Rough Cuts

OK 'fess up. I know you already tried listening to a few of our worship songs on SoundCloud and your reaction was probably "Ugh!" But as I warned you on the Songs page, these recordings are just "rough cuts" that I did at home and are (obviously) not studio quality recordings made by professional musicians.

But here's the problem: I'm an old dude now, and my voice has gotten kinda creaky with age, so I can't hit those top notes very well anymore. And even after many years of leading worship with guitar in a number of different home fellowships, I'm still pretty much just a novice guitar player who struggles with bar chords like F major. (OK so it's barre chords not bar chords — well, I told you I'm a guitar novice.)

But there's more. You see, I was at one time a pretty good keyboardist. In fact, in my early teenage years I was studying piano with Leonard Isaacs who was the head of the School of Music at the University of Manitoba. And Leonard could trace his piano lineage all the way back to Ferruccio Busoni who is considered the heir to Franz Liszt's legacy. So by the age of 15 I was well on the way to becoming a classically-trained pianist and was already composing works for the piano. But then I got interested in Physics.

Then I met the Lord during my last year of university just as I was about to embark on graduate studies in Astrophysics funded by a four-year National Research Council scholarship. My life completely changed when I became a Christian, and soon I found myself working weekdays as a laborer in a garment factory while playing piano to accompany congregational singing in church on Sundays and composing new tunes for old hymns (will record a few of these for you someday).

Then one day in the early 80s I came into contact with live worship from the early Vineyard Movement and I was totally blown away. Here's how I described my experience in chapter 1 of my book Simple Kingdom: Worship:

"...someone gave me a cassette tape recording of live evening worship at the Vineyard Christian Fellowship when it was still meeting in the gymnasium of Canyon High School in Anaheim, California. As I lay on my bed listening to this worship tape, I wept uncontrollably. Because I had finally found something I had always been longing for: a way of expressing the deepest feelings of my heart to God."

And once again my approach to music and musicality changed as I taught myself to (badly) play guitar and began leading worship in home fellowships and writing simple worship songs (i.e. not in the key of F). Classical music no longer had a hold over my heart as it used to, and Ingrid's experience was very similar. The simple Vineyard songs from the 80s remain to this day both the enabler of our personal worship times and also the model and inspiration for the many worship songs we ourselves have written over the years.

Then in the early 90s music took another turn for me as the Lord led Ingrid and I to move from our home in Winnipeg, Manitoba to Surrey, BC in order to join the Vineyard church there, and once we had settled in at Surrey Vineyard I was invited by Andy Park to join his worship team as keyboardist. By this time I had already gotten into synthesizers (logical for a guy who studied Physics) and I can remember that first time being on stage with my Korg T2 synth when Andy introduced me to the congregation by saying "Mitch Tulloch will be our keyboardist, and guess what? He even looks like a musician!"