Posts Tagged ‘music’

After college clean up and music

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The Day Events
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I’ve officially taken my last test in my undergraduate college career. Stats 7. A lot of formulas, and remembering concepts I will never ever ever ever ever ever use ever again. And I’ve forgotten half of it already by now.

After finals is the clean up. Papers shrewn all over my desk? Check. Books all over the floor around my chair? Check. Tons of cables and wires hooked up to my computer? Check. Oh wait, it’s always like that. 5 half filled water bottles…….somewhere? Check. And then there’s the randon miscellaneous snacky food wrappers that I don’t remember eating in the first place.

And then there’s the finals hair that I actually like. Finals week is the time you can wear almost whatever you want and you have an excuse for it. In fact, people assume you’re studying hard. If a girl was walking around with perfect hair and a thoughtfully thought out outfit (wow, that was extremely redundant), I would have my suspicions.

It’s an art, really, to get your hair like that. It takes lots of studying to get the right pieces of hair tousled. Notice I use the word “tousled”, not “messy”. An easy way to achieve this style is to go to sleep with your hair tied, and when you wake up the next day, the effect is complete.

Anyway, my music of choice to clean up right now is Jay Chou‘s second album, Fantasy, made back in 2001. I think this is my favorite album of his. Old school Jay Chou. I practically like EVERY song in this album. Unlike the recent albums where I can only pick out 1 or 2 now. Sigh. Do you need inspiration Jay? Shall I be your muse?!? And I just found out I don’t have his first album. @_@. Um…

Here is the fifth track on the album, 開不了口, or…”Can’t Open Mouth”…”Cannot Say” something like that. Basically “I can’t tell her that I like her!”

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Killer…..QueeEEEEeeen!

Media, The Day Events
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This song is pretty awesome. I thank my buddy Paco for introducing it to me. I know I like Queen, but I never really got around to listening to everything. I like the beginning of this song more than the end.

Originally my favorite line was “Well trained in alley cat”. But it turned out to actually be “well trained in etiquette” <: / Oops. I liked alley cat better. I wish I was well trained in alley cat. Sneaky and street smart-ish or something...that's how I interpreted it. Sigh.

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Musical Awesomeness

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Droolworthy
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I stumbled onto some musical awesomeness. I’m not even really sure how I got there, but that “related videos” section is something evil.

This is Tina Guo. She auditioned for some Grammy thingy…and plays the cello with such buttery ease that I’m totally engrossed. Well..I mean..it’s not just her…lots of great musicians exude that quality, but she’s so young and also asian so it relates to me a little more. The point of the competition is to play the Foo Fighter’s song “The Pretender”.

And then I saw a link on your “more info”…and she’s in some kind of rock band. I’m honestly not sure if an electric cello fits in to all this. I think it has something to do with the vibrato that makes it just sound like it’s not supposed to be there. Also, she plays so hard that she loses a lot of bow hair. I wonder how often she needs to get it rehaired?

And then…this is the grand finale of my post about her. So she won the Grammy thingy, or was in the top three, and other finalists were in the same hotel together to preform at the Grammys. The amazing part in all this is that they were bored and just decided to improv something. Like “hey, I’m bored…I’m going to start playing a note, I’ve mentioned the theme we’ll be playing and..uh….let’s just see what comes up”.

Uh…that’s pretty sexy. I wish I could ever become a part of something like this. But if I were…it would probably end up sounding a lot like Mary had a Little Lamb.

Here is also another great version of the same Foo Fighter’s song that they had to perform. I think I might like this better because it’s not so crazy and I like the use of double stops.

My cover on Coldplay’s Viva la Vida

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The Day Events, uhh...random!
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I thought about this during the week when I had this on repeat over and over…

Would it be cool if I played the piano and the cello together? And listening to it, you can pretty easily pick out the notes. Then I set off to youtube to see if there were any parts…but I decided that I could probably do it myself. I arranged the piano part first, and the cello part is almost the same stuff over and over again, with some differences in some parts. The piano part is actually a lot of the violin parts. Sorry violins! (not).

So this is what I had to do:

1. Record parts of piano using digital camera. (Part because it’s hard to do the whole thing without mistakes)

2. Record parts in cello digital camera. (Parts because the notes will be more uniform looped)

3. Take the audio off the movie clips and paste the piano parts all together. Paste the cello parts together.

4. Make sure the beats all align.

5. Sing the song with the arranged version and record.

6. Rip the audio off the video and paste it in. Makes sure all beats align.

7. Record video of me playing the piano while listening to the arranged version so the movements are the same. Same with cello. Same with voice.

8. Take all the clips, align the sounds with my arranged version, delete the audio.

So in total, this project allowed me to learn more about Adobe Audition, Adobe Soundbooth, and Sony Vegas.

Originally I had a lot more ideas for the video. I was going to have my stuffed Stitch beat out the drum…and other randomness…but near the end of this, I was already sick of working on it that I was ready to just spit it out.

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