Good day musically yesterday. The reconstituted band is cruising along, and I feel we are solidly on the road toward some really good sounds. Thursday's rehearsal went well, but we were down quite a few singers and my wife on keys because of various things, mainly some kind of stomach flu-type illness floating around. We got through rehearsal pretty well, our only problem seemed to be consistently getting the rhythm of Charlie Hall's arrangement of The Solid Rock.

Come Sunday morning, our lead guitarist is late, but he's so awesome anyway. Why? Because he had that nasty aforementioned illness and showed up to play anyway. We're still experimenting with his sound, and he brought a PRS electric and his acoustic to both rehearsal and sound check to mix it up some. Sound check went ok, but it seems that our EQ is waaaay off when the room is empty. It always seems to level out and sound better once the place fills up.

Service time comes, and it takes us a bit to get in the groove. There were a technical glitch with the on-screen lyrics, but that was resolved pretty quickly and we moved on. The Solid Rock was much better than it had been before, and the rest of the set was pretty solid. We had lots of visitors again yesterday, and the spirit of participation among some of those "new folks" was greater than most of our regulars. Like I've said before, the changes we're making over time here are just setting us up to receive the myriad masses who are moving out our way.

Our lead guitarist and I were talking afterward, and we (mostly he) came to the realization we usually take two or three songs to get warm and into the groove. I think we may start experimenting with playing pre-service music live rather than off an iTunes playlist and see if that gets us warm and fully engaged for the service time itself.

Check the list:

• O Worship the King // Robert Grant, Chris Tomlin
• The Solid Rock // More, Bradbury, arr. Charlie Hall
• Cannot Say Enough // MercyMe
• Let My Words Be Few // Matt & Beth Redman
• O How I Love Jesus // Frederick Whitfield, arr. Jeff M. Miller

Next week: my debut on mandolin!

Maybe….

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