In Evil Long I Took Delight - John Newton

"In evil long I took delight,
Unawed by shame or fear,
Till a new object struck my sight,
And stopped my wild career.

I saw One hanging on a tree,
In agony and blood,
Who fixed His languid eyes on me,
As near His cross I stood.

Sure, never to my latest breath,
Can I forget that look;
It seemed to charge me with His death,
Though not a word He spoke.

My conscience felt and owned the guilt,
And plunged me in despair,
I saw my sins His blood had spilt,
And helped to nail Him there.

A second look He gave, which said,
“I freely all forgive;
This blood is for thy ransom paid;
I die that thou mayst live.”

Thus, while His death my sin displays
In all its blackest hue,
Such is the mystery of grace,
It seals my pardon too."

Check it....

My Latest Vid

Hey Folks,

Check out my newest video. I made it for our upcoming church retreat. Feedback is welcome (if anybody even reads this freaking blog).

Here's the video.

High Strung Guitar - Nashville Tuning

I learned a nifty new thing recently as I perused the web. Let me just say that it was more than a discovery. It was life-changing... It was life-changing because I had held a grudge against Derek Webb for years after he played a song on a the guitar that I couldn't figure out. If you know me, you know that I can play virtually any song by ear so when someone (like Derek Webb) comes along and plays a song and I can't figure out how he's playing it, my entire self-worth is quickly flushed down the toilet.

What Derek Webb had done was very simple and I have forgiven him now that I know he didn't mean anything against me personally. He was, in fact, just trying to make a song sound cool. It was nothing against me.

Derek used a guitar tuning technique called the "high strung guitar" or, as it has come to be known, "Nashville tuning." All that means it that you replace the top 4 strings (E,A,D,G) with a string an octave higher. That would be the strings that you would normally double up with on a 12-string guitar. Except, in this case, you're doing it on a six-string. It gives the guitar a really light sound that is great for reducing those annoying middle frequencies when you're recording. And you can also play a standard tuned guitar in a different channel which would give the sound of a 12-string but in stereo if you put the channels hard left and hard right.

What ends up happening is that you have only one string that is wound (the low E), all other strings are steel. And you have to get lighter gauge strings of course since you're tuning an octave higher (basically just the gauges of a top four strings of your octave 12-string EADG). Oh, and I've been playing "Piece of Glass" all week on my newly high-strung guitar and feeling quite the equal of Derek Webb, even superior to him.