Out of the Box

First of all, this is my third blog post in a week and I'm not out "touring."  I'm very impressed with myself.

Now onto the real content...

Any of you who are musicians I'm sure get into a creative rut.  I find that it's a really easy place to get into for me, especially playing worship music.  This has two reasons for me: 1) I often play the same songs over and over again and have created my parts for these songs.  2) Worship sets are usually only 4-6 songs.  I have a "bag of tricks" that will get me through that big a set without challenging me to keep working beyond that.

That rut is not a good place to be, especially when I aspire to doing studio work and having to be creative on the fly.

Tonight, I resolved to take steps to move out of the rut, and I have to say that I'm really happy with the results.

The first step in the process began a few days ago.  I've been listening to a few albums lately that have been blowing my mind.  The main one is a Belmont band called Lorien.  I played in a School of Music ensemble with their keyboard player last year.  They just released that CD a few weeks ago and I have been listening to it non-stop.  There is some fantastic guitar work on that album.  It's not incredibly difficult, it's just tasteful.  That statement is what I hope people say about my playing, so I took some ideas from them.

The other album is U2's No Line on the Horizon.  The Edge is still one of the most amazing guitarists out there in terms of sounds and tasteful licks.  I love Magnificent off that album.

The second step was taking myself out of my comfort zone gear wise.  For most worship sets, I use the exact same setup: my Les Paul and my Dr. Z Maz 18Jr.  This afternoon I was learning a country tune, so I had my Tele plugged into my Dr. Z Stangray.

For those of you who aren't guitar geeks like me, the Stangray was designed by Dr. Z and Brad Paisley.  A tele plugged into that amp is pretty much instant amazing country tone.  This is not generally ideal for worship music.

As I was playing this afternoon, I tweaked some settings on the amp and my pedals and ended up with a great rock tone.  It was completely different from what I was used to, but worked strangely well.

Every few weeks I play guitar for the youth group at my church.  Youth group is a great place to experiment guitar-wise because most of the time, the kids don't notice what you're doing.  As long as it's loud, they're happy.  I decided I would take my Stangray (30 watt amp = loud) and tele and see what happened.

We played some pretty standard songs:

• Everlasting God
• Blessed Be Your Name
• Jesus is Lord (I didn't know this one)
• The Wonderful Cross
• In Christ Alone
• Jesus Paid It All

I challenged myself to do something different from what I normally play on those song and had such a good time.  I hope that this trend continues.  I'm playing at big church this weekend.  I'll see what I can do.