Radiate | Tristan Mason's Blog - Scattered thoughts on God, worship, music, the arts, soul care, modern liturgy, and guitar geekery | Radiate

String Parts #1

Thanks to the notational labors of my dear friend and cellist extraordinaire Jon Wiest, I’m able to post some of the string parts we’ve arranged for our worship gatherings over the past year.

Resources for Prayer & the Daily Offices

Welcome to the blog, friends from the 2011 Inner Journey spiritual disciplines retreat! What a great time. I loved spending a weekend in worship with you all. Below is the resource list I mentioned at the retreat for practicing prayer and the daily offices. Click on any title to view that book at Amazon. The [...]

A Couple Recent Stage Looks We Liked

(click the pics for larger versions) Especially if you aren’t used to working with lighting, it’s easy to default to traditional methods of changing the look of your stage. Don’t get me wrong; sometimes building a set, repainting walls, or working with huge yardages of fabric can be exactly the thing, and the result can [...]

Is It Really All In My Head?

I recently read an article by Vaughan Roberts in which Roberts relates the following encounter: Some years ago I was on a mission in London. After one of our meetings, another team member came to me and said: “Why don’t you hold out your hands when you sing?” I have nothing against that practice. There [...]

The Story Conference, Hope, Darkness… Stuff Like That

I recently attended Story Chicago (“a conference for the creative class”), which proved to be exceedingly thoughtful and helpful. Many conferences have the (stated or unstated) goal of providing resources, training, and networking for experts in a given field. That’s not a bad thing. But this conference was different. While I walked away with some [...]

A Difficult But Much-Needed Prayer

May 2nd, 2012

This is a tough prayer. It is a prayer for anyone who is probing the extent of his own selfishness and gathering his wits to fight it. It is a prayer for anyone who feels like her faith is real but her mind and heart still belong to herself instead of to God. It is a prayer for you and me—people who too often worship the gods of comfort and convenience, but desire the courage to ask for something greater.

Justify my soul, O God, but also from Your fountains fill my will with fire.

Shine in my mind, although perhaps this means ‘be darkness to my experience,’ but occupy my heart with Your tremendous Life. Let my eyes see nothing in the world but Your glory, and let my hands touch nothing that is not for Your service. Let my tongue taste no bread that does not strengthen me to praise Your great mercy. I will hear Your voice and I will hear all harmonies You have created, singing Your hymns. Sheep’s wool and cotton from the field shall warm me enough that I may live in your service; I will give the rest to Your poor. Let me use all things for one sole reason: to find my joy in giving You glory.

Therefore keep me, above all things, from sin. Keep me from the death of deadly sin which puts hell in my soul. Keep me from the murder of lust that blinds and poisons my heart. Keep me from the sins that eat a man’s flesh with irresistible fire until he is devoured. Keep me from loving money in which is hatred, from avarice and ambition that suffocate my life. Keep me from the dead works of vanity and the thankless labor in which artists destroy themselves for pride and money and reputation, and saints are smothered under the avalanche of their own importunate zeal. Stanch in me the rank wound of covetousness and the hungers that exhaust my nature with their bleeding. Stamp out the serpent envy that stings love with poison and kills all joy.

Untie my hands and deliver my heart from sloth. Set me free from the laziness that goes about disguised as activity when activity is not required of me, and from the cowardice that does what is not demanded, in order to escape sacrifice.

But give me the strength that waits upon You in silence and peace. Give me humility in which alone is rest, and deliver me from pride which is the heaviest of burdens. And possess my whole heart and soul with the simplicity of love. Occupy my whole life with the one thought and the one desire of love, that I may love not for the sake of merit, not for the sake of perfection, not for the sake of virtue, not for the sake of sanctity, but for You alone.

For there is only one thing that can satisfy love and reward it, and that is You alone.

(Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation 44-45)

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String Parts #1

March 6th, 2012

Thanks to the notational labors of my dear friend and cellist extraordinaire Jon Wiest, I’m able to post some of the string parts we’ve arranged for our worship gatherings over the past year. Of course, strings are C instruments, so you can use these parts with any C instruments you want (but beware the occasional tenor clef). If you use these, here are a few things to keep in mind:

1) We improvise. A lot. So while some of these have notated parts for the full song, many of them will have chorus/bridge parts but leave you to improvise using chord tones on the verses, etc. Sometimes a part will just drop out because that player was improvising (for instance, no cello part means the cellist was playing bass notes from the chord chart for that section). If you’re looking for instrumental parts for a large ensemble or you need entire songs written out, you should check out Praise Charts or similar sites.

2) We chose whatever key fit our vocalists and congregation best, so they are not usually in the original keys. But let’s be honest—your congregation can’t sing in the original key, either, so just be nice to them and use these keys. :)

3) There are no lyrics and usually no chords because of copyright, so while the song sections are labeled, you’ll need to pair these with chord charts to make them useful. We use charts from SongSelect, so often these arrangements should fit well with SongSelect chord charts.

4) We’re sharing these as Creative Commons CC BY-NC. That means you can use/remix them, but please give attribution (within reason, of course—if you’re using them in your church’s worship services, don’t worry about it, but for anything else, please attribute). Also, you cannot use them commercially/for profit without permission. Click the link above for more info. Contact us if you have questions. And please comment below and let us know how you are using them! We love hearing what you’re up to.

As we arrange more, we’ll try to post updates and link to them here.

Key: Vn=violin | Va=viola | Vc=cello || Br=bridge | Ch=chorus | I=intro | PC=prechorus | V=verse
When a cello part drops out, play bass notes through that section.

Song	Author/Band	Key	Parts	Sections	File
Amazing Grace (My Chains)	C Tomlin	E	Vn, Va, Vc	Ch
Breathe	C Hall	A	Vn, Vc	All
Forever Reign	Hillsong	C	Vn, Va, Vc	Ch, Br
Give Me Jesus	F Ortega	A	Vn, Vc	All
How Can I Keep From Singing	C Tomlin	G	Vn, Vc	I, Ch, Br
I Am Free	J Anderson	A	Vn	Ch, Br
My Heart Is Overwhelmed	Hillsong	D	Vn, Vc	I, V2, Br
O Worship the King	C Tomlin	G	Vn, Vc	I, Ch
Our God	C Tomlin	G	Vn, Va, Vc	I
The Lost Are Found	Hillsong	A	Vn, Vc	I, Ch, Br
The Stand	Hillsong	A	Vn, Vc	PC, Ch
You Love Me Anyway	Sidewalk Prophets	D	Vn, Va, Vc	All

String Parts from Radiate by Jonathon Wiest & Tristan Mason is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://aplacetoconnect.com/contact.

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Work and Rest // Tension and Synergy

January 18th, 2012

Anyone serving in a church, paid or unpaid, can identify with the strain Glenn Packiam shares in his recent post about the tension between busy church life and the contemplative life. In it he quotes Gregory (Bishop of Rome, b. 540), who wrote:

“On every side I am tossed by the waves of business, and sunk by storms, so that I may truly say, ‘I have come into the depth of the sea, and the storm has overwhelmed me’ (Psalm 68:3). After business I long to return to my heart; but, driven therefrom by vain tumults of thoughts, I am unable to return…”

This tension isn’t a feature unique to modern life. It has always been a challenge, from Mary and Martha until now. No, even further back, to the Garden and the Fall, when our previously joyful work was cursed to come at the expense of thorns and sweat. This struggle is not new. That is encouraging—for we are not alone—but it is also eye-opening: the tension is not going to go away until all things are made right. To avoid it would mean either isolating ourselves and shirking responsibility or being consumed by busyness and missing out on God in the process. It’s not a tension we can grow past, but at least it’s one we can grow through.

The telltales for me are my spiritual rhythms. When I’m serving in my own strength, gritting my teeth and pushing through, I grow fruit of bitterness and frustration instead of love, and my temporary happiness comes either from people’s opinions of me or from some subjective measurement of how much of my task list I’ve accomplished. That is the fruit of Martha living.

Instead, when I’m faithful in consistently practicing spiritual rhythms like silence, solitude, prayer, and scripture meditation, I am able joyfully to live in the middle of the tension and while experiencing the fruit of the Spirit and seeing God do kingdom work through me. Instead of temporary happiness, I experience deep joy from the Spirit. The difference is death versus life, slavery versus freedom, exhaustion versus empowerment. The Northumbria Community’s Aidan Compline says it well:

May the virtue of our daily work
hallow our nightly prayers.
May our sleep be deep and soft
so our work be fresh and hard.

Our God-given work ought be holy, fresh, and hard—but in order to be so, it must be in balance with our rest. It is the healthy tension between work and rest which gives each its meaning. Without holy work, our rest is simply inactivity. Without hearty rest, our work is simply activity. Between them, empowered by the Spirit, we live in healthy tension.

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Resources for Prayer & the Daily Offices

September 26th, 2011

Welcome to the blog, friends from the 2011 Inner Journey spiritual disciplines retreat! What a great time. I loved spending a weekend in worship with you all.

Below is the resource list I mentioned at the retreat for practicing prayer and the daily offices.

Click on any title to view that book at Amazon.

The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn & Wintertime	The Divine Hours: Prayers for Springtime
The Divine Hours: Prayers for Summertime	The Divine Hours: Pocket Edition
Celtic Daily Prayer	Prayers Across the Centuries
Mosaic Bible Imi. Leather	Mosaic Bible Hardcover

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First Compressor Build

June 30th, 2011

Well, here it is. I’ve been wanting a decent compressor pedal for a long time, and I’m too cheap to pay for a good one. I found a great thread on freestompboxes.org, though, with a schematic for a good-sounding, inexpensive compressor, and I figured I’d give it a go. Naming my first build “Ugly Mug” was a preemptive strike on my part, since I could totally screw up the enclosure and say I was just trying to live up to the name.

For my attempt, I’m fairly pleased with the results. The sound is pretty transparent. It’s a good circuit, not a tone killer like most of the cheap comps out there. In fact, I’ve found it to be transparent enough to double as a clean boost pedal. It has enough gain to drive my amp well into distortion without adding too much noise.

In case you’re interested, Small Bear Electronics and the Thaishine eBay store are great resources for parts, and there are a ton of sites out there with various schematics, such as Keen’s GeoFex and General Guitar Gadgets. I’m thinking about trying to build an octave-up pedal next.