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.
