I found this photo from my time at the Aashrum when we were tracking the Outloud EPand suddenly missed being there and being in a studio for that matter. To be honest I miss playing my guitar too; I used to play every single day, sometimes for hours, now I’m lucky if I pick one up more than once a week. I’ve hidden behind the excuse of “life happens” for too long in regards to writing, It’s time to start writing again. I think it was supposed to happen this way, to go through the metaphorical dessert of musical creativity to give me the overwhelming desire to begin again. To anyone who considers themselves a musician in The Church; I give you this piece of advice:

INPUT= OUTPUT. that’s it, it’s simple. We are endowed with the creativity of The Creator, but in order to be effective for the Kingdom, we must tap into Him daily, otherwise we’re wasting our time, and we’re wasting the time of those we have been entrusted to lead.

So create, but only after you’ve taken time to input.

Here’s a list of some of the gear our guitarists use:

AMPS

Fender Blues Jr.

Fender DeVille

Divided by 13

Egnater

Marshall

Vox AC30/AC15 handwired

Orange

GUITARS

Fender Stratocaster

Fender Tele

Gibson Les Paul

Gretsch

PEDALS

Drives/Distortion

Fulltone Fulldrive 2

Fulltone OCD

TS 808

Boss Blues Driver

Delays

Boss DD20

EHX Memory Man

Line 6 DL4

Comp’s

Barber TonePress

Keeley 2-knob

Keeley 4-knob

Boss C3

So what about your church?

If you’re an artist/creative than you know that sometimes there’s nothing more important than seeing your ideas/concepts come to life. To know that all of you and your teams hard work, from brainstorming to finished product, has paid off is one of the many rewards of hard work and dedication to an creative idea; this was the case last week when we were in a creative meeting and we were brainstorming ideas for a talk on “the naked truth about sex”.

Realizing that this is a middle school series we knew that there was only so far we could “push the envelope” with how suggestive we were with a sex theme; regardless we wanted to go for something that accomplished 2 key things:

1. Attention: we wanted to grab the students attention and direct it towards the stage/screens to prepare them for the talk.

2. Rememberability: is that even a word? Regardless, we wanted this piece to be one that students wouldn’t soon forget.

So we called our stage/set director and asked to borrow 2 mannequins, (cuz what church doesn’t keep mannequins around?). We then headed to our middle school director Josh Isenhardt’s house because his wife Amanda is a professional photographer and they had everything we needed to make this shoot awesome. The clothing came from my wife and I’s closet, and we had lots of help from Adam and intern Ryan dressing and positioning our “couple”. The photo’s were taken with a Canon 5D, edited in Light Room and the entire project came together in Adobe Premier.

for our team it wasn’t just about pushing the limits of what we could do, or go for a “wow factor”. We are endowed with creativity from The Creator, and we desperately want to use it, and feel a responsibility to do so.

So what about you? What’s your teams creative process? Come up with anything cool lately?

click image to download

Track List

1. Star Of Wonder

2. O Come O Come Emmanuel

3. Luke 2: 8-14

4. Glory In The Highest

5. The First Noel

6. Angels We Have Heard On High

7. Luke 2: 15-16

8. O The Glory Of It All

9. Little Drummer Boy

10. Silent Night

11. All Creation Sing (Joy To The World)

12. Adore Him

13. Prayer

14. Light Of The World

15. Here I Am To Worship

16. Shine

*legal stuff

You are an artist, you think, you dream, you create. You are endowed with the power of creativity from The Creator. Now, create.

Creativity in its simplest form is always the most riveting

thanks Carlos