Music To Pray By

Epizody

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  Music To Pray By Podcast 86 25.07.2026 32min

  Sixteen weeks in. Podcast 86 is up. Seven Selahs this week, pulled from four morning streams — and another busy week of changes behind the scenes. In This Episode Seven spontaneous pieces, drawn from May 25 through May 28. The timestamps match the YouTube chapters, and each link goes back to the full morning the piece came from: 0:00 Selah in C — from the 5-25-2026 stream, Song 6 5:07 Selah in E — from the 5-26-2026 stream, Song 1 10:07 Selah in C — from the 5-26-2026 stream, Song 2 19:01 Selah in F — from the 5-26-2026 stream, Song 5 21:21 Selah in B — from the 5-27-2026 stream, Song 4 22:51 Selah in A — from the 5-27-2026 stream, Song 5 28:22 Selah in C — from the 5-28-2026 stream, Song 2 Moving Beyond a One-Provider Workflow A lot of this week was spent moving the systems I use behind the scenes away from Claude Desktop and Cowork and into Hermes. I’ve depended on Claude Desktop for quite a while, but I don’t want one company’s app to be where every project, automation, and bit of context has to live. With Hermes, the work stays put while I can use different models for different jobs. Claude is still available when it’s the right fit; it just doesn’t have to hold the whole system anymore. If one service is busy, changes direction, or simply isn’t the best tool for a particular job, I can keep working without moving everything again. Putting Grok 4.5 and ChatGPT 5.6 to Work The timing was interesting: Grok 4.5 and ChatGPT 5.6 both arrived right as I was doing the migration. I didn’t just test them with a few demo prompts; both of them spent the week doing actual work. Grok’s long context and habit of following a thread all the way down made it useful for untangling the history and moving pieces. ChatGPT 5.6 has been especially strong on structured coding and exact operational work — the kind where I want it to slow down, check assumptions, and verify what it changed. They definitely feel different, but I can switch between them without rebuilding the desk around them. That’s the part I’ve liked most. A New Look for the Podcast Video This is the first episode where the new Piano VFX treatment made it all the way into the finished video. The real piano footage is still underneath it; I layered the falling notes and key effects over that footage in Final Cut Pro so the movement follows what I’m actually playing. Getting there took some experimentation. The effect had to sit with the real instrument instead of covering it, and the dark background, keyboard mask, and edges all needed careful compositing. I’m happy with where it landed, and this is the visual direction I plan to carry into the podcast videos and clips I share across YouTube, Facebook, and X. Almost Vacation Time By the time this posts, we’ll be less than a week from family vacation. I’m wrapping up the last plans, getting work staged ahead, and trying to leave enough margin that the ministry rhythm can keep going while we’re away. This Week’s Worship Moment To close — a quieter live worship moment from TCC’s June 7 service: At The Altar, Part 3. The steadier side view sits above the Meta-glasses view from the keys, so you can watch the same moment from both perspectives. If the embed isn’t loading for you, the direct link is youtu.be/pmFNNaU-ZMw. Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying. The post Music To Pray By Podcast 86 appeared first on Music To Pray By.
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  Music To Pray By Podcast 85 18.07.2026 33min

  Fifteen weeks in. Podcast 85 is up. Six Selahs this week, pulled from the morning streams as always — and a behind-the-scenes update I’m genuinely excited about, for the curious among you. In This Episode Six spontaneous pieces, drawn from two mornings — May 21 and May 25. The timestamps match the YouTube chapters, and each link goes back to the full morning the piece came from: 0:00 Selah in B — from the 5-21-2026 stream, Song 1 5:05 Selah in F — from the 5-21-2026 stream, Song 4 9:23 Selah in D — from the 5-21-2026 stream, Song 6 16:51 Selah in D — from the 5-25-2026 stream, Song 3 22:07 Selah in C — from the 5-25-2026 stream, Song 4 28:12 Selah in C — from the 5-25-2026 stream, Song 5 Teaching a Machine to Hear Tempo Here’s the update. When I play live, I breathe with the music — speeding up, pulling back, sitting in a moment. That’s the life of it, but it’s also the hardest part to clean up afterward. The editing software (Logic’s Smart Tempo) tries to map all that ebb and flow onto a grid so the notes line up, and it gets it mostly right — which means I spend a lot of quiet hours nudging the rest of it back by hand. So this past week I ran an experiment. I took 56 of my own past edits — every Selah from the last dozen-plus podcasts — and had the AI I use behind the scenes (Anthropic’s Fable) study them, to learn how I actually hear and correct the timing, and try doing that first pass itself instead of Smart Tempo. Fun fact: this very episode was one of its test cases. The result honestly surprised me. Through the middle of a song, it now matches my hand-editing almost note for note. Where it still stumbles is the big turns — the moments where the music changes feel entirely — and one wrong guess there throws off everything after it. So it’s not ready to take the wheel yet; I’ve set it on the shelf for now, and it keeps learning a little more from every episode I edit by hand. But the day a computer can hear a ritardando the way a human does is closer than I expected, and that’s a fun thing to watch unfold. A Quick Heads-Up The back half of July is busy — student camp the week of the 25th (I’ll be helping lead worship), and family vacation right after. This is one of the episodes I recorded ahead so the music and the prayer keep coming while I’m away. If you don’t hear from me for a couple weeks, that’s why — but the Selahs will still be landing each Saturday. This Week’s Pray the Bible To close — a Pray the Bible short, and a favorite: 1 John 4. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God. There is no fear in love; perfect love casts out fear. If the embed isn’t loading for you, the direct link is youtu.be/hs665uSujKU. Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying. The post Music To Pray By Podcast 85 appeared first on Music To Pray By.
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  Music To Pray By Podcast 84 11.07.2026 30min

  Fourteen weeks in. Podcast 84 is up. Five Selahs this week, gathered from the morning streams as always. A short note on why this one exists already, and a little about what’s coming. In This Episode Five spontaneous pieces, drawn from two mornings — May 19 and May 20. The timestamps match the YouTube chapters, and each link goes back to the full morning the piece came from: 0:00 Selah in B — from the 5-19-2026 stream, Song 7 5:30 Selah in B — from the 5-20-2026 stream, Song 1 10:54 Selah in G — from the 5-20-2026 stream, Song 2 15:16 Selah in G — from the 5-20-2026 stream, Song 3 22:52 Selah in D — from the 5-20-2026 stream, Song 5 Working Ahead Full transparency: I recorded this episode back-to-back with last week’s, in one sitting. The reason is simple — the back half of July is full. Our family vacation is at the end of the month, and right before it comes Youth Camp. Getting two episodes done at once puts me two weeks ahead, so the prayer and the music keep flowing even while I’m away from the studio. It felt like good stewardship of the time God’s given. YNG Summer Camp Speaking of camp — our student ministry’s YNG Summer Camp is coming up (July 25–29 at Twin Oaks Ranch), four days of worship, fellowship, and teaching for 6th through 12th graders. I get to help lead worship while we’re out there, and honestly it’s one of the highlights of my year — there’s nothing quite like a room full of students meeting God for themselves. It is always, always a blessing. If you’ve got a student, you can find the details on our church’s Summer at Connection page. Please keep the camp in your prayers — for safe travels, for open hearts, and for lives changed. This Week’s Pray the Bible To close — a Pray the Bible short for a busy season: Isaiah 26. You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on You, because he trusts in You. A good one to carry into the weeks ahead. If the embed isn’t loading for you, the direct link is youtu.be/Dsk4aAPuW4Q. Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying. The post Music To Pray By Podcast 84 appeared first on Music To Pray By.
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  Music To Pray By Podcast 83 04.07.2026 30min

  Thirteen weeks in, and this one lands on the Fourth of July. Podcast 83 is up. The usual gathering of live worship piano from the morning streams — five Selahs this week — and a few things on my heart for this particular weekend. In This Episode Five spontaneous pieces, drawn from three mornings — May 15, 18, and 19. The timestamps match the YouTube chapters, and each link goes back to the full morning the piece came from: 0:00 Selah in C — from the 5-15-2026 stream, Song 3 8:51 Selah in B — from the 5-18-2026 stream, Song 4 14:54 Selah in B — from the 5-18-2026 stream, Song 5 17:17 Selah in C — from the 5-19-2026 stream, Song 3 23:22 Selah in A — from the 5-19-2026 stream, Song 5 An Answered Prayer Last week I asked you to pray that God would make a way for my son Sanban to finish his senior year at San Marcos Academy. I want you to know: He made a way. It came together, and Sanban will walk across that stage with the friends he’s grown up with. I don’t take it for granted, and I’m grateful beyond words — to the Lord, and to every one of you who prayed. This is exactly why I keep doing this. Thank you. 250 Years — and the One Who Sustains Us This Independence Day is a milestone: 250 years since the birth of our nation. Two and a half centuries — it’s a lot to sit with. However you’re marking the Fourth this year, I hope it’s a good and restful one. But mostly I find myself wanting to give thanks. Not to a flag or a moment in history, but to God — for His faithfulness across two and a half centuries, for the freedom to sit down at a piano and pray out loud without fear, and for all He has done and is still doing for His Kingdom. Nations rise and fall; His Kingdom has no end. That’s the hope I’m resting in this weekend. A Night of Worship Our church family — The Connection Church in Buda, TX — gathered this week for a Night of Worship on Wednesday the 1st, a sweet time of singing and being together at the start of this celebration week. A few of you have asked lately where I play each week — that’s the place. If you’re anywhere near Buda and looking for a church home, we’d love to have you; you’d be welcomed with open arms. This Week’s Pray the Bible To close — a Pray the Bible short, and a fitting one for a weekend of looking up in gratitude. Psalm 121: I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord. If the embed isn’t loading for you, the direct link is youtu.be/lL3RZbnmEaw. Happy Independence Day. Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying. The post Music To Pray By Podcast 83 appeared first on Music To Pray By.
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  Music To Pray By Podcast 82 27.06.2026 32min

  Twelve weeks in. Podcast 82 is up. Same as always: live worship piano from the morning streams, cleaned up and gathered into one continuous listen. Six Selahs this week. Not a lot of behind-the-scenes news to report — mostly it’s been a season of life happening off the bench, which I’ll share a little of below. In This Episode Six spontaneous pieces, drawn from four mornings — May 13, 14, 15, and 18. The timestamps match the YouTube chapters, and each link goes back to the full morning the piece came from: 0:00 Selah in E — from the 5-13-2026 stream, Song 1 6:09 Selah in G — from the 5-13-2026 stream, Song 6 8:56 Selah in D — from the 5-13-2026 stream, Song 7 14:04 Selah in C — from the 5-14-2026 stream, Song 2 17:54 Selah in B — from the 5-15-2026 stream, Song 2 26:47 Selah in D — from the 5-18-2026 stream, Song 3 Life Off the Bench Most of my week hasn’t been at the piano — it’s been around the kitchen table, planning the year ahead for my boys. My oldest, Sanban, is heading into his senior year of high school, and my younger son, Jake, is gearing up for another year of homeschool. If you’ve raised teenagers you know the strange weight of a “last first day” coming into view. Here’s where I’ll ask for prayer, plainly. Sanban’s heart is to finish where he started — San Marcos Academy, the Christian school he’s called home since the fifth grade. It turns out that’s what he really wants, to walk across that stage with the people he grew up with. For our family right now, that’s a real financial stretch. So I’m simply asking: would you pray that God makes a way for him to finish his senior year there? I’ve watched the Lord provide before in ways I couldn’t have engineered, and I’m trying to hold this one with open hands. A Move Toward Home We’re also praying about a move that would put us closer to our church family in Buda. So much of our week is spent driving back and forth — services, youth nights, men’s mornings — and the thought of being a few minutes away instead of an hour round-trip feels like its own quiet answer to prayer. More time with the people we’re doing life with, less time on the highway. We’ll see how the Lord works out the timing; it hinges on a few things outside our hands, which is probably right where it should be. For the Curious Nothing flashy on the tech side this week. The chapter markers (table of contents) are on every episode now — tap along the YouTube progress bar to jump between the Selahs — and behind the scenes the whole publishing process has quietly gotten more automated. Practically, that just means it runs on its own and I get to spend the saved time where it belongs: at the keys, praying. This Week’s Pray the Bible To close, a Pray the Bible short — and given everything above, there was really only one choice. The oldest prayer of provision and trust we have: Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. If the embed isn’t loading for you, the direct link is youtu.be/7CUKr47UBmI. Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying — this week, especially, I mean that. The post Music To Pray By Podcast 82 appeared first on Music To Pray By.
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  Music To Pray By Podcast 81 20.06.2026 31min

  Eleven weeks in. Podcast 81 is up. Same idea as Podcast 80: live worship piano from the morning streams, cleaned up and stitched into one continuous listen. Six Selahs this week, and a couple of honest updates underneath them. In This Episode Six spontaneous pieces, pulled from three mornings — May 11, 12, and 13. The timestamps match the YouTube chapters, and each link goes back to the full morning the piece first showed up in: 0:00 Selah in C — from the 5-11-2026 stream, Song 2 4:57 Selah in B — from the 5-11-2026 stream, Song 5 13:46 Selah in D — from the 5-12-2026 stream, Song 4 17:34 Selah in D — from the 5-12-2026 stream, Song 5 22:35 Selah in B — from the 5-12-2026 stream, Song 6 27:03 Selah in C — from the 5-13-2026 stream, Song 5 Behind the Scenes: A Better-Sounding Pedal A quieter update, but one I can actually hear. Anthropic just released a new model — Fable 5 — and I’ve been moving the production workflow for this ministry over to it. The results have been honestly remarkable, and the place it showed up most this week was in how I clean up the piano itself. If you play, you know the sustain pedal is half the instrument. When I record live and the editing software stretches the timing to line everything up, it can quietly blow out the tiny gap where the pedal lifts and comes back down — so a chord change arrives a beat late and the new chord sounds dry, like the room went flat under it. I’d been hearing that all over this episode and fixing it by hand, one pedal lift at a time. This week that became an automatic step: it tightened up nearly four hundred of those late pedal changes across the recording — the ones I used to chase one by one — while leaving the deliberate pauses exactly as I played them. The sustain just connects now. It’s the kind of thing you don’t notice when it’s right, which is the whole point. Two Months In, and Honest About It We just passed the two-month mark since the relaunch, and I’ll be straight with you: the numbers haven’t moved much. Growth has been pretty stagnant. A few weeks ago that might have discouraged me. It doesn’t now. Relaunching Music To Pray By has completely revolutionized my own relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ — sitting down at the piano to pray every morning has changed me. So I’m going to keep going, even if I’m the only one who’s listening and praying along. If that’s you on the other end — thank you. And if it’s just the Lord and me for now, that’s enough. A Note on Timing In the spirit of being transparent about how this gets made: I actually finished this episode on June 13 and scheduled it to post a week ahead, today. I’m hoping to get another podcast finished today and recorded tomorrow — partly to see how much faster the new workflow really is now. If it works, you may notice these landing a little more reliably. That’s the goal: less time wrestling the machinery, more time at the keys. This Week’s Pray the Bible Back to the usual closer — a Pray the Bible short. Here’s the one that resonated most with you this past week, and it fits where my head’s at: a prayer of overflowing hope, from Romans 15. If the embed isn’t loading for you, the direct link is youtu.be/l6aabmHS4iQ. Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying. The post Music To Pray By Podcast 81 appeared first on Music To Pray By.
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  Music To Pray By Podcast 80 13.06.2026 33min

  Ten weeks in. Podcast 80 is up. Same compile as Podcast 79: live worship piano from the morning streams, cleaned up and stitched into a single listen. A few real updates this week, including one I’ve wanted to ship for a while. In This Episode Six Selahs, pulled from three mornings of streams — May 6, May 7, and May 8. The timestamps match the YouTube chapters, and each link goes to the full morning the piece first showed up in: 0:00 Selah in B — from the 5-6-2026 stream, Song 2 4:33 Selah in C — from the 5-6-2026 stream, Song 6 8:10 Selah in F — from the 5-7-2026 stream, Song 2 12:26 Selah in D — from the 5-7-2026 stream, Song 3 17:11 Selah in G — from the 5-7-2026 stream, Song 4 21:48 Selah in D — from the 5-8-2026 stream, Song 2 New: Chapters on Everything This is the update I’m most excited about. Every video now gets a table of contents — the chapter markers you can tap along the YouTube progress bar. On the morning streams, the chapters list the worship songs by name. The spontaneous pieces — the ones that aren’t covers — get a name of their own: Selah, the Psalms’ old marker to pause and reflect, each one named for the key it lives in. And on the podcasts, every track is cross-referenced back to the exact stream it came from — “Selah in F — from 5-7-2026 Song 2” means that piece first happened live on May 7, second song of the morning. Here’s why I like it: if one of those spontaneous moments catches you during a live stream, you can always find it again — and when its cleaned-up version lands in a future podcast, the chapter label tells you exactly where it began. The rough take and the polished take, connected in both directions. We’ve rolled this out across the back catalog too, so the older podcasts and streams have their chapters already. The Split-View Clips Are Out A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the church-service clips were getting a new look — the Meta-glasses POV paired side-by-side with a steadier FaceTime camera shot, so all that head motion is easier on the eyes. Those have been posting for a bit now, so this week, instead of the usual Pray the Bible short, here’s the one you all have watched the most — from TCC’s Sunday worship on May 10: If embeds aren’t loading for you, the direct link is youtu.be/PtNWxXQ7xn0. If You Tried to Subscribe and Heard Nothing — I’m Sorry One more, and it’s a confession. While working on the site this week I discovered the email subscribe form had been quietly broken — and not for a week or two. It looks like signups haven’t actually gone through since 2024. If you ever typed your email in and wondered why nothing came, that’s why, and I’m sorry. It’s fixed now. If you’d like a short note from me when each week’s podcast goes up — no spam, just the episode — you can sign up at musictoprayby.com/subscribe. You’ll get a confirmation email first; click that and you’re in. Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying. The post Music To Pray By Podcast 80 appeared first on Music To Pray By.
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  Music To Pray By Podcast 79 06.06.2026 31min

  Podcast 79 is up. Same compile as Podcast 78: live worship piano from the morning streams, stitched into a single listen. A couple of notes worth sharing this week. A Quick Note on Timing Before anything else: I actually recorded this episode last week, and I’m scheduling it to post ahead of time. So when I say “this week,” I’m really writing from a week ago — if a detail here feels a little out of step with the calendar, that’s why. I’m trying to get two or three podcasts queued up in advance. We’ve got a family trip coming in late July, and I’d rather the morning rhythm not skip a beat while we’re on the road. In This Episode Seven Selahs this week — the spontaneous worship pieces, each named for the key it lives in — pulled from four of the morning streams. The timestamps match the YouTube chapters if you want to jump around, and each link goes to the full morning stream it came from: 0:00 Selah in C — from the 4-30-2026 stream, Song 3 8:51 Selah in E — from the 4-30-2026 stream, Song 5 11:47 Selah in G — from the 5-1-2026 stream, Song 5 16:16 Selah in D — from the 5-1-2026 stream, Song 7 18:40 Selah in G — from the 5-4-2026 stream, Song 4 23:54 Selah in E — from the 5-5-2026 stream, Song 4 28:43 Selah in B — from the 5-5-2026 stream, Song 7 A Better Way to Watch the Church-Service Clips Last week I mentioned the church-service clips — the TCC Sunday and Wednesday-night worship moments — are back on the Music To Pray By channels. Since they’re staying, I changed how they’re shot. The footage used to be pure Meta-glasses POV: first-person, straight from my point of view at the keys. Immersive, but honestly all that head motion got a little dizzying to watch for more than a few seconds. So the new clips are a split view — the Meta-glasses POV on one side, paired with a steadier shot from my FaceTime camera on the other. You still get the up-close, over-the-keys perspective, but now there’s a stable frame to rest your eyes on. Same worship moment, just easier to actually watch. One more small thing from this past week: the Pray the Bible shorts and the weekly podcasts now post to Rumble as well. If that’s where you spend your time, the catalog is there now too. Closing — A Prayer as God’s Child To close, here’s one of the Pray the Bible shorts that’s been resonating most lately. It’s drawn from 1 John 3 — a reminder of who we already are before we ask Him for anything: “See how very much our Father loves us, for he calls us his children, and that is what we are!” (1 John 3:1) If embeds aren’t loading for you, the direct link is youtu.be/boWYeEKVW8Q. The Pray the Bible library keeps growing, all searchable under musictoprayby (one word, no spaces) on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X, Telegram, and now Rumble. Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying. The post Music To Pray By Podcast 79 appeared first on Music To Pray By.
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  Music To Pray By Podcast 78 30.05.2026 30min

  Eight weeks in. Podcast 78 is up. Same compile as Podcast 77: live worship piano from the morning streams, stitched into a single listen. Quick post this week, but a couple of real updates worth sharing. An Update on the Church-Service Clips A quick course-correction worth being honest about. For a few days I experimented with moving the church-service clips — the TCC Sunday and Wednesday-night worship moments, the meta-glasses videos — off the Music To Pray By channels and onto my personal accounts. The reasoning was that the live-band, full-room sound was a different vibe from the quiet, prayerful piano MTPB is built around, and I worried it muddied the feed. After testing it for a few days, I changed my mind. Those church-service posts turned out to be helping people find Music To Pray By — and since MTPB exists, at its core, to move people toward prayer, that’s exactly the point. The worship moments and the prayer content pull in the same direction, not against each other. So everything is back on the MTPB channels. The morning streams, the Prayer Shorts, the weekly podcast, and the church-service clips all live together under musictoprayby again. A Prayer Request — For Finances I’m going to be honest with you about something that’s been weighing on me. The past few years have been financially difficult for our family. The day job pays well on paper, but between expenses, the home sale we’ve been working through, and the cost of building MTPB on the side, things have been very tight — tighter than I’ve let on in any of these posts. I’m not asking for money — please don’t read it that way. What I am asking for is prayer. Pray that God would provide for our family the way He’s always provided. Pray that I’d have the wisdom to steward what He’s entrusted to me. Pray that this ministry would be sustainable on its own terms, in His timing. If you’re willing to lift that up sometime this week, it would mean the world. Closing — A Prayer for Provision Of all the Prayer Shorts in the catalog, this one feels right for this post. It’s drawn from Philippians 4:19 — one of the most quoted promises in scripture, and one I’ve been holding onto more tightly lately: “And this same God who takes care of me will supply all your needs from his glorious riches, which have been given to us in Christ Jesus.” If embeds aren’t loading for you, the direct link is youtu.be/SYorYnVg93k. We’re past 75 prayers published at this point, all searchable under musictoprayby (one word, no spaces) on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X, and Telegram. Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying. The post Music To Pray By Podcast 78 appeared first on Music To Pray By.
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  Music To Pray By Podcast 77 24.05.2026 30min

  Seven weeks in. Podcast 77 is up. Same compile as Podcast 76: live worship piano from the morning streams, stitched into a single listen. The weekly cadence is settled now — what I want to talk about this week is the where. There are a few new places to find MTPB content that haven’t made it into a post yet. Three Places You Might Not Know About Telegram Channel: @MusicToPrayBy We launched a Telegram channel earlier this month and I haven’t mentioned it here yet. If you’re a Telegram person, that’s the cleanest way to get a notification when each new Prayer Short drops — same content as the other socials, with no algorithm in between. Join at t.me/MusicToPrayBy. 24/7 Worship Replay on Twitch If you’d like to leave worship music playing in the background through the day, the MTPB Twitch channel now runs a 24/7 replay of past live worship sessions. It loops continuously, shuffled, with a fresh randomized order generated every day. No commentary, no breaks, no “starting soon” screens — just continuous piano. Find it at twitch.tv/musictoprayby. 24/7 Worship Replay on Rumble For folks who prefer Rumble, the same 24/7 worship piano replay is also live there: rumble.com/c/c-7892744. Same playlist, separate stream. The intent with both is simple: have continuous worship piano available on every major platform so that no one has to switch ecosystems to find it. The 6 AM Poll — Standing Pat for Now Last week I asked when most of you spend time with God in the morning, hoping to figure out whether to shift the 6 AM CT live stream earlier or later. The honest answer: nobody replied. Which is a perfectly valid signal too — if 6 AM isn’t bothering anyone, I’ll leave it where it is. We’ll stay at 6:00 AM CT, weekdays for now. The door’s still open if that changes — just drop me a line via any of the socials or comment below. Closing — A Prayer for Strength in Weakness Rather than embed the prayer as text this week, I’m going to drop in the actual Prayer Short. This one is currently the most-watched of the past week or so — a prayer drawn from 2 Corinthians 12, where Paul writes that God’s power is made perfect in our weakness. If embeds aren’t loading for you, the direct link is youtu.be/9eiHEHxHL64. We’re past 70 prayers published at this point, all searchable under musictoprayby (one word, no spaces) on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X, and now Telegram. Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying. The post Music To Pray By Podcast 77 appeared first on Music To Pray By.
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  Music To Pray By Podcast 76 16.05.2026 34min

  Six weeks in. Podcast 76 is up, and I think we can officially call this a routine. Not a lot of new equipment news this week — the pipeline is settling into a real rhythm, which is the goal. The MTPB weekly process from recording to publish to Prayer Shorts is more refined than I’ve ever had it, and I’m starting to feel like I can think about music again instead of about workflow. That’s the dream. A Quick Apology — The Duplicated Shorts If you follow the Prayer Shorts on YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook, you may have noticed the same prayer landing twice within seconds of each other a couple of times this past week. That was on me — an interaction between my scheduler and the post-queue at Postiz that I didn’t see coming. The short version: deleting a scheduled post on the back end didn’t actually cancel its publish job, so when I rescheduled, both copies fired to each platform. I’ve since put an automated trap in place that detects and removes the duplicates within about two minutes of when they fire, so it shouldn’t happen again. Thank you for your patience — the cleanup is in place now. A Question for You — What Time Do You Pray? One thing I’ve been wondering for a while: is 6:00 AM the right time for the live stream? I picked it early on because that’s when I tend to sit down at the piano, but I have no idea whether that’s actually convenient for the people who are listening. Could be earlier, could be later — I want to know. So I’d like to take a quick poll. What time do you most often spend time with God in the morning? (All times Central.) 5:30 AM CT 6:00 AM CT (current stream time) 6:30 AM CT 7:00 AM CT Reply in the comments below, send me a DM on any of the socials (musictoprayby, one word, on YouTube / Instagram / TikTok / Facebook / X), or just email me. I’ll let the results decide where the live time lands. If the answer is “earlier than 6” or “later than 6,” I’ll make the move — and announce the new time a week before it changes so nobody’s surprised. Summer Is Coming — Heads-Up on a Travel Gap Our boys wrapped up school last week, which means our family is finally going to take the road trip we’ve been planning all year. It’s a long one — Texas to Virginia and back through the Smoky Mountains — so there will be a stretch in late July / early August where the 6 AM streams pause. I’ll announce exact dates closer to it, and the Prayer Shorts will keep rolling out the whole time so you’ll still have something to pray with each morning. Just wanted to give the heads-up early. Closing Same compile process as Podcast 75: live worship piano from the morning streams, stitched into a single listen. The Prayer Shorts are still rolling at two a day, 8 AM and 8 PM CT — we’re north of 60 prayers published at this point. If you haven’t found them yet, search musictoprayby (one word, no spaces) on any of the social platforms. And again — please drop your morning-time vote. I want this thing to actually serve the people who are listening. Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying. The post Music To Pray By Podcast 76 appeared first on Music To Pray By.
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  Music To Pray By Podcast 75 09.05.2026 30min

  Five weeks in. Podcast 75 is up — and this one had to be re-recorded from scratch, which is a story in itself. (More on that below.) Same compile as Podcast 74: live worship piano from the morning streams, stitched into a single listen. We’re still running about two weeks behind in the release cycle, which is fine. If you’re new here, the launch-week post walks through what Music To Pray By is and the tech behind it. The OBS Audio Doubling I Didn’t Know About I built an auto-switching scene this week that flips between an overhead camera (looking down at the keys) and the FaceTime camera on my MacBook Pro — a small visual upgrade that lets you actually see what’s happening on the keyboard during the streams. While building it, I discovered that the piano microphones were attached to the overhead-camera scene and getting added to the mix twice — once from the scene, once from the global audio. That’s been the case for an unknown number of past streams and podcasts. I had to re-record this entire podcast from the beginning to get a clean mix without the doubling. Going forward, the audio should be a touch softer overall but with noticeably more dynamics — soft passages can actually be soft now instead of pushed up to the same level as the louder moments. That’s a real improvement, even if it took an unplanned re-record to find. Logic’s Smart Tempo Ate My Sustain Pedal This one cost me most of today. Logic’s Smart Tempo — which I’ve come to depend on for the MIDI editing pipeline — has a quirk that mangles sustain pedal events. The Disklavier records pedal motion at extraordinarily high resolution: a single pedal press can produce 30 or more CC64 events, sometimes well over a hundred, capturing every subtle shift in pressure as I play. Part of my regular MIDI cleanup simplifies those down to about 7 events per press — held-down (127), then a graceful release ramp through 95, 64, 32, to fully-released (0) — so the file is actually editable. What I discovered today: Smart Tempo collapses those 7 cleaned-up events into a tiny window, sometimes under 15 milliseconds. On playback that turns a natural release into an abrupt pedal-up — which kills the tail of every chord. The fix required some custom tooling to detect compressed releases and widen them back out to a natural ~60ms ramp, anchoring the trough at zero and re-spacing the intermediates evenly before it. Tedious to track down but a good catch — this has almost certainly been affecting the Prayer Shorts MIDI quality for weeks. New Piano Sounds Coming for Church Our worship pastor at The Connection Church, Rene Rodriguez, has been telling me for the better part of a month that I need to update my MainStage patches. He’s right — I’ve been running the same piano and pad sound for years and they’ve started to feel dated. Spent a chunk of this past week digging back into Keyscape (Spectrasonics’ LA Custom C7), Noire (the felt-piano engine in NI’s Komplete), and Omnisphere for pads, building a fresh patch list with proper crossfade-on-mod-wheel behavior so I can blend piano + pad smoothly mid-song. Combined with the Dante cutover I wrote about last week, the church worship clips should start sounding like a different room over the next few weeks — cleaner signal chain, fresher voicings. Dante — Still a Project Speaking of Dante: the cutover from analog to all-digital is mostly working, but consistency week-to-week has been a fight. Some Sundays everything routes cleanly the first time; other times we’re chasing dropouts or weird routing states between the Allen & Heath board and Mainstage on my M3. The sound quality when it works is unambiguously better, which is the only thing keeping me from rolling back. Hoping to land on a known-good config in the next couple weeks. Night of Worship at TCC One more thing on the church side — The Connection Church (theconnectionchurch.org) holds a Night of Worship service on the first Wednesday of every month, and this past one was the first I’ve actually recorded. Came home with about 45 minutes of video and audio that will turn into shorts over the next two to three weeks — once they’re edited and the new piano patches are dialed in. If you’re local to San Marcos / Buda, come visit the next one. If not, the shorts will land on your feed soon. A Side Project — Flux Report And one tangent for the curious: I launched fluxreport.ai this week. It’s a Drudge-style aggregator for AI news — refreshes every ten minutes, pulls from Hacker News, Reddit, GitHub trending, arXiv, and the major AI labs, with niche routes for /security and /enterprise. Different audience from MTPB — same person behind it. If you work in tech and want a fast scan of what’s happening, give it a look. Closing — A Prayer of Trust in God’s Plan The Prayer Shorts continue rolling out two a day, 8 AM and 8 PM CT — we’re past 50 prayers published at this point. If you haven’t found them yet, search musictoprayby (one word, no spaces) on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or X. Here’s a sample of the kinds of pray-the-Bible prayers landing in those feeds. This one aired this past Thursday — built on Romans 8:28-30, one of the most-quoted promises in all of scripture: Father, You see what I cannot. I trust You with every loose end. And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them. For God knew his people in advance, and he chose them to become like his Son, so that his Son would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. And having chosen them, he called them to come to him. And having called them, he gave them right standing with himself. And having given them right standing, he gave them his glory. Work it for good, Lord. All of it. Even this. Amen. — Romans 8:28-30 (NLT) This was a heavy tech week — OBS, Smart Tempo, Dante, Mainstage, all in one stretch. None of it is the point. The point is the morning hour at the piano. Everything else is in service of that. Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying. The post Music To Pray By Podcast 75 appeared first on Music To Pray By.
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  Music To Pray By Podcast 74 03.05.2026 31min

  Four weeks in. Podcast 74 is up, and the cadence I’ve been hoping for is starting to feel like it just is — not something I’m muscling into existence anymore. Same compile as Podcast 73: live worship piano from the morning streams, stitched into a single listen. This week’s episode is drawn from the streams on April 13–15 — we’re running about two weeks behind in the release cycle, and that’s honestly fine. The point is the rhythm of getting one out each week, not which days the recording happened. If you’re new here, the launch-week post walks through what Music To Pray By is and the tech behind it. Cleaner Audio Coming for the Church Shorts A handful of times a week I post a short clip from one of our services at The Connection Church — me serving keys at Sunday morning, our Wednesday gathering, or our Saturday gathering. If you’ve watched any of those, you’ve probably noticed the audio quality on the church clips never quite matched the morning streams from home. That’s about to change. This past week we finished a cutover at TCC from an analog signal chain (Mainstage → Apogee Symphony I/O → analog runs → Allen & Heath board) to a fully-digital Dante network. End-to-end, my keys now travel from Mainstage on my MacBook Pro out to the Allen & Heath board without ever leaving the digital domain — no analog-to-digital conversion to color the signal, no cable noise floor, no impedance loss. The bonus: I can record the stream mix straight into Logic alongside an isolated track of just my keys. Going forward, the worship shorts from every service I serve at TCC — Sunday, Wednesday, and Saturday — should sound dramatically cleaner. Same Disklavier-grade signal philosophy, just from the church side. What I’ve Been Noticing Monday I rolled out the next batch of 15 Prayer Shorts — built from Podcast 73’s MIDI, played back through the Disklavier as the actual instrument under the scripture and the prayer. With this batch we’ve crossed 44 prayers published since this started. Two a day, every day, 8 AM and 8 PM CT. By the time you’re reading this they’re still rolling out, with the last one of the week landing Monday evening. What I keep noticing is the shape of the loop: every Friday morning of playing eventually becomes a week of small prayers — first the podcast that compiles the recording, then the prayer shorts built from the same MIDI. Nothing is wasted. Every session God gives me at the piano gets a second life carrying scripture into someone’s morning or evening commute. That’s the part that humbles me most about this whole project — I just sit down and worship, and somehow He keeps multiplying it. If you’ve been praying along with the shorts — thank you. If you haven’t found them yet, search musictoprayby (one word, no spaces) on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or X. Pick whichever platform you already use. The Next Album — Hallowed Be Your Name One thing I haven’t talked about here yet: I’m working on the next album. Working title is Hallowed Be Your Name, and I already have two candidate songs in early shape. The goal is to have it out by the end of the year — Lord willing. I’ll share more as the songs take form. For now, the big rock is just keeping the morning rhythm faithful and letting the album come together in the margins. If God wants it out by December, He’ll make the time appear. Closing — A Prayer of Faithfulness I’ll leave you with one of last week’s Prayer Shorts. This one has been on my heart all week. It’s drawn from Lamentations 3, written from the literal ashes of Jerusalem — and it’s still the verse that produced the hymn we sing every Sunday: Great is Thy faithfulness. Lord, my heart is weary, but Your mercies are new this morning. The faithful love of the Lord never ends! His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning. I say to myself, “The Lord is my inheritance; therefore, I will hope in him!” The Lord is good to those who depend on him, to those who search for him. So it is good to wait quietly for salvation from the Lord. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Great is Your faithfulness, Lord. You have not changed — and You will not. Amen. — Lamentations 3:22-26 · Hebrews 13:8 (NLT) Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying. The post Music To Pray By Podcast 74 appeared first on Music To Pray By.
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  Music To Pray By Podcast 73 26.04.2026 28min

  Three weeks in. Podcast 73 is up, and the rhythm I’ve been hoping for is starting to feel real. The 6 AM streams are still rolling every weekday, and I’m more convinced than ever that this morning hour belongs to prayer. Podcast 73 is compiled the same way Podcast 72 was — the past week of live worship sessions stitched into a single listen. If you’re new here, the launch-week post walks through what Music To Pray By is and the tech behind it. Logic Pro’s Auto Tempo — the timing problem, solved The thing that’s been quietly eating my time every week is timing. The piano sessions are recorded to MIDI off the Disklavier, and that MIDI is what feeds that week’s podcast, which in turn becomes the source for the Pray the Bible Shorts — the Disklavier plays the part back as real piano underneath the scripture and the prayer. The catch: I don’t play to a click. I sit down and worship. So when the MIDI lands in Logic, the bars and beats are nowhere near what I actually played, and tightening it up by hand — dragging notes, slicing measures, fighting the grid — could easily chew up an entire day or more, and up to this point — still learning the new tool — I’ve spent a minimum of 10 hours on each podcast from start to finish. This week I finally sat down with Logic Pro’s Auto Tempo. Instead of manually correcting perceived timing issues by hand, Auto Tempo listens to what I played and bends the project tempo to match — no dragging notes, no slicing measures, no fighting the grid. I haven’t taken a full podcast through with this knowledge yet, but based on what I’ve done so far I’m estimating it’ll cut a minimum of 8 hours of MIDI editing down to roughly 3–4 hours, and probably less once I get more fluent with the tool. That’s a quiet, unglamorous tool change, but it’s the kind of thing that decides whether a weekly cadence is sustainable or whether it grinds me into the ground. Claude Cowork + Claude Code — the editing pipeline A smaller slice of time savings — maybe ten percent on top — comes from the AI pipeline I’ve been building. Between Claude Cowork on the desktop and Claude Code running headless, the entire post-production chain — silence trimming, the album-art intro card, the 1080p re-encode, the MP3 extraction with a clean fade to silence at the tail, the WordPress publish to musictoprayby.com, the cross-publish to piano-music.org, the Cloudflare cache purge, the social fan-out to YouTube, X, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook — all of it now happens from a handful of commands. Auto Tempo is what really moves the needle on time. Claude just keeps the publish steps from becoming the new bottleneck once the timing work is done. I’m mentioning this not because the tools are the point but because removing the friction is what makes the consistency possible. If publishing took twelve hours every week, this would have died at episode three. Because it doesn’t, I get to keep showing up. What Matters Music To Pray By has been in my heart for a long time. The tech I keep writing about — Auto Tempo, the AI workflow, the Disklavier, the MIDI — is in service of one thing: giving you a quiet place to meet with God, every morning, on whichever platform you already use. The podcast is the heart of it — a full week of worship, gathered into one listen. From it, next week’s Pray the Bible Shorts are drawn, scripture set against the same playing. The week after, another podcast, and another set of shorts drawn from that. One body of work feeding the next, and Lord willing, a steadier and steadier rhythm of prayer woven into ordinary mornings. Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying. The post Music To Pray By Podcast 73 appeared first on Music To Pray By.
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  Music To Pray By Podcast 72 20.04.2026 30min

  Two weeks in. Podcast 72 is here, and a rhythm is starting to settle in. The morning streams have kept rolling at 6 AM every weekday, and each one teaches me something new — about the piano, about the prayer, about what it looks like to sit down at a grand piano and worship while the rest of the world is still waking up. What started as “can I even pull this off?” has turned into something I look forward to every morning. Podcast 72 is compiled the same way Podcast 71 was — live worship sessions from this past week bundled into a single listen. If you’re new here, the launch-week post walks through what Music To Pray By is and the tech behind it. The Prayer Shorts — Pray Often, Pray Scripture The biggest new thing this week: the Prayer Shorts. Every Monday I’m publishing a batch of short 1–2 minute videos, each one built around a single passage of scripture and a short prayer. The idea is simple — twice a day, take two minutes, read a verse, pray it back. Morning and evening. That’s the rhythm I’d love to see take root in all of us, and these shorts are my attempt to make it easy. The music underneath those shorts is Podcast 71. After each podcast is finished, the MIDI from those sessions gets cleaned up and played back through the Disklavier so the shorts get the real instrument in the background rather than a sample. Quiet piano worship, gently carrying the scripture and the prayer. Going forward, this is the pattern: every week, the latest podcast becomes the soundtrack for the next week’s shorts. Podcast 72 will live under next week’s batch. Podcast 73 under the one after that. One body of work feeding the next. If you haven’t seen the shorts yet, they’re on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and X — whichever platform you already use. Pray along. What Matters A lot of what I’ve been writing these last couple weeks has been tech — the Yamaha DC7XE3 Disklavier, the MIDI pipeline, the signal chain, the automation. All of that matters, but none of it is the point. Music To Pray By has been in my heart for a long time. This chapter is the next iteration of it — more consistent, more reachable, and finally landing in front of people who weren’t around when this started. When I sit down at 6 AM, the goal is to give you a quiet place to meet with God. Everything else is in service of that. Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying. The post Music To Pray By Podcast 72 appeared first on Music To Pray By.
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  Music To Pray By Podcast 71 13.04.2026 29min

  This is it — the first official podcast from the new era of Music To Pray By. Podcast 71 is compiled from the first three live worship sessions, recorded Good Friday through Easter Sunday 2026. If you’ve been following along, you know that we launched live streaming on Good Friday, and those first three sessions hold a special place — recorded during the most sacred weekend of the Christian year. There’s something about playing worship music during the passion and resurrection of Christ that carries a weight and an intimacy that’s hard to put into words. The music is mostly original — pieces that came out of those live prayer sessions as the Spirit led. You’ll also hear a few familiar hymns and worship tunes that I naturally fell back on during the live recordings. When you’re playing live for 30 minutes straight, you go where the music takes you, and sometimes that means leaning into melodies that have carried the church for generations. A note on quality: you’ll hear some imperfections. The good news is that each week the quality improves as I refine the automated MIDI cleanup and processing pipeline I’ve been building. Every iteration of edits I work through gets incorporated back into the automated tools, so the post-production process gets smarter over time. What you’re hearing in Podcast 71 is the very first pass of this system — it only gets better from here. Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying. This ministry exists because God called it into being during Holy Week 2026, and I’m grateful for every ear and every heart that joins in. Soli Deo Gloria. The post Music To Pray By Podcast 71 appeared first on Music To Pray By.
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  Podcast Seventy 23.01.2016 33min

  This comprises of the songs left out of the Music To Pray By album "My Father in Heaven". This is the first podcast recorded on my new Yamaha DC7XE3 Grand Piano as well as all new mics and pre-amps. I believe it is the best sounding piano audio I've ever captured. I hope and pray it inspires you to pray and spend time in our Heavenly Father's Presence.
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  Podcast Sixty-nine 25.06.2014 30min

  The last podcast to be recorded on my Yamaha DC3M4. It goes away tomorrow, and though it’s only been 4 years, I feel as though I have a tremendous amount of history with that wonderful piano. I actually had to pick and choose from about 2 hours worth of recordings since I’m not sure if the old format will be supported on the new piano. I’m truly excited about the capabilities and the sound of the new Yamaha DC7XE3Pro, but it’s also sad to see my old piano leave the studio. I’m sure it will end up in good hands! About the podcast – it’s all original except the last song. I had to choose between two really good covers and ended up going with “Oceans” by Hillsong United. It is one of my favorite songs, and though I feel like I barely did the original justice, I hope to do another rendition in a future podcast.  I did a lot of playing with this mix, which will likely change noticeably with the new piano. I wanted to make sure the last podcast from the DC3M4 was as good as it could possibly sound, and I think I accomplished that. I have a number of things to share with you so I apologize in advance for all the non-music posts that are to come over the next week or so. I pray this podcast is a blessing to you. The post Podcast Sixty-nine appeared first on Music To Pray By.
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  Podcast Sixty-eight 02.01.2014 31min

  Yet another all-original podcast. I did use some pretty familiar chord progressions, but I also tried out some new styles. I’m definitely looking forward to trying this podcast out tomorrow morning during my devotional. Sorry this came a little late. I spent way more time editing than I have in the past largely due to Logic Pro X, the new version of pro audio software I use. Some of the editing techniques I use don’t work the same way unfortunately so I spent bit of time finding workarounds. May the Joy and Peace of our LORD overwhelm you as you listen and stay your mind on Him! The post Podcast Sixty-eight appeared first on Music To Pray By.
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  Podcast Sixty-seven 24.02.2013 29min

  You may not hear any familiar melodies as this podcast is mostly original. I've adopted a fairly new process to recording the podcast. Rather than attempting to record all 30+ minutes in one sitting, I've just sat at the piano and pressed "record" as the Holy Spirit has led throughout the past quarter. It has been working out okay so far. It also gives me an opportunity to select the best recordings out of many, and there was a really bad 15 minutes of recording I was happy not to have included in this podcast. You may notice that it may have a slightly different sound than previous podcasts. I'm still perfecting the audio recording and mixing aspect of the podcast even after almost 5 years. I pray this podcast encourages you to spend some quality time with our Maker.