So, I was listening to a sermon by Mark Driscoll the other day.  The sermon was on John the Baptist.  In Luke 7:28, Jesus claimed that John was the greatest man to ever live.  Well, I figured that if Jesus said that, I better be paying a little more attention to this guy.

Driscoll’s sermon impacted me in quite a profound way.  I could write pages on what the Lord taught me through his message, but I figured it would be best to focus on one point at a time.

Driscoll was outlining the keys to John’s greatness.  The last “key” that he identified was that he “avoided adolescence”.

John spent the first 25 years of his life preparing (“growing and becoming strong in the Spirit”) for his ministry.

Lets contrast this with the first 25 years of the American man: well, we’ve got this thing called “adolescence”.  It is actually a relatively new idea in history.  It is this time in life between childhood and manhood when a guy can just be an idiot.  He can spend the majority of his time playing video games, watching TV, going to the movies, buying his way into debt.  He can spend 8 years getting his undergrad only to move back into his mom’s house after he graduates.  Then we’ve got a 20-something-year-old “man” who has no distinguishable differences from a child.  Our society is really good at turn out guys who are childish consumers, defined by what they consume, not by what they create (and furthermore, cultivate).

Now, put this into the church context.  If there is one thing that the Church is lacking, it is young men who are courageous and full of vision.  Most of the young men in the American Church are cowards and complainers; they are really good at criticizing the efforts/vision/passion of other people but have none of their own.

The reality is, I see many of these tendencies in my life.  The laziness, the lack of vision, the dependance.  I am so critical, but I’m rarely going for it and actually creating anything of significance on my own volition.  I wait for the vision of others, and don’t pray enough for God to give me my own, unique vision.  Furthermore, when I do create, I rarely ever follow through and cultivate what the Lord is doing through me and those around me.

We need our young men to stand up in firm leadership, opposing our culture’s alluring message of a carefree adolescence.  We simply don’t have the time for it.  We’ve got a generation to lead, an entire world that is crying out under the weight of depravity and injustice, and such a heavy restoration cannot be carried in the hands of a lazy adolescent.

Well, I took a break from blogging.  A long break.

Why?  Like many others, I got a little jaded by it.  I originally started blogging out of a passion to assist churches with music, loops, sequencing, etc.  Then, it got out of hand.  It became a burden.  You see, I loved making loops, sequences, etc…but in all honesty, many people started leeching off of my work.  It lost its innocence and the line between generosity and “being taken advantage of” became more and more blurred.  So, I guess I just decided to disappear.  All of this coincided with a cross-country move (hello, Arkansas!).

I decided that maybe it is time to start blogging again.  I don’t really know what it will be about, but I’ve felt the need for a creative and expressive outlet.  It will likely be very different, as it should be; my life has changed drastically in the past year and a half…more about that later, I’m sure.  This doesn’t mean that I am no longer interested in assisting the church and worship community…it is quite the contrary.  I think it is just going to take a different form.

I’m excited to start this up again…and excited to get re-acquainted with the blog-world.

Well, I was planning on finishing the loop for “Grace Will Be My Song” today, but I actually ended up spending about 3 hours EQing and tweaking the piano.  I’m still not happy with it by any means (my ears are probably just tired), but its getting there.  I got all of the piano parts sequenced out, and all I have left to do is sequence the pad…then mix all of it.

Also, I was thinking and decided that when I post it (it should be soon, I promise), I will post the loop both with and without the piano track just in case some of you are running with a live keyboardist.  That being said, if any of you have any special requests when it comes to anything I post, please do let me know — I’d be more than happy to accommodate.

Oh, and a quick shoutout — I have become acquainted with a couple of really amazing individuals lately, and thought I’d point you their way.

First, please check out Josh Collesano’s Blog – He’s a worship leader and musician from the land of Michigan.  He’s got some sweet videos up on the blog.  Oh yeah — you’ll notice that his guitarist has freakin’ amazing tone.  That’d be because he’s got a Bad Cat.  Kudos.

Also, hop on over to Aaron Ivey’s Blog...he’s the front man with a heart of gold for an amazing band called Spur58.  They’ve got some catchy tunes, so do yourself the great favor of taking a listen to their album.

That’ll be all for today.  I’m tired ladies and gents.  Really tired.  I wish I felt like finishing that loop tonight, but I just can’t do it.  I try not to exhaust myself creatively.  I’ve seen people do so to the extreme, and watched as they’ve completely lost passion for the art they were once in love with.  Don’t know about you, but I never want that to happen to me!  Never underestimate the value of rest and recuperation!

This is in response to a question I received earlier.  Hopefully this answers the posed question of “how do I get a Reason project into Ableton Live?”  Let me know if this helps!

Please let me know if you have any further questions, or need any clarification!
Also, if you want to download this video in full quality, you can do so by clicking here.

Please do let me know if you have any random questions about Ableton or Reason — I’m here to help!  Shoot me an email at TheMonoBox@gmail.com. 

Alright, me and another individual who frequents the blog are about to attempt to write a loop for David Crowder Band’s “Rain Down”.  I realize that this is a very daunting task (quite honestly, it scares me that I have committed to working on it…it is songs like this that make you feel incapable), so thought that it would be a good idea to ask if anyone has any bits and pieces of the song that they have already sequenced out and would like to contribute.

Let me know (either in the comments or emailing me at themonobox@gmail.com) if you have sequenced any of it out, or would like to assists in handling the workload!  If not, be keeping your eyes open; if things go well, you will probably see a loop for “Rain Down” pop up here on TheMonoBox within the next couple of weeks.  If nothing less, this will be an intense learning experience.

Also, I wanted to let you guys know that I am going to start working on finishing up the loop for Steve Fee’s “Grace Will Be My Song” (as mentioned in the previous post).  You should be seeing that within the next several days.

Hey guys – I was looking through some of the loops I’ve constructed over the past year or so, and saw that I had a good start on Steve Fee’s “Grace Will Be My Song”…

That being said, are any of you currently doing this song or want to do the song?  If there is a significant response, I’ll finish the loop up (I think I just have to add the piano parts), and post it.

Let me know if you’ve got a significant interest in it, and also if you have any special requests regarding the loop.

So, you may notice that my blog is now forwarding to a different address: themonobox.com.  

Today marks the day that somewhat of a transformation will take place — over the next month or so, the blog will likely get a facelift and will no longer be a strictly personal blog, but rather a more general blog focusing on Ableton Live, Reason, Sampling, Music, Audio and related things in relation to the Christian faith.  I plan on having multiple contributors (Benji Robinson, Matt Monson, and others) who have specific areas of expertise.

That being said, this site will henceforth be known as TheMonoBox.

I’m sure the vision and direction of the blog will become more clear over time (especially as I find more time on my hands).  Please bear with us as we get things in order…its all somewhat of a mess right now…

Rock y’all.

So, I know these guys, Neil Greathouse, Joe Hohman, and Matthew Santone…they are basically geniuses of the highest degree.  Extremely creative.  Well, a while back (not too long ago), they designed a web site for a growing multi-campus church in Arkansas called New Life Church.

Well, turns out, they made it on Churchrelevance.com’s Best Church Webdesigns.  So, I just wanted to congratulate these guys and slap a big high five over the bloglines.  Rock and roll.

Alright, I was searching through some old stuff, and realized that me and a good friend of mine, Matt Monson, had created a loop for Hillsong United’s “Lead Me to the Cross”.  At that time, we didn’t have anyone dedicated to either acoustic guitar or keys.  

So, the loop includes acoustic, pads, shaker, and tambourine.  When we’ve used it live, it has always filled the song out quite nicely.  Sequences like these are nice because everyone can essentially stop playing to let the song breathe, and the sequence carries it very gracefully.

The tempo is at 72 BPM and the key is A.  If you happen to have Ableton Live (which I recommend all of you get!), you can easily transpose this if you’d like to do so.

Alright – here it is:

Lead Me to the Cross – 72 BPM

Hope it helps someone out!

Well, its more of a sequence than a loop.  Someone I have become acquainted with (a worship director in Michigan) needed a sequence written for a song called “Words Hurt Too” by Rhian Benson.  It is not, by any means the type of music I am used to listening to, but fortunately, the instrumentation is pretty traditional.  
The only twist to all of it is that he needs the bass guitar sequenced out…this will definitely take a while, as the bass line is quite involved.  It will be fun to see how it turns out – I am not used to trying to imitate a bass guitar using Reason.  If only I owned a bass…

At any rate, I wanted to give y’all an idea of how I do this sort of thing.  Over the past year or so, I have become more an more comfortable doing all of this as I have developed a specific workspace/workflow for this kind of work.  I use two programs simultaneously – Reason and Ableton live.  This is not a new idea by any means…I love Reason for its sequencing and instruments, but it lacks audio editing capabilities and is, naturally, a closed program, which means that I cannot use any external plugins.  So, I Rewire Reason into Ableton Live, and do the writing using both.  You will notice, by the way, that I named my Reason and Ableton Live sessions incorrectly – I named them “Words Don’t Hurt”.  Turns out I can’t read.

For example, at the beginning of the song, there’s a bunch of reversed sounds.  So to figure out how to get those sounds, I simply loaded the original song into Live and reversed it.  Thus, I could hear the reversed sounds in their original state.  It turned out to be a reversed Rhodes riff, so I learned it, and then sequenced it out in Reason.  Then, I recorded it into Ableton and reversed it…shazaam!  Sounds pretty good.

So, the marriage between Ableton and Reason gives you a lot of creativity, and really just makes the entire process so easy.  It also allows you to load the original song into Ableton to follow along as you sequence it out.  This is always really nice, unless you run into a song that has any tempo drift, which happens to be the case here.  You CAN correct tempo drift under some circumstances, but this one is somewhat of a disaster. 

Well, I will keep y’all posted on the progress.  If you have ANY questions about using Reason and Ableton together, please either comment, or send me an email (mattjhuber@gmail.com).