It was a beautiful day
Don’t let it get away
Beautiful day

Touch me, Take me to that other place
Reach me, I know I’m not a hopeless case

What you don’t have you don’t need it now
What you don’t know you can feel it somehow
What you don’t have you don’t need it now
Don’t need it now, Was a beautiful day

It was indeed a beautiful day. That very moment reminded me of God and how much thankful I am for my life and for giving me the things that I really need … God and my family!

This is definitely one of the highlights of our trip that I will always cherish forever.

Without further ado, I give you: Sunny Day

Have fun, we sure will

Today is Father’s Day. There are two things I can do to celebrate. One is to just close my eyes and think of all those things that passed. And I can just open my eyes and slowly see him come into his own being.

Indeed, I am a happy daddy!

Anyhow, here’s the previous one …

So check it out every once in a while, i might even do this once a month

1. Drummers
Drummers main tasks are keeping time and providing groove. You can ask drummers how a bass player is essential to grooving. There are a lot of things that can be done with drums, but without a good bassist, it’s just doesn’t sound right. Drummers need the bassist to help enforce the groove and the feel of the song. A drum beat/pattern can easily transform into different things with different bass grooves.

2. Guitarists
As a guitarist, it’s easy to say that a job of a bassist is easy. But as guitarist who also plays a little bit of bass, I can attest that it’s not as easy as we think. I am often limited to what I can do without a good bassist. Inversions, chord substitutions, triads/diads and modes can easily be taken out of context without the bassist enforcing the key and chord changes. Most times, I find my rhythm patterns are also limited to some degree. Either I get stuck with a bottom-heavy tone and/or I’ll play more power-chords and arpeggio with the root all the time. Not a good thing for a guitarist.

A lot of people may argue with me on this. That’s OK. This is what I notice and experience whenever we don’t have a bass player. Some band may be lucky to have a keyboard player who can play the bass parts.

So there it is. This is an appreciation to all the bass players out there. We need you, you are important!

Here’s the MP3: Open String & Double Stop

Have fun with it and if you do change it up, please be sure to let me know

The atheist doctor asks, “Do you know why people pray to God”? And she continued to answer her own question by saying, “To let Him know how great He is, although He already knows that”. After a few more dialogs, Dr. House responded with the line, “They pray to their Gods so that they won’t be crushed like bugs”.

In my perspective, the writer got half the conversation right. Yes, we do pray to glorify and praise God even though He already knows that He is great. God enjoys the worship of His people. Unfortunately, the other half does not hold that much ground in Christian views. In the first place, Christians have already secured salvation by grace through faith in Christ. Therefore, there is no need to worry about being crushed like bugs. If anything, it should be the people who don’t believe in God that should be wary of this ever happening.

We, as a family, pray because we are thankful of the fact that in spite of us, we are still given the free gift of salvation. We pray for the many blessings that we receive and even for the trials that he allows to come our way. And above all, we pray to God to guide us to live everyday in line with His purpose and will.

I’m sure that there are many other reasons why people pray. But, because we are afraid is not and should not be one of them!

How about you, why do you pray? Or do you ever pray?

It was so much fun that I decided to record it so that I won’t forget the phrasing myself.

So, without further ado, here’s the 30-second clip: Open String Exercise

Disclaimer: This is a rough take so please try not to judge the fluidity and/or tone!

If you have a lick that uses open strings, please let me know. I would definitely want to improve this technique!

Have fun!

- Sickness
Me and my son Gabby have been sick for about a week now. We are getting better but the weather here in Toronto hasn’t been cooperating. It has been fluctuating like crazy from very warm to almost freezing. Please pray for our speedy recovery.

- Moving
This Saturday, we will be moving to another unit down the hall from where we are now. Needless to say, we’ve been busy packing things. I can’t believe we’ve accumulated that much in the short 4 1/2 years we’ve been married.

- Music
Not much doing here. I was trying to revisit the scratch tracks I’ve laid down about a month ago or so. But that is also proving to be a challenge. I need to get a great realistic drum generator. I have the rhythm guitar down but no drum beats to match it. I am loving the tone I am getting from my rig right now. So that has been a real blessing to me!

- Church Ministry
We are in a big transition period right now. We lost very good musicians recently but also gained great ones. The problem is the getting used to and re-alignment of schedules. For the past 3 Sundays I’ve played, twice we only rehearsed 1 1/2 hours before service. Even good musicians will have trouble with that and I can tell you that we did have some challenges. But praise God for always being there to bail us out!

- Work
It has been a very busy month of May for me! With the new role of making sure that our storage infrastructure is running as smoothly as possible, it’s quite demanding. Although, it was fun working with PHP again to graph some performance metrics using GD library. Man, how I love scripts & automation

- Life
As always, it has been good! Praise God!