New things! Exciting things!

So! This year's kind of gotten ahead of me, and many things have happened, some that I've sorta kinda mentioned here, and others not so much. So I thought that I'd take this time to talk about them!

Firstly, I'm doing Impart! For those in the Church of Christ loop, it's like Navigate's big brother. For those not, it's like an intensive part-time one year bible college course, done as a very small community (i.e. 10 people). Which is pretty cool. I've already done my first intensive block, which I mentioned in one of my previous posts. But I've met some awesome people with this, and it's generally quite awesome :D

Secondly, I've come into some new-fangled music stuff through Christmas, and birthday, and other stuff like that. So I now have Ableton Live 9 Standard; a Macbook Pro (one of the new ones); and Ableton Push. For those who don't know Ableton (most of you), it's a sort of music software that is used for music creation, changing, editing, transforming, production, etc. Really good for electronic stuff, and made specifically to be used for live performance. Push, then, is a MIDI controller that interacts with Ableton, and is essentially a grid of buttons that you can use kinda like a keyboard, but set out quite differently. And with a lot more variety of uses. And my laptop means that I can do a whole lot more, like recording, making new videos, doing livestreaming (check out my channel at http://www.stageit.com/brendanjamesraymond), which is pretty cool.
And I got an accordion. Just cause. Realised after I got it that I don't really have anywhere I can practice (it's really, *really* loud, so I can't practice at home), so I'm not sure what's going to happen with that. And I don't really have anyone to teach me either. Some of it's fairly simple - I mean, one side is a piano - but the bass is proving pretty tricky, and the mechanics of it can be a little finicky as well.

Those are the main ones. But then I'm still doing some casual work at Boomerang, I've got Youth Group happening at church that I'm helping out with, Life Group, church, and choir as well. So I'm keeping myself fairly occupied. I've got a few other projects I'm working on as well - one in particular that's going to be coming up quite soon - but you'll hear about those as they come around ;)