I'm John Francis: a Baptist Minister of Worship in St. Louis, trumpet player, and researcher. This site began as a blog of my writings as a doctoral student, I have now redesigned the site to be more useful to the pastoral musician and trumpet player. For my research click here.
I hope that you enjoy these tracks; they are all recorded by using a TASCAM DP-006 6-Track "Pocketstudio." They are mostly Public Domain, and I add to them frequently. My basement studio is called "The Brass Menagerie" hence the title. If you need any of these arrangements, let me know. Enjoy!
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My daily playing horn, and one that I have had for forty years, is my Bb Bach Stradivarius, Model 43, from Elkhart, IN. Modification: "Heavy Caps." Mouthpiece: Bach 3C.
This cornet a 1955 "Olds Ambassador" from Fullerton CA. No modifications. Mouthpiece: Flip Oakes 7X (bought horn for $25!)
Piccolo Trumpet: (A/Bb): Getzen Eterna. Elkhorn, WI. Mouthpiece Modified Schilke 14A4A. Flugelhorn: "Wild Thing" Flip Oakes, Oceanside, California. Mouthpiece: Flip Oakes 3C.
This fun 4:30 minute video is a wonderful place to start in your exploration of biblical trumpets. I produced it a few years ago for my old website, "gloryhorn."
A “spiritual awakening”, having taken place in the small community of Herrnhut, Germany, gave birth to a sacred instrumental music ministry so profound that repercussions are still felt today in the secular and sacred United States and elsewhere.
This paper seeks to research why British hymnody would be an optimum source for a hymnal for Esperanto-speaking people, what can be learned from other English hymn translators and to determine a philosophy of translation to create a hymnal that would be useful for the glorification of God, and a tool for evangelism to a secularized culture.
Through his hymnal, William Gadsby, sought to use hymns as a formative means of teaching a specific doctrine of the Lord’s Supper to "Strict Baptists" that would be Calvinistic in expression, despite the clear Zwinglian “memorialism” stance that their confessions would state.
This brief article is about the importance of sincere platform leadership through preparation, appearance, platform vibrancy and certain untangibles
In the Jewish faith, according to Rabbi Abraham Witty, the shofar is a symbol for Messiah. This paper looks at iconodules and iconclasts to decide is the shofar a good representative of the Messiah.
This is an article written for "Let's Worship" (LifeWay) in 2013 about using David Allen's 43 Folders to better organize your music ministry.
The calls are performed by Dr. John Francis on a Yemenite Shofar (kudu horn). They are performed after research using some of the oldest references., namely the medieval R. Moses ben Maimonides treatise Hilchos Shofar. They are recorded for academic purposes only.