast is mostly original. I've adopted a fairly new process to recording the podcast. Rather than attempting to record all 30+ minutes in one sitting, I've just sat at the piano and pressed "record" as the Holy Spirit has led throughout the past quarter. It has been working out okay so far. It also gives me an opportunity to select the best recordings out of many, and there was a really bad 15 minutes of recording I was happy not to have included in this podcast. You may notice that it may have a slightly different sound than previous podcasts. I'm still perfecting the audio recording and mixing aspect of the podcast even after almost 5 years. I pray this podcast encourages you to spend some quality time with our Maker.

I think this might end up being my favorite podcast to date. What God has brought me through over the past 7 months is expressed in this music since even today I fail to grasp the words to properly convey what God has done in me. Even the technical part of getting this recorded was met with enormous opposition. I had hoped to post this on Wednesday, but two completely separate devices in my studio failed - one of them is still dead. Praise the LORD it is finally done as I silently hope my computer doesn't crash before I click "Publish". :-) The two familiar songs I used go way back. The titles are "Holy, Holy, Holy LORD", and "I Love You LORD". I also wrote song with the primary lyrics being, "I stay my mind on You God". I hope to someday make it into a full blown song with verses and a bridge, but I'm not really a lyricist, nor was Moses a speaker so we'll see where it goes. I pray this podcast blesses you as much as it has blessed me and thank you for your patience. I'll post an update within the next couple of weeks regarding some of my future plans for this ministry and life in general though His Kingdom will I seek first.

In this podcast, I used songs Soundwave prepared for DCYC - they are "Strong Enough to Save", "Your Name High", "Forever Reign", "Always", "Your Great Name", and "Our God". I think this is probably the first podcast ever to be original-free, although, it does contain some originality. Those who like consistently quite and peaceful podcasts may not enjoy this one as much since I get a bit loud in some parts. It may be a few months before the next podcast is posted, but I'll try to make it softer. I thank all of you who continue to use this ministry to enhance your prayer time. I'm blown away at the number of downloads that happen on a daily basis.

What a crazy couple of weeks it has been! I won't bore you with all the details, but the end result is I finally have a new podcast. You'd think after 3 years of doing this I'd have it down but I don't. This podcast required a massive amount of editing, but I think it turned out okay. I did find some ways to improve the audio over the previous podcasts. The only issue is there's too big of a dynamic range so had to go a little overboard on the compression and limiting. I wish I could commit to doing these more frequently, but with work at AT&T consuming more and more of my time, family, Soundwave, and {hopefully} a Music To Pray By album by early 2013, I'm going to keep it at once a Month for now. God bless all y'all who are listening, and please keep me and my family in your prayers.

I finished mixing the Soundwave album last week so I'm back at it - thanks for your patience. This podcast, I only used "Hosannah" for a brief period. The rest is original - some from previous podcasts and some that's fresh and new. An interesting stat about this podcast is it's the first to be exactly 30 minutes long! I admit, I stretched the end out a little, but it was already pretty close. I added a bit more gain both at the pre amp and in software using a little more compression and gain on the limiter to try to even out the level a bit. There is quite a bit more dynamics in this podcast compared to the previous two or three. This time, I wanted to keep the dynamics as original as possible, especially during the soft parts, and I didn't change the level on some of the louder midi notes like I have in the past. I think it turned out better this way. I'm sure I'll get better at holding back more as I record so please bear with me as I continue learn and grow in this ministry.

I used quite a few worship songs during this podcast - "Give Me Faith", "Our God", "I Lift My Hands", and "Mighty To Save". In a way, a lot of this podcast sounds repetitive to me compared to previous podcasts. It's becoming a little challenging to keep things unique considering there is already over 30 hours of podcasts. :-) If this podcast inspires you to pray, mission accomplished.

Still searching for the best mic placement and mix, but I think its getting there. Most all the tunes are repeat or new originals. You may recognize one or two of them. I pray that every note played will encourage you to seek God's Kingdom first. Peace.

This podcast has familiar melodies from others, but I believe it has uniqueness. I did use one melody from the chorus of "Pour My Love on You". I used a new mic and mic positions, and there was definitely more dynamics than usual, but this was my heart of worship at the time. Happy 4th of July!

This podcast, I used the songs, "Came to My Rescue" and "I Will Exalt". Since I actually recorded this podcast over a month ago, I had to refer to planning center for the song names. Interesting fact: this podcast contains 16,782 notes, and I probably touched 80-90% of them during the editing process. :-) I either need to learn how to play better or be less picky about timing issues. I hope you enjoy the podcast.

It's finally finished! The songs used are mostly original. I did play a familiar melody at the tail end. Most of it is a little more fast-paced than the norm. May you continue to be inspired to pray through my offering of worship to our wonderful Creator. To Him be the glory!

This week we had Wednesday Night worship at The Connection Church so I used quite a few songs from that service - "Mighty To Save", "Came To My Rescue", and "Awakening", a new worship song by Chris Tomlin that is pretty awesome. Be sure to check it out if you haven't heard it yet. A couple originals are included as well. One was from a previous podcast. I'm still on a quest for the perfect piano mix. Mic placement and EQ has been changing every podcast. I really need to swap out my NT1000 with something else. It isn't very balanced across the frequency spectrum. Maybe I'll be able to afford the mic I'd like to replace it with in a couple months. Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and the rest will be added. I pray this podcast assists you in seeking!

I used only one song this podcast. It’s by Robbie Seay, and it’s called “Crazy Love”. The rest is original. This podcast is actually a second take since the first didn’t record properly. I always thought recording to MIDI would eliminate having to re-record podcasts, but not true. I did learn that the Disklavier does not like any kind of MIDI signal coming into it when recording so hopefully this will be the last time this happens. I do believe the second take turned out better than the first – thank you Holy Spirit. Draw near to Him and He WILL draw near to you. Not only is that in the Bible, but I have witnessed it first-hand.

I used two songs from last week’s service for today’s podcast – “Forever Reign”, and “God You Reign”. The rest is original. I used a different acoustic piano sample for editing the MIDI this week, and it actually disguised a lot of the small timing issues which is good and bad. The good is it took me half the time to edit (~4 hours instead of ~8). The bad is I notice them when playing back on the DC3, but I’m pretty sure most people won’t notice. For those who do, you’ll have the CD to look forward to. My plan is to make it as perfect as possible. Stay tuned! As you pray, please remember to pray for Japan.

We did a new song called "Our God" by Chris Tomlin in church last week, and it's a beautiful song so that's what I started this podcast with. The rest is somewhat original. A familiar melody came to mind towards the end, but I couldn't pinpoint where it came from. Feel free to leave a comment if you recognize it.

This week I used a new song we played at church called “Came to My Rescue”. It is a wonderful worship song and it would be worthwhile to check out the lyrics if you haven’t heard them before. I also played “Amazing Love” and “You are My King”. The rest is original. Even though I didn’t spend as much time fixing timing issues as the last podcast, I did spend most of the weekend editing. I hope and pray one day this will be my full time job. God bless all of yall out there who are listening and may He continue to draw near to you as you draw near to Him!

I used new mics and new mic placements for this podcast, and have to say, this may be the best podcast yet in my opinion. God is so good! It is such a huge blessing an honor to be serving Him in this way. Everything but the beginning of the last song is original. Pray without ceasing!

It seems like ages ago that the last podcast was posted even though it's only been 4 weeks. The piano was recently tuned and is sounding wonderful. I've had this podcast ready for a while now. There were some issues with the sustain pedal after we got the technical problems resolved so I had to fine-tune the sustain MIDI data in a number of locations, which may be noticeable in some places. You'll hear the melodies of "This Church", and "God of this City" as well as an original. I pray this podcast is a blessing to all who listens - a great deal of time went into this one.

Merry Christmas! Well, this is the place to come when you're burnt out on all the Christmas music being played everywhere. I had planned on adding a Christmas song or two, but that didn't work out. Everything this week is original.

This week is all original since the church set list is pretty much all Christmas music. There were a couple that weren't Christmas songs, but they weren't really appropriate. Well, maybe one was. I guess I might do it for the next podcast since the set lists for the rest of the month are going to be full of Christmas songs.

A podcast subscriber suggested recording without the usual increase in dynamics so I gave it a shot. My wife has actually suggested this as well a while back. I hope you enjoy it. I used the following songs: "Real", "I Will Rise", "Healer", "None but Jesus", and one melody I don't recall the song it came from. It wasn't really planned. I hope you have a wonderful Thanks Giving!

I used "Jesus Saves, "All I Need is You", and "Give Me Faith" this week. Again, I had the mic / audio interface problem, but I didn't discover it till it was too late so no second-take this time. I tried to compensate by automating the pan, but it's still not like I'd like it. This issue also caused me to use a bit more compression than I'd normally use. Hope it's not too much of a distraction. I'm may just use my keyboard next podcast if I can't figure out why this is happening. I'll be sure to keep you posted.

I used the following songs: “Your Grace is Enough”, “King of Glory”, and sort of used the chord progressions of ”Own Little World”. Once again, there ended up being a lot of timing issues in this podcast. Can’t wait to get the Disklavier. That will make timing much less of an issue. This podcast is actually a second take. My first take got botched for some strange reason. The left channel kept fading in and out. I tried to use automation to correct it, but it was so random it was easier to just record again. It could be the pre-amps in the audio interface, or an issue with phantom power. Hopefully it’s isolated to inputs 7 and 8. I moved the mics to 3 and 4, played a sine wave for about 10 minutes, and there was no variation in amplitude. The Motu 896HD is almost 7 years old so I guess it may be time to look into upgrading.

Happy 10-10-10! Did you know that in some areas, the number of people getting married today is 10 times the norm! I happen to be at one of those weddings today. My best bud since the 7th grade is getting married! It was really hard to leave my wonderful wife with our 4-day-old son, Jacob, and our 2-year-old Sanban, but thankfully my mom is there to help out while I’m gone. At any rate, this podcast, I used the following songs: “Revelation Song”, “The Motions”, and “All I Need Is You”. Since my time was limited with the new baby and all, I wasn’t able to do any flex-time editing, but hopefully my lack of timing won’t be too distracting. God bless!

There are quite a few familiar melodies from previous podcasts in this one. The only song I sort of used was "Your Love is Amazing". I didn't spend as much time editing this week since I kind of ran out of time. Yoko and I just hit our eleventh anniversary, which is really exciting. We went out to eat at our favorite restaurant and sort of took it easy this weekend. I hope this week's podcast is a blessing to you!

I didn't get to spend as much time as I would have liked editing this podcast, but I think it still turned out okay. I'll be out all day on Sunday for a Soundwave gig in Waco so I had to get everything done on Saturday. I only used the song "Jesus Saves" at the end. The rest is original - some melodies may even sound a little familiar from previous podcasts. I pray it inspires you to draw near to God!

This podcast, I used "Beautiful The Blood" and "You'll Come". The rest of it is original. I tried some different editing and mixing tools so it may sound a little different than previous podcasts. I hope this isn't distracting.

The following songs were used in this podcast - "Tear Down The Walls", "Your Name High", and the Soundwave original that we just recorded in the studio, "Confidence". There are some original melodies as well. I feel like this podcast turned out really well. I hope you enjoy it.

The only familiar song used was "Glory to God", and I mixed in some original stuff. There are some pieces of some new Soundwave songs that'll be on the next album we're working on currently. The rest is original - there might be a familiar melody or two.

The only familiar song used was "Glory to God", and I mixed in some original stuff. There are some pieces of some new Soundwave songs that'll be on the next album we're working on currently. The rest is original - there might be a familiar melody or two.

The following songs were used in this podcast: "Your Grace Is Enough", "Marvelous Light", "Sing, Sing, Sing", and "This is the Air I Breathe". Throughout recording, the mic placement changed slightly so there are some noticeable variances in the tone. The next podcast will have a more consistent tone throughout since I believe I've found the "sweet spot".

Felt a little rusty recording this one after 6 months off. It's great to be back at it. There's a pretty even mix of original melodies and contemporary songs like "God You Reign", and "God Of This City".

I Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. We certainly did hanging out with the family. I just realized that we didn't take any pictures. We really need to designate someone to do that next time we get together because there are so many memories to be captured. This is the last podcast of 2009, and it is all original. I hope you enjoy it.

This podcast, I used a completely different setup to record. I'll blog more about it later. I used a number of familiar tunes. It was basically our set list for church this Sunday, and I think it turned out okay. There are some sounds in the background that got picked up by my new setup in the beginning, but they shouldn't be too distracting. I hope this podcast inspires you to spend more time in prayer. LORD knows we all should be when you consider these crazy times we live in.

I decided to change the naming from "week" to "podcast" since these will no longer be weekly. However, I will attempt to record one every other week. This podcast was actually recorded last Monday, but I wasn't able to finish editing and mastering till this evening. The only recognizable song used is "Revelation Song" which I think I've done a few times. I also had issues with the R-09HR so I'm about to move to a traditional recording platform, which I will blog about sometime this week. This podcast is probably not as inspiring as previous podcasts partly due to the sound issues. If it's used during prayer, it probably won't be that noticeable, but I apologize for this. Just know that the best is yet to come.

This was supposed to be posted yesterday, but it has been a very busy weekend. I thought that after the exam, I'd have a lot more time to do stuff, but that certainly is not the case. At any rate, it was certainly a change in pace to sit down at the freshly tuned grand piano and worship for 30 minutes. I played a number of familiar melodies, but they're all kind of mixed together so I won't try to mention them all. It sure is great to be back to living life! Have a great week!

This day last year was my first post to the Music To Pray By Blog and now, a year later, there have been close to 30,000 downloads of 16 hours of recorded piano music to pray by. This is truly a God thing. This week was kind of a half-way point between when I started really studying for the CCIE and the dredded date of October 2nd so I took a break. Since mid-May, I've put in right at 300 hours of study, and I've made a great deal of progress. It may not be the 40 hours a week I was shooting for, but it's the quality of study that has helped. This podcast, I used the following songs: "Audience of One", "God With Us", "Mighty to Save", and a small piece of "The Motions" at the tail end. It's been so long, I'm starting to feel a little rusty. Gloves will be off after the exam. Jeremy has already booked some Soundwave gigs right after so I'm looking forward to getting back to my normal life. 2 more months to go!

During this podcast, I used the songs: "Hosanna", "Mighty to Save", and a new song called "Forever". We're doing it for the first time at church tomorrow. It's a great song and it's not the one yall might be familiar with - it just happens to have the same title. Some of the songs are repeats, but we've done them recently at church and it just seemed right. It was truly a joy to sit down at the grand and worship our Savior today. I hope and pray this podcast inspires you to spend some time in His presence. God bless.

This one is a little longer than usual. I just didn't feel like stopping. I used a number of familiar melodys and chord progressions in this week's podcast. I hope you enjoy it.

The bi-weekly podcast is here. I decided to get it done today so that I can focus on studying for the CCIE tomorrow after church and group. I missed the "record" button again. I ended up playing for over an hour today so that I'd have something to post. The first 30 minutes may have been a little better than the later 30 due to a little bit of frustration after realizing the first 30 minutes didn't get recorded, but hopefully it doesn't show in the podcast. I used "Mighty to Save" and "Lead me to the Cross", with some original stuff. I've been meaning to blog about all the home improvement that's been happening here at the Johns residence, but haven't had the chance. I should get to it either tomorrow or Monday. God bless!

I've gotta make this quick - Don is out there working hard without me and has been for the past couple of hours while I finish up this week's podcast. I used a few songs from Sunday morning service - "You Said", and "There will be a day". I also used a Soundwave song since we had practice on Friday. Live free! Pray hard!

Sunday morning worship was awesome this morning! We had a new guitar player who rocked the house! What a great sermon by Cole too! This week, I did some familiar songs: "Revelation Song", "Love Story", "Abba Father", and "Here I am to Worship", and all I can say is what a wonderful way to end a great weekend. I had loads of fun chillin' with the 'lil one while Yoko took a much needed break with her friends Saturday, and we went out to eat at the greatest Tex Mex restaurant in Texas after church and spent most of the day looking at new houses. Good times.... Hope you enjoy the podcast!

Keeping it short this week - I used the songs "I Can Only Imagine", and "God of this City". I know I've played these songs before, but we did them at church today so I decided to do them again. God bless!

Sorry about getting this posted a little late. I recorded it this afternoon after church, but had to head over to the Petreas for our small group Super Bowl Bash. It was a blast, but left a little early so I could mix and post the MTPB blog. This week I used the songs "Audience of One", "Your Name", and "None but Jesus" all of which we played during this Sunday morning worship service which turned out to be completely awesome! In closing, I'd just like to say how disappointed I am that the Cardinals couldn't hold off the Steelers offence the last few minutes of the 4th quarter. Ah well. Either way, this year's Super Bowl was historic. The Steelers are the first to win 6 Super Bowls, and this is the first Super Bowl the Cardinals have ever made it to. I was kind of hoping that the Dallas Cowboys would be the first to take 6, but they sure did blow it this season. I can see my collegues at work laughing while they read this post because they really know how ignorant I am when it comes to football. Anyway, probably should have made all the football talk a seperate post, but I pray this podcast blesses you, and hope you have a great week!