Wassup, my friends! It's time to release a new music video! Passion Pit's "Carried Away" has been stuck in my head so much lately. It's such a catchy and danceable tune (just don't pay attention to the depressing lyrics). So I felt compelled to do my own cover of it! Click here or on the screenshots above to view the video in YouTube.
My "instrument of the day" is the Keytar! I had purchased a Roland Lucina AX-09 a while ago, but just realized I've never shown it off in its own video. "Carried Away" was perfect for it, since it has a great keyboard lead riff that fits the strengths of the Roland. For those of you who are interested in the keytar, here's a nice demo video. I love this baby. It is quite versatile, and it's super portable. I've decided to clear out my other keyboards and just stick to this one (and a stage piano).
For the music video, I decided to shoot it "on scene" at the Great Wall of China! Well maybe not exactly on scene, since I went there in 2008 and filmed this music video in 2014. Details, details :)
Happy New Year! I went back to the iPad to make this latest video. "Synthetica" is the title track off Metric's latest album (2013). It's a great song with powerful lyrics, rocking guitars, and cool synth sounds. Click here or on the pic above to view on YouTube.
I had planned to work on a different song by a different band. But some interesting things happened last month (November). Through a friend of the band, Metric discovered my A Capella cover of "Gold Guns Girls." They shared my video via Twitter and Facebook, and in two days, 8000 viewers had seen it. It went almost viral! Well not that viral - maybe "bacterial" haha. Metric also invited me to meet them backstage at their show in Chicago (see above). I had never met a band backstage before. They were so nice and fun to talk to. I felt a little flattered having this awesome band ask little ole me about my home video. It was a bit ironic since it was their song in the first place haha. So.... I thought I would pay tribute to Metric by doing another cover of their songs (my 3rd Metric cover), one off their new album. And voila - Synthetica!
I've done several videos on the iPad already. In fact, music was the primary reason for buying an iPad originally. So what's different about this one? The big thing is that "Synthetica" is a guitar rock song. My previous videos were almost entirely synths. It is pretty cool using the guitar and bass instruments on GarageBand. GarageBand put a lot of effort into making lots of guitar effects and amps, so you can choose how clean or dirty, reverb, delay, wah wah, flanger, etc. The acoustic guitar sounds are pretty nice too. The iPad interface allows you to just tap to play chords, or you can play notes like on a real fingerboard. One limitation, however, is that you can't play frets up the fingerboard - I think only the first 7-8 frets are accessible, while most electric guitars have at least 22.
After the bridge of the song, I switched to a real instrument - an electric guitar! My buddy Chris wanted to trim his lineup of guitars. So I acquired his Ephiphone Les Paul Standard, which he had some nice custom work done on, including fancy Seymour Duncan pickups. It's a beautiful guitar, and it plays very well. I thought I'd show off the guitar with my own guitar solo on Synthetica - hopefully it was somewhat worthy of Metric's Jimmy Shaw! :)
I know, I know - everybody has covered "Get Lucky." You may be sick of the song by now, since it's been the hottest song all summer. It's a fun and catchy song though - makes you just want to bounce around, wherever you are. Listen to my cover!!! Your life will change once you do it!!! :)
I've been a Daft Punk fan for years. I missed seeing them live at Lollapalooza
2007, but one day... I'm glad they departed from their heavy DJ set to a more full band with instruments. Pharrell Williams's guest vocals on this track are great, and Nile Rodgers on the guitar was amazing. If you didn't know, Nile Rodgers founded the classic 70's disco band Chic ("Freak Out!"). No wonder "Get Lucky" has such a great disco groove. Pharrell has been all over the music scene, though mostly as a producer and songwriter. He sounds pretty darn good for someone who doesn't sing lead vocals often! Some trivia: Pharrell and his production group The Neptunes had previously collaborated with Daft Punk, on a remix of "Harder Faster Stronger Better" :)
Doing a cover that everyone else has done can be tough. How do you make it unique? How can it be special? At least I have the "one-man band" approach (although there are a few great ones of these already). I wanted to keep it strongly disco. But more layered than Daft Punk's version, which is a little sparse. I couldn't sing nearly as well as Pharrell or play guitar nearly as well as Nile... but I had other instruments to work with. So my cover ended up with:
Finally, a new music video! It's a big one - an 11-song medley of covers from Lollapalooza 2012! I played "one-man band" covers of the songs (vocals, guitar, keys, synth bass & drums), and I arranged them all together. And I filmed a fun video to go along with it. You'll want to sit down to view this video - it's almost 13 minutes long!
To view a bigger version, you can click the "full screen" button in the video above. Or you can open the video's YouTube page.
I love Lollapalooza. If you aren't familiar, Lolla is a music festival held in Chicago every summer. It's such a great venue, and so many great bands come to play. Most of the music is considered Alternative/Indie or Electronic. You get to see big famous bands, up-and-coming stars, as well as less-known artists. I really wanted to see Metric, Florence + The Machine, and Justice. On the other hand, I "discovered" bands like Temper Trap and Chairlift at the festival.
Here's the tracklist:
Red Hot Chili Peppers: "Under the Bridge"
Florence + The Machine: "No Light"
The Temper Trap: "Fader"
Metric: "Sweet Sympathy"
The Black Keys: "Howlin' For You"
Chairlift: "Amanaemonesia"
Franz Ferdinand: "Take Me Out"
Neon Indian: "Polish Girl"
Passion Pit: "Take a Walk"
M83: "Midnight City"
Justice: "D.A.N.C.E."
Making the Medley
I've never done a medley before. Creating this medley was an ambitious project. I started it in August 2012 and finished six months later! Well most of the delay was from other distractions, but this project did involve a bit of work. I'll talk about the challenges in several aspects: arranging, performing, and production.
Arranging. When you do a medley, you first need to figure out which songs could fit. Good thing there were so many good songs from great bands to choose from. You also need to arrange the songs in some reasonable order. Finally, you also need to match the rhythms and key signatures/chords between the songs.
I had to throw a few songs out. For example, I really wanted to play "Bruises" by Chairlift, but the song was way too fast to fit with the rest of the medley.
"No Light" is a great song, but the slow, syncopated rhythm of the main part didn't fit anywhere (the medley was either fast rock or disco). So I decided to perform only the song intro.
As discussed in the video, I had to put all the rock songs in the first half, then transition to all the disco/dance songs. The rock songs in the medley go much faster (~160-170 bpm) than the disco songs (~120-130 bpm, if I recall correctly). Rock beats are different from disco too. Rock beats are in pairs: down/up down/up, whereas disco is all even: down down down down (that's why disco is also known as "four-on-the-floor." "Take Me Out" provided the perfect transition that accomplished exactly what I needed.
Another cool transition was from "Howlin' For You" to "Amanaemonesia." I couldn't stand to play "Howlin' For You" for too long, and I thought it would be cool to make a little fun of it by playing the riff on the keys. So that's what I did. It
Performing. Although it's just one music video, I had to learn to sing and play 11 songs. I performed vocals, guitar, and keys on all the songs. The bass and drums were synthesized. Lucikly, most of the guitar and key parts weren't too difficult for me.
Guitar. "Howlin' For You" required some blues lead play on the guitar, something I've never tried before (I HATE BLUES!!! hehe). The fast tempo required some fast picking on some songs like "Take Me Out". The one super difficult part was the intro to "Under the Bridge." I learned it, but I realized my play wouldn't be good enough to record. So I abandoned that idea.
Keys. About half the songs had significant keyboard parts. There were a couple cool keyboard riffs in the medley, in "Amanaemonseia" and "Take a Walk." My favorite keyboard thing was the keyboard part show on the bottom half of the "Amanaemonesia" video. I improvised that entire part one day - you won't find it on the original Chairlift track! :)
Vocals. I'm terrible at remembering song lyrics. I always forget the words of my favorite songs that I've been singing for decades. I did many recording takes in this medley because I messed up the lyrics haha. Singing is not my forte; a couple songs were a bit challenging for me. I probably set the key of a couple songs too high ("Fader" and "Polish Girl" in particular). But I needed them to be played at those keys so the medley would transition well. I probably would have sounded better if I had tuned those songs down a step or two. One nice thing about pushing myself was that I was able to sing some notes I was previous unable to hit :)
Production. When you do a 13-minute video of yourself playing music, you MUST come up with something interesting. Otherwise your viewers would fall asleep or click elsewhere hehe. So I tried to spice up the video a bit.
I tried to incorporate Visualizers into the video. These are software programs that create cool graphics that adapts to the music that is played. I use a few Visualizers: Aeon (used the most), a couple by Wowlabs, and the default iTunes Visualizer. Oh yeah, I used the Desktop Aquarium screen saver too.
I try to learn something new with video production every time I do a new video. This time, the big thing was using keyers. You may know this as "green screen" work. This was super fun. It allowed me to superimpose myself singing/playing over other videos and photos.
My latest music video project is something far from what I have done before: a capella! That's right - it's just me singing/humming/beatboxing all the parts of the song, including the drums! The song is "Gold Guns Girls," a 2010 hit by the Canadian Indie band Metric (who is coming back to Lollapalooza in 2012, yay!).
Most of my music background is from being an instrumentalist. I am not a great singer, nor do I have much singing experience. Thus making a one-man a capella music video was quite the challenge! I had to do many takes to get all the vocal parts right. The hardest part, of course, was staying in tune with myself. Not only is it hard without an instrument to carry a tune; every pitch adjustment ends up affecting the other tracks. Making the video required a bit of work too - lots more shots of myself looking silly.
Despite the challenges, I learned a lot, and it was very fun to do. I hope you enjoy the production! And please "like" the video on YouTube! :)
