Posts in category "Video"

Famous Blue Raincoat (ukulele cover)

Almost three months ago, I walked into a music store and bought a ukulele. I did­n’t even know the frets on the ukulele (or gui­tar, for that mat­ter) were raised; I thought they were just lines paint­ed on the neck used as guide­lines for fin­ger posi­tions. Ever since, it’s filled a void in me. A void I did­n’t even know exist­ed until I found myself feel­ing emp­ty when I did­n’t get a chance to play.

Famous Blue Raincoat is one of my favourite Leonard Cohen songs. I wish I could write let­ters like this.

I haven’t quite fig­ured out what kind of style or genre I want to apply to the ukulele, but I think my singing abil­i­ty (or lack there­of) will lim­it me to the soft Sam Beam folk sound unless I start­ed tak­ing singing lessons. Borrowed in my inter­pre­ta­tion is a vari­a­tion of the pick­ing pat­tern Cohen uses in a lot of his ear­li­er songs, such as Hey That’s No Way To Say Goodbye, adapt­ed for the sopra­no ukulele.

While my brain picks out the mis­takes and details I need to work on when I see myself play, I try to keep in mind the words of my Tai Chi teacher, “We’re nev­er as bad as we fear nor as good as we would like”. I don’t think I’ll ever be sat­is­fied with my musi­cal abil­i­ty unless I could com­mit a lot more time to it. Unfortunately, that would mean less time for anoth­er hob­by, so I have to accept that this will prob­a­bly be close to the lim­it of my abil­i­ty. Hopefully, I’ll be able to clean things up in anoth­er few years. Patience will come from learn­ing to be sat­is­fied from the act of play­ing itself, and not the mas­tery of it. For now, this’ll serve as record of my progress.

Next To You

Found footage, cap­tured with my small CCD cam­corder. It strug­gles in low light sit­u­a­tions, but when I brought up the lev­els in post, out came this amaz­ing grain that gives it such a wist­ful tex­ture.

When watch­ing this, my eyes tend to grav­i­tate to her hands; the way she moves them with a light, but firm touch, whether it’s get­ting Dolly to sit down, or brush­ing cat hair from her nose. They were artists hands. Not par­tic­u­lar­ly strik­ing, but filled with del­i­cate dex­ter­i­ty. Sometimes, I’d kiss the tip of each fin­ger, and she’d tease me by pulling her hand away before I could fin­ish.

It must have been one win­ter morn­ing, after a run out to Second Cup with their hol­i­day-themed paper cups, watch­ing The Blue Planet in the com­fort of a blan­ket with a cat by our side.

Only after find­ing this footage did I start to believe that my mem­o­ries were real, and not just imag­i­na­tions caught between the haze of desire and denial.

We existed. We existed.

Even if only for a few moments, as won­der­ful as they were fleet­ing, one of them cap­tured in 24 frames per sec­ond.

Make Hymn Cry + Cover

In the win­ter I made a short video teas­er for Jesse’s upcom­ing album by get­ting him to per­form a song off it called Make Hymn Cry. As the only ukulele piece on a rap album, it def­i­nite­ly stands out.

Then it dawned on me this morn­ing to see if I could cov­er it. As I was try­ing to fig­ure out the chord pro­gres­sion, I real­ized it’s a fair­ly sim­ple song that only alter­nates between the G and C chords. The strum­ming in Jesse’s video is slight­ly sim­pler than on the album, the lat­ter of which is the pat­tern I use in my ver­sion, and includes the pick­ing arpeg­gio for the sec­ond verse.

Still, it took me half the day just to get com­fort­able with the strum­ming pat­tern because it’s syn­co­pat­ed in a way I’m not used to yet, the rhythm at the end of each bar divid­ed beyond eighth notes into six­teenth notes. This is what long week­ends are for.

The main thing I’m con­cen­trat­ing on is count­ing the beats so I can strum off them and keep track of where the extra strum is at the end of each bar. The next is try­ing not to speed up, which is a very bad habit of mine, regard­less of instru­ment. I also need to pay atten­tion to soft­ly rest­ing my hand on the strings when tran­si­tion­ing to the sec­ond verse; first­ly, to pre­vent the last chord from ring­ing too long, and sec­ond­ly, to phys­i­cal­ly feel where the strings are so I can get my thumb on the C string. I’m def­i­nite­ly not good enough to know where it is at all times. Most of the rest came by itself (i.e. I’m not con­scious­ly focus­ing on it), prob­a­bly from already lis­ten­ing a few times to a pre-release copy of the album Jesse gave me.

The phras­es of the lyrics are also syn­co­pat­ed against the strum­ming; it always feels like your strum­ming is late because the first word of every line falls on the beat before each down-strum), which adds anoth­er lay­er of com­plex­i­ty. The fact that I made it through with­out any major mis­takes but fucked it up right at the very end1 is why I can’t stop laugh­ing.

My singing is strained cause I’m try­ing to project above the strum­ming to stay in bal­ance, but it’s clear­ly out of my com­fort zone. I’m not good enough to strum soft­ly with con­trol yet, so I cheat­ed and just raised my voice. The thing is, I nev­er prac­tice singing when I’m prac­tic­ing my play­ing, usu­al­ly because I need to con­cen­trate on one thing at a time. Singing prac­tice is also bor­ing by itself, so I nev­er do it, even though I should.

Anyway, I had a good day after learn­ing this lit­tle piece, and being able to fig­ure out the chords and the strum­ming was prob­a­bly just as fun as being able to play it.

  1. I lost track of the extra strum in the sec­ond last bar! [↩]

Cranium Party 02

Cranium Party invitation

The sec­ond Cranium Party went exceed­ing­ly well, even though not a sin­gle one of my core friends was there. In fact, aside from Jess, it was an entire­ly dif­fer­ent group from last time, and none of the four groups of peo­ple knew each oth­er, but that did­n’t stop it from being an awe­some par­ty and every­one got along famous­ly. Through the night, I heard peo­ple ask­ing each oth­er, “And how do you know Jeff?”

People brought all sorts of snacks, but more impor­tant­ly, they also helped me eat them. Of note was Audra bring­ing a tub of green tea and hon­ey vanil­la Häagen-Dazs ice cream, which I had nev­er even heard of before.

To make it inter­est­ing, I told every­one that the los­ing team would have to per­form a tal­ent. Some came pre­pared, oth­ers came with the atti­tude that they would­n’t lose.

Audra’s tal­ent is speech writ­ing, but since she could­n’t per­form that, she did a ren­di­tion of a song she wrote with Jesse three years ago about their cat Zoey. And the song was­n’t just a short jin­gle, it was a full piece with prop­er song struc­ture and clever rhymes. If only I was­n’t laugh­ing so hard that I kept shak­ing the cam­era.

Sergei did­n’t have a tal­ent pre­pared, but since I knew that he used to study mar­tial arts, I asked him if he could demon­strate what he knew. He sug­gest­ed that he could blow out a can­dle with a punch, and no one was left unmoved.

Shawn brought his beau­ti­ful­ly carved didgeri­doo to play as his tal­ent. Even though he did­n’t lose, peo­ple were still intrigued enough that they want­ed to try it. And, of course, Jesse added his own flavour at the end.