Happy New Year! - Random Musical Thoughts

Happy New Year everyone! All my various projects began again Monday, Jan. 2nd so I've been pretty busy this week with the various groups. Anyway, have a few random thoughts that I thought I'd share:

1) A friend sent me this You Tube video last week. It's very funny, but also very clever. It is a video of the musical group Mnozil Brass being silly. I highly recommend following one of their related videos to see them doing more traditional performances--they're fantastic. However, it seems that everything they do has a touch of humor to it.

2) Today I changed the guitar strings on both of my work guitars (the ones I use all the time). It's a bit time-consuming, so I often like to listen to music or watch something on TV while I do it. So, I popped in my DVD of Giulio Cesare and watched Act II. This is definitely one of my favorite operas for many reasons. For one, it features male soprano Michael Maniaci. No, he isn't a counter-tenor; he's the closest thing we have to a living castrato. Anyway, he's got a beautiful voice and it's a fantastic aria. If you like opera at all, you should check this out. If you don't like opera, still check it out to see a man singing in fantastic ranges.

3) For the Christmas Eve service at St. Mark's I arranged a ton of Christmas carols and hymns for the praise band to sing. One that I am most pleased with was this pop-rock version of "Hark The Herald, Angels Sing". Here's just a snippet of the piece (mind you, this is just the backing track that I recorded, but it gives a good idea of what was going on).

I think there was something else that I wanted to share, but I can't remember what it was now. Anyway, I think that's enough for one post anyway.

Happy New Year!