It's Friday!!
My favorite day of the week. And a week since I've posted. Ooooooo
Since last Saturday, I was at Covfamikoi, which is a yearly conference for our presbytery of the Reformed Presbyterian church. The conference speaker had many good things to say, and being a West Point graduate certainly helped him to hammer home some of his points. Sadly, my ADD-spanned brain had trouble maintaining consciousness even with coffee and Twix. ;)
I mostly hanged with another college junior, a fellow also named Joshua. We played a lot of sports throughout the week, and I don't think I've spent so much time on the guitar in a single week in my life. It was fun though!
I don't have any pictures right now. Hopefully this one guy (who took 500 photos over the course of the conference!) will send me a few.
The "college group" of people there didn't have a counselor over them, as did the high schoolers, nor did we have a set schedule really. So other than the speaker and general events, we did whatever we liked. Candace taught us all some of her games like "Swat" and we played board games like Balderdash. It was much fun.
Probably the best time was the last night there. We had pizza delivered and stayed up until after 4 AM. I spent a good few hours with two fellows who were really good at the guitar. One of them in particular was just amazing.
He was trying to explain to the other fellow how to just randomly come up with cool sounding acoustic guitar solos, and actually there is a lot of music theory behind it.
To explain, he wrote the five patterns of the E minor pentatonic scale, from memory, on a sheet of notebook paper. I suppose when you know the pattern it isn't that hard, but on paper it looked kinda complicated. I ran through one of the first patterns clumsily, and then cranked up a few simple chord progressions I knew.
I just played each one a few times over and this fellow improvised a really awesome sounding tune, explaining that he had done it by working within just one of the patterns on the paper.
"Learn a few licks," he said, "And switch around the patterns, and you can do about anything."
You can take these same five patterns, once you learn them, and put them in any key you like, so there is remarkably little to memorize considering the astounding range of things this would allow you to play. Yeah, this is the next thing I'm working on for guitar. :D
Anyway... less guitar and more conference. I *did* do other things. The above mentioned guitar wizard actually had a really awesome testimony. He spent several years in prison for armed robbery (he committed the crime at about my age) and was later converted in prison. A kind Christian lady befriended him and had a job lined up for him at her husband's work before he was released.
Since that time, he got an associate's degree that qualifies him to work on air conditioning units. It was cool to hear him talk about it -- such a big turnaround.
People came from mostly Indiana and the surrounding area, but there were others from farther, such as Michigan, Florida and Georgia.
And I must say... that 350 people singing a psalm in harmony sounds really cool in a fine auditorium.
Since last Saturday, I was at Covfamikoi, which is a yearly conference for our presbytery of the Reformed Presbyterian church. The conference speaker had many good things to say, and being a West Point graduate certainly helped him to hammer home some of his points. Sadly, my ADD-spanned brain had trouble maintaining consciousness even with coffee and Twix. ;)
I mostly hanged with another college junior, a fellow also named Joshua. We played a lot of sports throughout the week, and I don't think I've spent so much time on the guitar in a single week in my life. It was fun though!
I don't have any pictures right now. Hopefully this one guy (who took 500 photos over the course of the conference!) will send me a few.
The "college group" of people there didn't have a counselor over them, as did the high schoolers, nor did we have a set schedule really. So other than the speaker and general events, we did whatever we liked. Candace taught us all some of her games like "Swat" and we played board games like Balderdash. It was much fun.
Probably the best time was the last night there. We had pizza delivered and stayed up until after 4 AM. I spent a good few hours with two fellows who were really good at the guitar. One of them in particular was just amazing.
He was trying to explain to the other fellow how to just randomly come up with cool sounding acoustic guitar solos, and actually there is a lot of music theory behind it.
To explain, he wrote the five patterns of the E minor pentatonic scale, from memory, on a sheet of notebook paper. I suppose when you know the pattern it isn't that hard, but on paper it looked kinda complicated. I ran through one of the first patterns clumsily, and then cranked up a few simple chord progressions I knew.
I just played each one a few times over and this fellow improvised a really awesome sounding tune, explaining that he had done it by working within just one of the patterns on the paper.
"Learn a few licks," he said, "And switch around the patterns, and you can do about anything."
You can take these same five patterns, once you learn them, and put them in any key you like, so there is remarkably little to memorize considering the astounding range of things this would allow you to play. Yeah, this is the next thing I'm working on for guitar. :D
Anyway... less guitar and more conference. I *did* do other things. The above mentioned guitar wizard actually had a really awesome testimony. He spent several years in prison for armed robbery (he committed the crime at about my age) and was later converted in prison. A kind Christian lady befriended him and had a job lined up for him at her husband's work before he was released.
Since that time, he got an associate's degree that qualifies him to work on air conditioning units. It was cool to hear him talk about it -- such a big turnaround.
People came from mostly Indiana and the surrounding area, but there were others from farther, such as Michigan, Florida and Georgia.
And I must say... that 350 people singing a psalm in harmony sounds really cool in a fine auditorium.
