Music To Pray By

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.

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.

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.

In this podcast, I used songs Soundwave prepared for DCYC - they are "Strong Enough to Save", "Your Name High", "Forever Reign", "Always", "Your Great Name", and "Our God". I think this is probably the first podcast ever to be original-free, although, it does contain some originality. Those who like consistently quite and peaceful podcasts may not enjoy this one as much since I get a bit loud in some parts. It may be a few months before the next podcast is posted, but I'll try to make it softer. I thank all of you who continue to use this ministry to enhance your prayer time. I'm blown away at the number of downloads that happen on a daily basis.

I finished mixing the Soundwave album last week so I'm back at it - thanks for your patience. This podcast, I only used "Hosannah" for a brief period. The rest is original - some from previous podcasts and some that's fresh and new. An interesting stat about this podcast is it's the first to be exactly 30 minutes long! I admit, I stretched the end out a little, but it was already pretty close. I added a bit more gain both at the pre amp and in software using a little more compression and gain on the limiter to try to even out the level a bit. There is quite a bit more dynamics in this podcast compared to the previous two or three. This time, I wanted to keep the dynamics as original as possible, especially during the soft parts, and I didn't change the level on some of the louder midi notes like I have in the past. I think it turned out better this way. I'm sure I'll get better at holding back more as I record so please bear with me as I continue learn and grow in this ministry.

Still searching for the best mic placement and mix, but I think its getting there. Most all the tunes are repeat or new originals. You may recognize one or two of them. I pray that every note played will encourage you to seek God's Kingdom first. Peace.

This podcast, I used the songs, "Came to My Rescue" and "I Will Exalt". Since I actually recorded this podcast over a month ago, I had to refer to planning center for the song names. Interesting fact: this podcast contains 16,782 notes, and I probably touched 80-90% of them during the editing process. :-) I either need to learn how to play better or be less picky about timing issues. I hope you enjoy the podcast.