mike portnoy drums

So this weekend I played drums! First time in at least 6 months. It was awesome - I was a little worried because in the past few months we’ve introduced the click to almost all our songs, and I had never played along with a click, ever. But I think I did alright; out of 4 worship sets, I only lost it once, which I think was OK, cuz it was towards the end of the song during the “rock you like a hurricane” portion of the song. I also broke a stick, so you know it was a good day! Here was our set:

  1. Not to Us (Tomlin)
  2. Blessed be Your Name (Redman)
  3. How Great is Our God (Tomlin)
  4. Wonderful Cross (Redman)

I think my favorite song was “Not to Us”, although I did get to play some brushes on “How Great” and I tried my best to do the rudiment-style snare for “Wonderful Cross”. I tried to keep it diverse. I love playing drums. When Karl gets the audio up - I’ll link to it in case you want to book me, ha! [updated: here's the audio - it's a little distorted]

As soon as the main worship set was done, I ran over to our youth and led worship on guitar. We’re trying to develop more of a worship experience for our youth during the 9:30 & 11am time slots. So we are slowly working on getting more worship leaders in there, but right now, it’s me. So I led these songs:

  1. Not to Us
  2. Everlasting God (Tomlin)
  3. Blessed be Your Name

A little redundant right? I know, but I’m just trying to keep it easy, do songs that I don’t really need to focus on music and lyrics - all these I know like the back of my hand - so I can just pop in there and get it going. The kids are beginning to respond more to the music. For the first couple weeks it was just me up there with a guitar and a lot of blank stares. I think they are beginning to feel comfortable engaging and understanding worship. But we’ve got a lot of work to do.

Our total attendance this weekend was 590 so we’re still growing!

How was you’re weekend?