Like a pair of jeans.

Merry Christmas folks!
I'm sure you all have significantly better things to do than to read the J-Blog this holiday season, but two posts popped into my head tonight, and I thought I'd get them out now rather than hold on to them. They're both worship related, but this one goes out to all you guitar players in the bunch.

Tonight I was getting ready for the Christmas Eve service, and giving my guitars the yearly once-over. Polish. Lemon solution for the neck. New Strings. String ointment (no joke). The whole nine yards. I do this no where near as often as I should, but Christmas Eve is a big production for us, so I like to make sure the axe is in good shape.

As I was polishing the body of my Taylor, I noticed that right around the sound hole there are a collection of scratches. At first I thought it was just a smudge, but these are in fact deep lasting scratches right next to the pick guard.

At first I was sort of ticked. This is my beautiful guitar, that we spent way too much money on! How could I be so foolish as to rock so hard unrelentingly for so long as to cause my baby this damage? But then I thought about some of my favorite guitars out there (spoiler alert: they're all Taylors)

Dave's Taylor is sporting some wear and tear on the up side of the sound hole. This strikes me as odd. Is he strumming harder on the upstrokes? This man is a mystery to me...

I scoured the internet looking for a frontal shot of Josh Wilson's Taylor, but alas Google would not comply. Josh just went a head and ripped his pick guard off his guitar, which is pretty slick because it leaves the anti-pickgaurd line behind. You can see it best in this video, which just display's some sick pedal work!

First of all, where does one summon the courage to wear those shorts on stage? Secondly, Jars of Clay has been one of my favorite bands for a long while. No two albums sound the same, and yet, I love all of them. No other band can do that. Again, Matt Odmark's guitar is ellusive to the still camera, but youtube bails us out again. Check out the :52 mark.

I heard someone say that a good guitar is like a good pair of jeans. They're fine when they're brand new, but they don't really become yours until they're worn in a little bit. I will say that I feel like guitar self-mutalation, or purposefully damaging it to look cool is on par with paying 50 dollars to have someone pre-rip holes in your jeans. But if you're actually wearing and tearing your guitar, have a blast!

Godspeed,

J

A day of rest/Some thoughts about marketing.

 

Good afternoon everybody.

I am sitting on my couch. I spent the night last night playing some music with a potential new band, and then following up by recording for my good friend Ben Bitzel's album. It was super good to be back on the drums last night, and I felt like I was rocking and rolling on a level that I haven't been at in a while. I was (wait for it) playing like an animal.

 

(Rock!)

While I am sitting around at home, I am thinking about marketing. Our youth group just bought an ad for the high school musical, and so our church's communication director and I have been working hard to design it. I struggle with marketing, because I spend so much time preaching and giving messages in 20-40 minute blocks, and marketing is all about summing that all up in a photograph. It is hard for me.

 

This is our youth ministry's logo. Actually, it has a tremendous amount of meaning, because each of the three arrows stands for one part of our mission statement (more on this later?). I also think it just looks really good, it's clean, it's simple to understand, it holds up both in color and in black and white. While I'm thinking through it, I thought I'd post some of my favorite logos and marketing schemes in recent years.

 

Apple Computers (Link)

Ok, I'm a little biased. I love Apple. I think their computers are the bomb diggity (yeah, I just did that to the English language). But beyond that, they've had a logo that has been more or less unchanged since their start in the 70s. They've done a really good job of modernizing it without ditching what works for them. 

 
 

Mars Hill Church, Michigan (Link)

Again, probably a little biased because of my love for Rob Bell. But this logo is as simple as could possibly be, and I'm not sure but I think their logo (like the Veritas logo) is based upon their mission or purpose statement. I'm very impressed by logos that can be clean and simple and yet convay a ton of information if you know where you're looking for. 

 

Google (Link)

This has nothing to do with kissing up to the company that owns my blog. Honestly, at first I really didn't like the Google logo, but it's started to grow on me a little bit. It would appear (based on the three logos I've picked) that I'm also a little partial to that shinny effect everyone's using these days.

Here's the point though. I'm starting to think that logos are more important to young people than they've ever been before. There was a point in time that people could make the arguement that it really didn't matter, but I think those days are gone. So to those of us who are in youth ministry, how important is our ministry's logo? How important is our marketing campaign. I know we all hate it, but perhaps it's time to start picking up on it. 

PS: I'm going to start labeling my posts, so people can find parts of the blog quicker. Yeah!

Godspeed,

-J-