Daniel (Elton John)

Saying you're not talented enough (or not talented at all) I think is a simplification.  Its like saying I didn't eat enough vegetables as a kid to explain something thats difficult as an adult.  Some people connect very quickly with a certain activity for a specific reason likely traceable back to an experience from childhood and others take a longer time, but an innate proclivity for playing music is a myth I think.  Unless you're a Mozart who was a genius at 4 years old - but those are so rare that it doesn't make sense to compare yourself to a child prodigy.  Saying Michael Jackson was talented is easy to say but in reality we'd all be pretty talented if our dad's kicked the crap out of us from 6 years old for screwing up dance steps.  Then again Mozart's dad probably kicked the crap out of him too.  In the end you just have to practice to get good and motivation can come from many places like boredom, necessity, or a traumatizing fear of being humiliated by your parents.  Talent isn't real.  It doesn't necessarily have to be hard work because I learn a lot more a lot faster when I'm enjoying what I'm doing - thats why I have to alternate because if I just played classical guitar week after week I'd probably murder someone.

Pop keyboard is hard because varying the rhythms of chords is tricky against singing a melody.  Piano is so bright and penetrating that playing too similar rhythms over and over again your ear becomes fatigued - like when you hear (or had to play yourself) Mary Had a Little Lamb with block chords supporting the melody.  It does feel good when you're in the zone though syncopating individual notes of chords in both hands in interesting ways.  This recording isn't great but I been playing it so long I gotta move on.

The guitar licks are a frankenstein track of random noodlings - but because all of the takes line up with the vocals you can just transplant what is good into a single track.

My mom said my last song was too sad, so here is a happier song with lyrics by Bernie Taupin about Vietnam veterans coming home and suffering from PTSD given the trauma experienced during war.

Pro Tip
 - iMovie is horrible
 - Bass is an easy instrument to start playing, so if you've always wanted to play an instrument maybe pick up the bass!  I wouldn't really call it a separate instrument from guitar though - its the same notes and same technique except you generally just play one note at a time.


Ishida
 

Come Home (Jo Ishida)

This song almost got vetoed or at least significantly reworked, but its already a day late and I need to upload.

I was going to add bass guitar to this one but ended up taking it out because it didn't really add anything to the song.  I was also going to add keyboard and harmony, but for the same reason they were axed.

Music inspired by recently found band Hurray for the Riff Raff.

Lyrics were inspired by Schubert's Gretchen Am Spinnrade which were written by Johann Von Goethe.  Found here: http://classicalmusic.about.com/od/romanticperiod/qt/gretchenlyrics.htm


Pro Tips

 - My script writing teacher in Melbourne told me "If it doesn't help propel the story forward then get it out."  This can also be applied to music.

 - According to the Allen Ginsberg Movie "Howl", Allen says the goal is to speak to your 'muse' the same way as you speak to your close friends in order to achieve true frankness.


Ishida




Sunday Morning (The Velvet Underground)

ありがとうさくらさん！  I heard this song for the first time 3 days ago and just had to learn it.  I also quite cheekily copied the way he plays it as well so thank you sensei!

I also discovered this morning that my large diaphragm condenser microphone has broken.  I hate when things break on their own just sitting in a drawer.

I feel like some might complain that its too heavy on the effects but really you gotta beef up the sound to be heard on tiny crappy computer / iphone speakers.  I used to mix to my nice headphones but now I mix to these horrible speakers since its how most people listen to music anyway


ProTip

- Going heavy on the effects can help simulate a live gig environment to more easily transport yourself.


Ishida

Bach: Cello Suite No. 1 mvts 1-4

I just don't have much to say about this one maybe because my brain is fried from Bach.

The Courante was rough but luckily I recovered in the Sarabande - ironically I spent the entire week working on the Courante and it ended up having the most problems.  But if it weren't for mistakes / tension I guess there would be no drama.  The point was to record a live multimovement piece and survive to the end. 

By the way this is the "hall" setting on my Roland 1980's reverb unit and I think it sounds awesome.  Reverb really does add depth in my opinion. 


This is on vimeo.  Lets see how it goes.




What Are the Odds (Jo Ishida)

I might be wrong, but I believe the vibrato of an actual Hammond organ is made by a horn inside of an accompanying Leslie speaker spinning at a different frequency than a rotating chamber that bounces around / amplifies the sound...like a guitar body.  You can use the keyboard's turnwheel to activate or deactivate this effect.

I've wanted to learn how to play accompanying organ with the volume pedal for a long time, so I figured instead of learning another song I'd just make up my own - finally.  I thought writing my own song would be this big occasion, but really I just had to learn an organ song within a week:

 - guitar - 30 seconds
 - melody - 30 mins
 - harmony / counter melody - 1 hour
 - lyrics - 2 days?
 - organ - 5 days

Lyrics were annoying because its just hard to decide on the what words to use only to later discover that the natural stresses of the syllables wont quite gel with the stresses of the melody you're fooling around with OR you begin changing the melodic idea to accommodate the foreign sounding words - then I get stuck going back and forth forever.  I mean eventually you can get away with mumbling a word here and there or just saying fuck it they're gonna go where I want them to go, but I just didn't want to do that - I wanted some kind of natural gellingness.  Then I kinda realized how certain cliche phrases and rhymes just sit easy in the mouth - and thats what actually propelled the work forward because I knew I had serious heavy lifting to do w/ the keyboard part.  I can kinda see how outsourcing lyrics to someone else would be useful because its just freaking hard to argue with yourself. 


Take aways
 - Mixing Pro tip - recording with effects live is way more fun than adding reverb and stuff afterwards.  Messing with EQ while you're recording and seeing how the compressor works live are good lessons.  You also don't need to sing as loud to get a good capture - I recommend it. 

  Songwriting Pro tip - Its hard to reinvent 5 wheels at once, so just choose one thing to accomplish and don't feel bad about leveraging cliche / familiar ideas at first

 - The videos were loading too slowly, so I exported at very low quality in order to avoid buffering hell online

 - Lyricism is an entire field of its own - being sensitive to all the syllables and rhymes and fricatives and even just the attention grabbing nature of uncommon words really demands significant mindshare...in my opinion.


Ishida

I'll Follow the Sun (The Beatles)

I took a week to develop some piano chops, and Apple software makes me want to shoot myself.

There was a whole paragraph that followed that but I just deleted it because the first sentence pretty much says it all. 

Anyway, this song is early Beatles, so I'm sure my mom likes it, so this one is dedicated to her - Marianna.  At all my gigs I always dedicate songs to my friends who make up the majority of my audiences, so I figured I should do it online here as well.

I was wondering if people understand what I'm doing with this blog because it makes sense to me but maybe it just seems like an amateur just having fun from the outside.  Basically, I try to choose songs that target specific difficulties.  This one was pop keyboard, which I've never done before, but because the original has a harmony and guitar part as well, I threw that in too - so in the end this is a high yielding assignment.  I also wanted to figure out how to merge two videos together and it was a total bastard just trying to find those instructions online - but I do know how to do it now.  Examples of past targets are: Classical guitar, Classical piano, vocal harmony, electric guitar, guitar solo, chord melody, percussion, and drum automation.  So I do have a roadmap, and original work is on the horizon.

I also bought some used effects online because usually I'm just tired of playing the damn song and want to post it online asap so the mixing / editing part I usually just can't be bothered to put much effort into it.  Theres a Line 6 guitar pedal, a Yamaha mixer w/ a built in compressor and EQ and a Roland Digital Effects unit.  This way I can train / develop my ear to the engineering and mixing sides of things whilst I'm rehearsing instead of just getting it over with once the recording is finished and fiddling with the silly sliders and ultimately just choosing a preset that came with the software.  Hardly anyone uses hardware now adays I figure because software sounds so close to the real stuff, but I just want to kill people if I can't find the answers I need quickly online on how to use them.  Plus 1980's Japanese music hardware is super cheap, so its a good way to accustom my ears I reckon.



Take aways

- Jo's Mixing pro tip:  Things usually sound awesome on headphones, but then sound crappy on an iPhone or computer speakers (which I think is how most people listen to stuff today).  So double check how it sounds on the little speakers too and even pull the headphones away and turn up the volume to hear how it sounds coming out of your headphones at a distance.  If it still sounds bad or "apart" or "thin" then keep fooling around with it. 

  - There is a specific point of legitimate "mixed feelings" where you're recording and finally get over the part of the song that has been screwing you up over and over, but then you finally get it under control and then immediately screw up soon after because you're so ecstatic that you nailed it - so you're pissed you screwed up the take but elated because you know it'll be down hill from here.

 - I hit a point where I just can't look at all the keys my fingers are hitting at the same time and actually had more success when I wasn't looking at my hands.  I wondered if being a blind piano player could have actually been advantageous...

Ishida



King Kong Goes to Tallahassee (Bruce Cockburn)

I copied as closely as I could this version by Josh Turner who is a monster guitar player. 


Take aways

Its funny because its not that hard to learn the notes I guess thanks to learning so many classical pieces, but the little solos are really hard to get the timing right... but I figure that takes years and years of shredding to literally destroy the time and then get it back so quickly.

This was recorded directly out of my new 1980's Roland amp that has a real spring reverb built inside.  Its 100x better than the Vox which needs to go away because it only works about 30% of the time.  

Don't rush

Ishida








Satie: Gymnopédie No.1

Erik Satie, a common name on classical greatest hits CDs, was a relatively recent French composer most known for his famous Gymnopedies - the name's origin coming from the ancient Greek dance festival Gymnopaedia.  I don't know much else about him other than he hung out with other now famous musical contemporaries like Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.  This piece was composed when he was 22 years old.

Take aways
 - This piece is deceptively difficult because the left hand has a constant roll of hitting the low bass followed by a chord usually more than an octave away.  It gets really hard when you have to: look up at the music see the bass note, look down to find it on the keyboard, then look back up to see the chord, and then look back down to find the chord which creates this zig-zag motion in your neck.  Its also bloody hard just reading 2 staves of music at the same time!  Then you might figure it might just be easier to memorize the whole thing, but this piece is actually very hard to memorize!  Maybe I've just been playing it for too long, but I'd be more than 75% of the way thru using memory then suddenly forget where I am or what I'm doing.  I'm not talking like a memory slip but more of a legitimate state of complete confusion like you're on drugs.  So ultimately I had to rely on the music just to stay anchored and not float away. 

 - The left hand chords can spread more than an octave which creates pain in the wrist eventually. 

 - You have to slow down even if the music seems to drag.  The challenge is to avoid creating some kind of pulsing dance because...I just don't think thats the point..I think you are supposed to feel like you're on drugs, but thats just my opinion / interpretation.


The sound is a Yamaha Motif Wurlitizer w/ tremolo.  I like it.

Ishida


Mama You've Been On My Mind (Dylan / Harrison)

This song was originally by Bob Dylan but because his version sounds completely different from George Harrison's version I pretty much consider this one Lyrics: Bob and Music: George.

I wanted to try to use this intonation tool on my audio software but because the guitar and voice were recorded together I couldn't isolate the voice alone to use it.  The tool reads the music and shows you a chart where your notes are and you can manually put them in tune whereas auto-tune graps every note I believe and slams it into perfect pitch which gives it that robot sound. 

The goal of this one is I wanted to sing it for a gig coming up but also because now that I think I have a pretty good sense of 'placement' in order to form a connection with your throat and breath (ugh I hate this abstract vocal speak), whats even harder is to connect at lower volumes - or at least to me it is.  I remember a professor in school emphasizing how difficult it is to hit a high note softly with enough intention to project into an opera theater.  

Also this one I learned in 2 days and threw together a roadmap of how I wanted to sound and just wanted to record it.  6 months ago I would have never posted a recording that sounds this rough, but its important I think to become accustomed to just letting it go and moving on - plus no one really cares if it isn't perfect anyway. 

Ishida