Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Mood For A Day

I started learning this song about 25 years ago. Back then, I only learned the first part of the song, then I stopped playing the guitar. 2 or 3 years ago, I got a wild hair and decided to try to learn the entire song. Fortunately computers and the Internet had been invented. That made learning the song a lot easier. It was easier due to 3 things...

1. I was able to find the 'Tab' (easy to read guitar sheet music) for the song. This could have been more helpful if it was more accurate.

2. I could rip the song off the CD and open it with an audio player that allowed me to see the waveform and select any portion the song to listen to (so I could listen note-by-note if necessary).

3. I discovered that you can find just about any song you can think of being played by people all over the world on YouTube. After finding a YouTube video of someone talented, playing the song, I could then figure out the fingering (like I said, the Tab wasn't very accurate).

With these 3 things available, I simply needed to sit down and learn the song! So after 2 or 3 years of practicing, I was ready. I went to the bathroom (I thought that would give the audio a nice reverb effect), sat my little Panasonic digital camera on the back of the toilet, set it on 'movie' mode and recorded this video. That explains the poor sound and video quality (at least that's what I like to think). Then I discovered that I needed a video editing program to cut out the part of the video where I'm walking to and from the camera to start and stop the recording. A buddy gave me his copy of Adobe Premiere Elements that he wasn't using (thanks Gary!) and for the first time, I tried my hand at video editing. Adobe Photoshop has always been one of my favorite programs, and I've always thought I would enjoy movie editing on a computer (vs. moving editing with a splicer and clear tape like I did on Super 8 film in the 70's). Now I may just have to go and buy a video camera...

So here's my first Internet performance in my first video ever, who knows what will be next!?!?


3 comments:

  1. Dude, that was AWESOME!

    Isn't that from the Fragile album? I remember driving around in my 1972 Chevy Vega with that cranking through my Pioneer speakers.

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  2. Yes, that was off Fragile! It was a Volkswagon Fastback and Jenson speakers for me!

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  3. That seems like a whole lot of work, but then as I recall learning Fur Elise on the piano was about just as tedious. Mom

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