Updates and Guitar Chords for Thaen Inimayilum

I have added guitar chords for few more Tamil songs in the pdf file and re-arranged the file. Now the songs for which I have written chords have been brought forward in the file for easier access and I have moved the lyrics of  other songs to the later pages of the file.  Moreover, I have added tabs with links to the pdf file pages on top of this blog page. Also, I have added video for the song Thaen Inimayilum in E major. Here is the video:

Chords for Paareer Arunodhayam pol Tamil Song (Adavi Tharukalin - Malayalam)

This update includes guitar chords for an old tamil worship song, "Paareer Arunodhayam pol" which is also available in Malayalam (Adavi Tharukalin). The written chords are available in the pdf file here. I am also including here a video showing how this song can be played.

Guitar Chords for more Tamil Christian Songs

It has been more than two years since I updated this blog. Over the past few weeks,  I found some time to put together chords for some more tamil songs. The chords for these songs are also included in the pdf file.  The pdf file is not complete. The file is not yet formatted and I have included words for a few songs for which I am planning to add chords when I find time. I am also planning to add more songs whenever I find time.  Here is the link to the Tamil Songs pdf file: Tamil Christian Songs

Since it has become more easy to include online videos over the past few years, I am attempting for the first time to include links for couple of videos that show how I play the chords for some of these songs in acoustic guitar. As an initial attempt, I am adding videos for the songs "Ennaalumae thudhipaai" and "Sthothiram Yesunathaa" that show how I play contemporary style chords for these songs. Over the past decade, the playing styles of chords and chord arrangments have changed significantly. Many of us must have observed that the acoustic guitar chord accompaniment is used more commonly not just in small group worship sessions but also in large praise and worship concerts. That being the case, it may be worthwhile to learn various styles of chord arrangements. For example, in the video "Ennaalumae thudipaai", I have tried to include the traditional simple arrangement of chords (more commonly used during the eighties) followed by a contemporary pattern of chord arrangement (more common chord arrangement style in this decade). Similarly, one can attempt various types of chord arrangements for a single song and choose the one that is more useful during small group worship sessions.  Here are the videos:

Sthothiram Yesu Naatha

Ennaalumae Thudhipaai

Please feel free to include your suggestions through email/comments regarding the videos so that we can make this process better and more useful with future updates.

Guitar Chords for Tamil Christian Songs and minor update to Songs with Chords file

Some of my friends had been encouraging me for quiet sometime now to to compile a file with guitar chords for Tamil Christian songs. I just started doing this recently and have put together chords for some simple Tamil Christian songs according to how I sing these songs. Here is the link for the file:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/75286846/Music/Tamil%20Christian%20Songs.pdf


I also found some time to update the Songs file with chords for two more songs, Draw me close to You (Song 198) and Days of Elijah (Song 212). Here is the link for the file.

http://sdrv.ms/12HAArU


Thanks

Music Theory as I understand it and more updates in my songs file

I think that I have introduced significant updates in my songs file since my last post here. Chords have been introduced to more songs and I have put quite a lot of chord position diagrams.

Moreover, I had also created another file regarding music theory as I understand it. While I have tried my level best to simplify the fundamental concepts, it definitely ended up being a large file. In the later parts of this file, I have tried to include practical examples for the utilization of some uncommon chords in christian songs. As time permits, I will try to update this file too in future.

It is my hope and prayer that young christian musicians who want to do their very best with their music in small groups and christian worship sessions will find these resources helpful.

Quotes

Here are some quotes that I think are thought-provoking.

"When God is knocked out, sin is minimized" - Ravi Zacharias

"When belief becomes hard and struggles becomes great, the tendency is to turn away from God. But the million dollar question in the name of sanity in heaven's name is to what?" - Unknown

"Son, whatever weakens your reasoning, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures
your sense of God or takes away your relish for spiritual things; in short, if anything increases the authority and power of the flesh over the spirit, that to you becomes sin, however good it is in itself" - John Wesley's mother.

"Meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain; meaninglessness comes from being
weary of pleasure" - G K Chesterton

"God whispers to us in our pleasure but shouts to us in our pain" - G.K. Chesterton

"Anything that refreshes you without distracting from or destroying your final goal is a legitimate pleasure" - Ravi Zacharias (What is worthwhile under the sun)

"Any pleasure that jepordizes the sacred right of another person may well be an illegitimate pleasure" - Ravi Zacharias

Any pleasure however good if not kept in balance will distort reality or destroy apetite"
- Ravi Zacharias

Pleasure for pleasure's sake will leave you empty. Pleasure must only be a means. It can
never be an end in itself. - Ravi Zacharias.

"Character is what we are in the dark." - D.L. Moody.

"Whatever a man does without God, in that he must either fail miserably or suceed even more miserably." - George Mcdonald.

"The church should move on its knees seeking God" - Erwin Lutzer.

"One of the reasons that you find people are so driven often times is because they try to cover their emptiness in their lives that they will not face." - Erwin Lutzer

"An opinion is a position you hold with a varied degree of intensity that merely voices your preferences. But a conviction is that which is rooted in your conscience. If you were to toy with your opinions, you are going to jostle with your preferences. If you were to toy with your conviction, you were going to deal with your conscience. And it is pivotal to know that. A conviction that is ungirded by love will make the possesser of them obnoxious and the dogma he possesses repulsive." - Ravi Zacharias

"Sin is violation of a Person - the Person of God" - Ravi Zacharias

"The Cross - The crossroad where justice kissed peace when grace met the truth during the ultimate sacrifice that mankind had ever known."

Updates to my Songs with Chords file

It has been a while since I wrote something in here. This post is about the updates to my Songs with Guitar Chords pdf file. I have recently included few more songs with chords. I have also started including diagrams for position of some of the unfamiliar chords (along with the songs) on the guitar fretboard. This, I thought may be helpful to learn and practice using these chords for these songs. So far, I have included chord position diagrams for the first fifty songs in the file. So now one can find the relevant chord position diagrams for any of the first fifty songs in the file within three pages above or below that song in the file. In due course of time, I will try to include chord position diagrams for all the songs in the file.

Memorials and Memories

Joshua 4: 4-7
4 So Joshua called together the twelve men he had appointed from the Israelites, one from each tribe, 5 and said to them, "Go over before the ark of the LORD your God into the middle of the Jordan. Each of you is to take up a stone on his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the Israelites, 6 to serve as a sign among you. In the future, when your children ask you, 'What do these stones mean?' 7 tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD. When it crossed the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. These stones are to be a memorial to the people of Israel forever.


One of my favorite passages in the bible is in Joshua Chapter 4. As the Israelites crossed Jordan, their new leader Joshua commanded something unusual for them to do. He commanded the twelve tribes to collect twelve stones as memorial pieces of this marvelous event for the nation of Israel forever.

Whenever we come across life-threatening trials (similar to that of a flooding Jordan in front of the Israelites) in our lives, we need to understand that God allows such trials to prove His marvelous faithfulness and awesome control that He has over anything and everything in our lives. When passing through such trials, we need to learn to see far beyond those trials and plan how we can later testify about God’s greatness and faithfulness during such a time to others. Such trials are nothing but opportunities for us to build everlasting memorials about God’s faithfulness and awesome control over our lives.

Such memorials can
(i) build our confidence in Him when we face even larger trials later in our lives
(ii) minimize any kind of trial ahead of us and maximize our focus on God’s awesome power and His faithfulness in our lives and
(iii) help others around us see, wonder and believe in this awesome God.

Here is another example from the bible where another great man of God won a marvelous victory against a giant who was terrorizing an entire nation.

I Samuel 17: 32-37

32 David said to Saul, "Let no one lose heart on account of this Philistine; your servant will go and fight him."
33 Saul replied, "You are not able to go out against this Philistine and fight him; you are only a boy, and he has been a fighting man from his youth."
34 But David said to Saul, "Your servant has been keeping his father's sheep. When a lion or a bear came and carried off a sheep from the flock, 35 I went after it, struck it and rescued the sheep from its mouth. When it turned on me, I seized it by its hair, struck it and killed it. 36 Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear; this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, because he has defied the armies of the living God. 37 The LORD who delivered me from the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine." Saul said to David, "Go, and the LORD be with you."

When David saw Goliath, he went to Saul and said that he would go against this giant and bring him down. Saul and his security council were not really convinced of this young man’s idea. But then David told them about how God had helped him protect his father’s sheep from wild beasts in the past. It is in fact interesting to see the confident David minimizing Goliath as similar to one of those wild beasts while the whole nation of Israel was trembling at the very sight of Goliath. David had built up such an awesome and accurate memorial of God’s faithfulness and power in his life that the idea of Goliath being anything significant sounded so trivial to him.

In our fast paced world, do we pause and try to remember the great things that God has done in our lives? In this age of wired (better said wireless!!!!) communication, we are rapidly getting used to store all the needed information for our professional world, in wireless gadgets or in online servers that we don’t have to remember them any more. We are also getting used to backing up the data that we collect to avoid any loss of data due to accidental deletions or hardware crashes.

But when was the last time that we paused to record the data of God’s greatness and His faithfulness in our lives even as He brought us out of a nasty problem which we thought would sink us down?

Also, when we think of our various painful struggles in the past, do we complain about them or do we praise God for leading us out of those trials with His awesome power? What is our first thought about our nasty problems in the past? Are we able to look back and praise God for His mercies and grace? Or are we grumbling against Him with bitterness for leading us through such a rough terrain?

We need to understand that memory is a God given gift to mankind. But human memory often keeps record of all the wrong things for a longer time leading to scars of bitterness. We as human beings tend to often remember the wrong or tragic things that happen to us for a long time while often forgetting God’s faithfulness and grace for us to overcome those painful moments.

Probably, this is where memorials play an important role in human life. If we think about memorials, it will be interesting to note that most memorials in history throughout the world are raised by people to always remind us of either some monumental achievement of someone as a person or the resilience of a community of people during a tragic time in history. Similarly, personal memorials regarding God’s goodness in our own lives during tough times can help us keep a better record of God’s faithfulness and grace in our lives. Such memorials also help us to minimize any major trial that we may have to face in future by helping us to focus on Him and Him alone. Beyond all these, it may be that God leads us successfully through such painful trials and struggles in our own lives so that we can later graciously help with confidence people around us who may go through a similar path. Therefore the next time we face some major trial or threat in our own lives, let us remember to focus on recording accurately God’s greatness and faithfulness through it. And while we are yet recording His perfect guidance, we may find ourselves already out of the problem.

Songs with Chords

I just added a link to one of my old webpages containing lyrics of Christian songs with guitar chord arrangements. Most of the chord arrangements were written by me and some of my friends according to how we sing these songs in our small groups in India. Over a period of time, I had collected all these arrangements together from our old notebooks and put it on a webpage as an Adobe Acrobat reader file. Hope this will be useful for someone out there looking for a quick arrangement of chords for an old song. I will try to update this page in future with more songs and an index. One can always find this link in my links list in this page. Feel free to add suggestions regarding this.

Anyway

Let me start my blog here with one of my all time favorite poems apparently written by one Kent Keith. The poem is titled "Anyway".

“Anyway”

People are often unreasonable, illogical,and self-centered;

Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, People may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;

Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;

Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;

Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight.

Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;

Be happy anyway.
The good you do today,people will often forget tomorrow;

Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have,and it may never be enough;

Give the world the best you've got anyway.
You see, in the final analysis,it is between you and God;

It was never between you and them anyway.
Kent Keith