It’s tough to sound unique or non-repetitive in this genre (if you can call percussive acoustic guitar a genre), but this Stefano Barone tune caught my ear. There’s something about mildly Gypsy sounding music (from an Italian no less) that’s melodically interesting to me.

For our Christmas services at NewSpring Church, Ken Wilson made samples in Reason, loaded them into the iPhone app Beatmaker, and then we used them to “DJ” opening sets as everyone arrived to the service(s) at our campuses.

Ken and Daniel tagteamed it at our Anderson Campus. I was on at our Greenville Campus. I replaced a few of Ken’s original samples with some of my own (handclaps, Charlie Brown, George Carlin, etc.) for a slightly different flavor. Ken has lots of details and source files here and here and here, or you can download my Beatmaker kit here.

I’d love to know the thought process that resulted in this. I have musician friends who occasionally do savantish things like call out the pitch of industrial objects; I wonder if this was “Hey, my microwave dings an A note when my HotPocket® is done!” However it came about, amazing creativity from AKQA. (via AV Club)

After some massive office furniture destruction in our team’s area, there is only one wall left in my “cubicle.” On the other side of said wall sits RoseAngela Merritt. I give her a hard time (often) about practicing, but she puts her skills to good use. For example:

All I Want for Christmas on Vimeo.

For our part, The Blankenships are trying to make as many of our gifts and as much of our packaging as possible this year. You can find out more about what other folks are doing at Advent Conspiracy or on their blog.

I submit to you that there is nothing on the internet with more cute-per-second than this video.