Cantonese Practice: Le Petit Prince 10-11

 

Cantonese Practice: Le Petit Prince 9

 

Cantonese Practice: Le Petit Prince 8

 

Cantonese Practice: Le Petit Prince 7

 

Cantonese Practice: Le Petit Prince 6

 

Chronicling my growing up while learning electric guitar: Asian Kung-Fu Generation

0:00 E 0:39 Kimi no Machi Made 1:17 Siren 2:27 Shindōkaku 3:53 Re:Re: 5:08 Rewrite

Sentimental: Finally. FINALLY. We get to play AKFG. These songs, particularly the Sol-fa album, land right in the 2004 era, but they carry so much farther into the future.

AKFG brings back happy memories of finally finding my footing after moving to Howard County. Making more friends. Relaxing playing Quake. Taking FBLA, ACSL, and Model UN trips. Studying for AP classes at Kevin's house. 

Just sit back and enjoy.

Technical: So why in the beginning did I say "finally"? Because. These are simply perfect songs to play. The riffs are super catchy BUT easy (enough). I don't need to labor over complicated patterns; I just play my heart out. It has been 20 years since these songs came out, but I still listen to them on repeat. So practicing the songs is not a chore, and the payback is more immediate.

The guitar tone is somewhat of a technical mystery. It could be I can't really replicate the BOSS pedals at all octaves, or is it that my guitar is lacking vs. a Les Paul? Whatever it is, I can't find the same grind, overdrive, or distortion that AKFG has without sacrificing the pleasantness of the sound. In a single song I'm vacillating between a British punk stack for chorus chords, and an Octane amp for punchy solos or interludes.

Also, I realized quite late that I fastened my strap backwards. So now. I can put the guitar much lower on my hip, like they do in the music videos. 

Cantonese Practice: Le Petit Prince 5

 

Cantonese Practice: Le Petit Prince 4

 

Chronicling my growing up while learning electric guitar: Late 20s

0:00 Hero by UNLIMITS  0:59 Haruka Kanata from BLEACH ED 28
1:51 Climber from Haikyū!! ED 3
2:58 風箏 by Supper Moment
4:16 無盡 by Supper Moment

Sentimental: Instead of being chronologically linear, I thought it'd be fun to skip around for variation. (And why are the videos filmed in different places in my house? I'm just bored.) So here are some rock songs in the past couple years. 

By this point, I had already moved from NY to MD and had a son, and there really wasn't much time to discover new music. I originally listened to UNLIMITS a lot while heartbroken and depressed over OPIM projects senior year of college, but now the association is much more positive. They're a go-to when I'm pumping myself up to do DIY around the house.

Then the pandemic came, along with some depression (it's one of the main factors I'm now seeing a therapist). But there were still a couple bright spots! There was Haikyu!! (hence Galileo Galilei) and also learning Cantonese.

My Cantonese teacher introduced me to so much awesome modern Hong Kong music, and so it was nice to ground my pandemic soundtrack through this cultural heritage. (There are other great songs too, particularly from Dear Jane, but I think they block even covers of their songs). I basically sing my heart out getting emotional to the Supper Moment songs lol.

In general, with the pandemic being so isolating, it's making me reach back into happy nostalgic memories, hence this entire chronicling exercise. But the reality is, I just can't get those past highs anymore, or maybe I never had them and it's one of those things where, from my Christian worldview, we are nostalgic for eternity and the feeling of a spiritual home. It's a very funny feeling, because sometimes I feel nostalgic to go back to Taiwan, but I'm not Taiwanese and I visited as a tourist ONCE. And yet, my heart yearns to be there like it's homesick lol. 

Technical: Wow my wrist is so awkward in the first UNLIMITS song; I realized I could just lower the guitar to get the fretboard close to my hand, instead of my hands looking like a pterodactyl. 

Also, the Japanese punk tone has less distortion than I thought? For UNLIMITS, a vintage British stack was way closer to the Japanese rock sound than previous attempts with an Octane or American stack. Or I just got lucky.

I'm starting to notice the value of the pickup position: closer to fretboard when doing single note solos, farther for power chords.

Chronicling my growing up while learning electric guitar: Middle School 2003

0:00 - Engel by Rammstein
0:40 - Adam’s Song by blink-182
1:18 - Holding On by Pillar
2:08 - Crawling in the Dark by Hoobastank
3:19 - Faint by Linkin Park

Sentimental: Love live nu-metal! Japanese songs I discovered on my lonesome, but Western rock music was shared with me by friends!

Just kidding. I listened to these songs by myself too, coupled with anime music videos. But s'ok, I’ll share the songs I got from friends once I made them later on, but for now we’re still in middle school. I still get an excited feeling listening to these songs, because I see them in my mind backing all sorts of sakuga-level anime scenes. I only know this blink-182 song from a pretty well-done Kenshin music video on shonenanime.com, with the site itself being my fundamental source of music discovery.

TBH the Pillar song was introduced by a friend! Ben C was nice enough to invite me to a LAN party, and there I listened to Andrew H’s CD which happened to have this song. I must have listened to it 100 times that night, it was so catchy.

And Linkin Park songs still carried over long after middle school for me, because of the different remixes that exist for breakbeats used in bboying that I started in high school.

Technical: This is the first time I failed to complete the assignment. The fast rhythmic palm mutes in Rammstein are deceptively hard. I recorded an earlier version with them, but it neither sounded nor looked good, so I figured what’s the point. And for Hoobastank, it’s just gonna be bar chords for me, dawg. I wonder how professionals have that level of speed and precision.

In general, drop C tuning just makes everything sound seriously fun. It was very hard to make the Pillar song sound bad. For Hoobastank, I didn’t bother trying to get the tone of the echo delay guitar; there’ll be plenty of time for that doing Ling Tosite songs. Just having a swell time with the song’s bridge in the meanwhile.

Cantonese Practice: Le Petit Prince 3

 

Chronicling my growing up while learning electric guitar: Middle School 2002

0:00 - Sk8er Boi
0:17 - Storm Eagle from Megaman X
0:35 - One More Time from Megaman X3
1:05 - Opening from Megaman X5
1:21 - Lazy Mind from Megaman X7
1:41 - Over Shine by Rina Aiuchi

I picked up electric guitar at the beginning of this year! bc #omicron. As I learn, I'll have sentimental and technical reflections in parallel.

Sentimental: The soundtrack of my life has a lot of branches, ranging from funk, electronic, pop (OK not really that much range), but I think at my core it's pop rock, alternative, and punk rock that animate me, bordering the language of "it defines me."

I fully accept this stems from being a complete anime weeb, and I think I can trace this back to my parents playing Teresa Tang in the car when we were kids, where she sang a lot of Japanese melodies with Chinese lyrics.

There were certainly different childhood influences that I may cover in a later post, but we'll use Avril Lavigne as a starting place since we listened to her a lot at Linda Y's house over the summer. Sadly though, middle school overall was a lonely time when we moved away from my childhood friends.

In this void, one of my escapes-turned-obsessions was Megaman. Some of my best friends don't even know, but Megaman was a big part of my childhood. I'm surprised I didn't include songs from the Zero series, which were my favorite -- perhaps for another post. The last song by Rina Aiuchi is a foreshadowing of all the J-pop and J-rock that is to come in the following years.

Technical: Ben S pointed this out to me: the Squier Telecaster is a low-end guitar with scratchy, single coil pickup with distortion but .. it's so pretty!!

I would say the electric guitar subculture is super gatekeeping, and not just with the hardware barrier to entry. Access to DAWs, digital amplifiers, and pedals is hidden behind virus-laden websites or paywalls, with super complicated installation and setup. And then the pretentious attitudes in general (goodness help you if you're in a forum and ask how to get Avril Lavigne's tone). All can be super discouraging for a starting hobbyist.

Imagine my sheer delight to discover Apple's Garageband as a free, super-intuitive DAW preloaded with hundreds of effects. I hate to admit it, but this may be the single reason I buy Macbooks for the rest of my life. This has saved me hundreds of hours of scouring for terrible DAWs and effects, while getting started and actually playing guitar songs immediately.

In my youtube video descriptions, I'll be writing down the settings I used for tone. This is another gatekeeping aspect: unlike in the coding community where you have open repositories or Terraform templates, I am unaware of any all-in-one packages for guitar/music production, where you take an artifact and immediately have the exact same tone settings as another player.