I’m about one month away from releasing a brand new album. While most of my previous releases have been more acoustic flavored, this one is going to be full length and full production. I’m really excited about this, so in my excitement, I’ve decided to make You Have Rescued Me free for the month of February.
So, here it is – download away!
If you’ve already downloaded this (thank you!), please post a link to Twitter or Facebook and spread the word. And stay tuned for news about the new album.
We introduced a couple brand new things this Sunday. One a side note – maybe it’s not a great idea to do two brand new things on one Sunday. Going slow is good. Anyway, here they are…
I’m not an electric player, but some songs just need two electric guitars. I play electric on “God is Able” (worked really well), and “I Will Follow” (didn’t work as well). I still need to tweak my tone and setup. I played a Gretsch hollowbody through a Vox AC15, and used a Fulltone OCD for overdrive.
This is a big deal. Not really because of the loop itself, but because of the fact that you have to play to a click to pull this off. We’ve never really played to a click as a band before. You have to use in-ear monitoring (at least your drummer). This is so the band can hear the click but the audience can’t. Then you have to stay with the click 
. We didn’t stay with it, so we cut it off half-way through the song. Lesson learned: we need to practice with a click for a while before we do it on Sunday morning.
Pre-service song
During service
We had a stripped down band this week. Instrumentally, it was just me on acoustic and a bass and keyboard player. For Blessed Be Your Name, we did an arrangement where I started it with fingerstyle picking until the “You give and take away” section and we got bigger. It was cool to do a very familiar song in a different way.
You can get chord charts and find tutorials for these songs at Worship Tutorials.
My good friend and bass enthusiast Dillon Partin found a really cool backing loop for Hosanna the other day. It comes from Our Rising Sound (Kyle Campos). He does loops for various worship songs, and they are all really high quality. You can get the Hosanna loop here for free.
Dillon and I went ahead and made a recording to the loop. You can see it here:
Dillon is on bass. I did the electric parts as well as the acoustic and vocal parts. Thanks, Kyle, for making such a great loop available for free! You can see this video and all my other videos in the Videos Section.
Back in 2008 I built a few guitars with my grandfather. He’s a retired carpenter with a great woodworking shop (and woodworking skills). We went with telecasters, as they are fairly easy to build (the bodies), and they are just plain cool.
This thing sounds really big and full. Having two humbuckers in it kind of gives it a telecaster meets Les Paul feel. If you’ve heard any of the music I’ve recorded in the last few years with electric guitar, you’ve heard this thing.
You can see the full rez photos here on Flickr.
For a long time now, most of the traffic to my site here has been to the tutorials section, where I put up video tutorials for popular worship songs as well as chord charts.
I’ve decided to give Worship Tutorials a proper home, so I built out a totally new site for it. The tutorials and charts are far more organized there – everything is easier to find.
If you’ve come here in the past looking for tutorials, be sure to subscribe to the new Worship Tutorials.
Get it for free for the month of January!
View past Free Music Friday releases here
You are mine
And I am yours
I am yoursThis will be
Forever more
Forever moreNothing could ever take that away
I am here to staySeasons come and seasons go
There is winter, summer, spring and fall
There is one thing I’ll always know
That you love me, and I love youIf the rain should fall
And wash everything away
If the wind should blow
And blow everything away
I will stay
I will stay
I will stay
I will stay
I’ve been giving away all my music for free for a few years now. Here is a post explaining why, but in a nutshell, the reason is this: Exposure is worth more than a few album sales. Before I gave my music away, the term “a few album sales” was a gross exaggeration of how much music I was selling.
My plan all along has been to give everything away until I reached 2500 email subscribers (you can subscribe here). There are several reasons I chose this number, including:
I figured the 2500 subscriber mark would take a long, long time. In less than a year, I’ve far surpassed 2500 subscribers. I’m pretty blown away by that, and I’d like to thank you all for downloading and listening to my music. If you’ve ever downloaded any of my music and left your email address, you’re on my mailing list, by the way.
My basic rates are going to be as follows:
Basically, you’ll get a bit of a break for buying full albums. As you can see, this is still way less than iTunes, Amazon, etc.
You can currently still download everything for free at the Brian Wahl Music Store (powered by BandCamp, which is another awesome service). My music is also available on iTunes, Amazon, and most other online music stores.
If you don’t know about Free Music Friday, click here. I’m still going to give some music away every month. It might be an entire album, or a single song. Sign up for the mailing list to make sure you get something free every month.
Finally, I want to thank you all again for all your support, and for listening to and downloading my music. Many of you have spread the word to your friends, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am.
Now go download more stuff while it’s still free
If you are an indie artist just getting started, I’d really encourage you to think about giving away your music for free in order to build a fan base. I’ve actually made way more money (in tips) giving away free music in the last year or so than I ever did selling albums. But the biggest thing you’ll gain is a little exposure.
December’s Free Music Friday is coming up quick, and I’ve decided to go in a little different direction this time. I’m recording a Christmas album!
This is going to be an acoustic album, similar in sound to the “You Have Rescued Me” album, which is an acoustic worship album.
The album will be available for free from NoiseTrade by this Friday. In fact, I just tracked all the songs today, so I’m putting this together in just two or three days.
Song list (not necessarily in this order):
Haven’t done a Sunday Set List post in a while. This week it’s a bonus because I’ve got some audio recordings of a few of the songs we did. You can pick up chord charts for all these (as well as video tutorials for some) on the Worship Tutorials page.
People are starting to learn the originals that we’re doing and really sing them out. There are 3 originals that are in full rotation now. It’s funny – I’ve had a few conversations with people and they’ll mention those songs (usually in a positive way), but they have no idea that I wrote them. I don’t make it a point to announce that they’re my songs.
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