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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And we know that God causes everything

For God knew his people in advance,

And having chosen them, he called them to come to him.

Work it for good, Lord.

— 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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

The faithful love of the Lord never ends!

I say to myself, “The Lord is my inheritance;

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Great is Your faithfulness, Lord.

— Lamentations 3:22-26 · Hebrews 13:8 (NLT)

Thank you for listening, and thank you for praying.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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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 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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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