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