RussHutto.com

Crazy For You from Russ Hutto on Vimeo.

Well, I’m playing a show tonight. It’s an open mic night. The rules are 30 minutes, and one of our set has to be an original. I’ve got a few that I’ll be doing. But I wanted to introduce a BRAND SPANKING new original. I wrote it this morning. It’s a simple pop-ish kind of love song. Yeah, I know. What happened to rockstar, Russ? Well, he’s getting older and wanted to write a song that didn’t melt your face off with distortion, but still had a fun enthusiasm.

It’s called “Crazy for You” and it’s for my wife. Since it’s for her, it’s from my heart and not necessarily manufactured, like sometimes my songs are when I TRY to write for a specific concept or something. This is pure love from me to her. She hasn’t heard it yet, so it’ll be a surprise tonight. (She’s not a blogger at all so I’m not worried about her reading this post)

Edit: I kind of flub the lyrics towards the end, because I was getting into it and I forgot the words.

Anyways, what do you think?

Suggestions?

I might play it on keys, instead of guitar depending on what my entire 30 minutes set list ends up containing, but I just wanted to kind of get a little feedback before I unveiled it tonight.

Here at HOJ we wanted to at least one song that contained a nod to a traditional Christmas Carol. Because of our service length and the “style” of our worship gatherings, we only do 3 song sets each week. This means that we typically only do about 3 Christmas songs per year.

• 2 weeks before Christmas: 1 Christmas song, 2 regular worship tunes
• 1 week before Christmas: 2 Christmas songs, 1 regular worship tune
• Christmas week: All 3 of those Christmas songs

This year the “new” song that we added in is Gloria (A Mercy Me adaptation and contemporization of Angels We Have Heard). I knew from the get-go that wanted to remix this remix.

We took the bare bones of the verses and choruses for the Mercy Me version and then added our own bridge. We also hinted at the “Hallelujahs” in the Mercy Me version, by creating a 3 layer ending that turned out nicely.

We had 4 vocals: Me on lead, another male on chorus melody, 1 female on lead (verse), 1 female on harmony (both females harmony on chorus).

The bridge is basically a 4 chord progression (the most common and rocking one in rock/modern worship: vi IV I  V ), with scripture from Luke read on top of it. Then we dive right into the traditional Gloria (Angels We Have Heard) chorus. I would have liked to polish the vocals a bit more but we just flat out ran out of time. But overall I think the idea turned out really nicely.

Here’s a bit of audio (recorded and ripped from a camera right next to the drums). You don’t get FOH quality mix, but this at least gives you an idea of what we did with it. Your basically hearing ONE of the monitor mixes and live drums. I was pleased with how it turned out.

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What does your “Gloria” sound like? How have you reworked, remixed, or rewritten Christmas tunes to fit your worship environment? This morning Fred shared how we mashed up Hark! The Herald with the lyrics from The Doxology. How about you and your church?

Ok, leave a comment, or post a vid response and play along.

Open up your itunes > select 25 Most Played > Turn Shuffle on (Controls) > Hit play > then hit the “next” button to shuffle through the next songs.

Share your top 5 (out of your top 25).

iTunes Shuffle Game 12.10.08Playing the itunes shuffle game using my top 25 most played songs in itunes.

http://www.russhutto.com

Christmas Tree: Real or Artificial? on 12seconds.tv

I stumbled across a cool tip to enhance your twitter usage, and possibly create more of a connection with new followers from the moment they follow you.

Add a brief welcome video.

There’s nothing more “real” than a video of a person actually thanking you for following them.

Using the automation services of tweetlater.com you can set up your twitter and email accounts to send an auto-response (by direct message or by @replies) to people who follow you. Include a link to your welcome video at your favorite video sharing site (I usually shorten the link with snurl.com or similar), and voila! You’ve got an automated thank you response with a link to a brief welcome video where you can introduce yourself a little more in-depth.

I’ve set up @theworshipcomm to automate a thank you response and welcome vid and it’s working great. Here’s the message that new followers receive in a direct message:

Thanks for following The Worship Community! View our 60-second welcome video: http://vimeo.com/2476286

The video isn’t the greatest, but I can see that the views are already increasing on the vimeo page the video is hosted at. That means people are seeing it.

I’ve not set up my personal twitter account (@russhutto) to do this yet, but probably will in the next few days to add that personal touch.