This is priceless. Every time I watch it gets funnier… you have to catch the keyboard player dropping into the Final Countdown at 1:11.
Not sure what a hat tip from Wild Goose Chase is worth, but I got this from Jonathan Coulton’s blog. He has a link to a whole collection of these from YouTuber StSanders. JoCo’s favorite is Jake E. Lee shreds, because, in his words, “it has Ozzy clapping all out of time like a crazy person.” Yeah, it does.
Categories: Music
The Band Director Guy recently posted about mashups, which are songs pieced together from the audio of two different songs… often very different songs. He gave a couple good examples — I particularly liked the JayZ/Verve mashup of Dirt of your Shoulders/Bittersweet Symphony (on YouTube) and also had to give classic props to the Justin Timberlake/Sugar Hill Gang mashup Rock your body/Rappers Delight (Radio Blog). In his comments I offered up When I’m 25 or 64 done by Jonathan Coulton.
Thanks for posting that stuff, BDG! They really cracked me up. Listening to them reminded me of a different kind of music mixup where a band plays covers in a completely different style from the original. There’s one band called Hayseed Dixie that plays bluegrass covers of metal tunes. My buddy Eric from grad school used to play one of their CDs during poker nights. And I recently discovered another one (which you can hear in the youtube box below) called Beatallica. They play Beatles tunes with somewhat modified lyrics… and in the style of Metallica, of course.
It’s funny… I wanted to make a CD of them for Eric to hear when we went to Hugo and Isa’s wedding last weekend. I forgot to make the CD but when I mentioned the name of the band he had already heard of them. How is it that some people are always in the know about cool/weird stuff like this and where do I sign up?!
Hey Dude
EDIT: Good point from Mike in the comments. And I don’t have to break the Metallica theme to bring you some Richard Cheese.
Enter Mr. Sandman
Categories: Music
Code Monkey!!
Jonathan Coulton wrote something every week from September 2005 – September 2006 and posted it on his blog. All of it is available (for free… it’s distributed under a Creative Commons license so even the weird World of Warcraft video above is legit) on his website. I heard of “JoCo” when he did a fun cover of Baby Got Back sometime ago but I stumbled upon Code Monkey completely randomly.
The Thing a Week series is magic, one of those just simple and cool ideas. Anybody could do it… that makes doing it well all the more impressive.
Categories: Music
Now that I have that Youtube account I thought I would make a little more use of it. Believe it or not, I actually sing one or two songs with Radio Daze (very, very rarely). The movie below is from our little show at the Donelson Senior Center Monday night. Steve W., Steve R. and I sang Harbor Lights. Super cheesy I know… but it’s fun! Thanks Sary for taking the video of us!
Some time back I posted about working on Tommy Dorsey solos with the big band. Just thought I would share this video that Sary took at Centennial Park last weekend. It was 13 MB originally, but I don’t know how big the YouTube version is… it may take a minute to load. It’s the opening from Gettin’ Sentimental Over You. My crazy eye is doing much better, by the way.
I’ve been thinking lately about how I am doing in Radio Daze. I have been playing lead trombone with the band for at least 4 years now (can’t remember when I started), and doing a competent job I believe. We have a pretty large book of music that we know and perform, and as a band and as a trombone section, we do justice to most of it. My weakness is in making up solos on the spot, but I know our book well enough now that I have an idea or two in the back of my mind for every improvised solo that’s likely to come up, and for several I have essentially worked out an entire solo in my head ahead of time (is that cheating?).
I’ll focus on the solo stuff because it was really the Tommy Dorsey bone solos that got me thinking. We do Sentimental Over You on a fairly regular basis (in a lower key, check out this video, although it’s really dark). We’ve done Song of India (in the original key) a good bit. Lately we have been rehearsing I’ll Never Smile Again as well, and performed that one a couple times. Those tunes are great fun for a trombone player (we also have Marie in the book, but almost never play that one).
The US Postal Service issued a stamp with Tommy Dorsey playing trombone and his brother Jimmy (on sax)
Dorsey used a mute throughout these solos, usually a solotone mute shown below. Mutes fit into the end of the trombone and change the sound, making it softer but also making the tone different. The notes can sound smoother with some mutes (there’s one called a bucket mute which is like strapping a bucket full of cotton balls on the end of the horn) or sharper and buzzier with others. I don’t have a solotone, like the one Dorsey used to get his signature smooth sound. They aren’t popular today and I gather they’re a little hard to find. I have tried using a cup mute on the Dorsey solos, but damnit I just don’t like it! It feels stuffy to play (and makes the horn a little more unpredictable in the high range), and I end up thinking about getting the notes to come out much more. Maybe I better way to say it is that with a mute stuck in the end of the horn, I feel like I am trying too hard.
Humes & Berg Cleartone (solotone) mute
Deciding whether or not to use a mute for a solo that is famously perfomed with one leads me to the question at the top of the post. Are we trying to create music, or trying to recreate music. Are we trying to express something about how we feel about a song, or are we trying to get it right? Like any good question, the answer isn’t just one or the other, but it’s good to think about.
From the audience perspective, let’s face it, we’re not the Beatles… nobody is playing recordings of Radio Daze backwards trying to figure out what we really meant in a song. We should try to be professional and, in performing a tune the right way (as it was done in the day when this music was the popular music), we can bring back memories of well-loved songs. In a very real way, that’s the point of what we’re doing — bringing back the experience of hearing Big Band songs in a live audience setting. We’re also providing music for dancing, and dancing swing music to a live band is another experience for people that we are keeping alive.
There’s also the experience for the band of playing these great tunes for a live audience, and feeling a sort of connection to the original bands from the 40s and 50s. And maybe that’s the expression I am looking for — that people hear us playing and they can tell we have a great respect for the music and love playing it. Part of that respect is playing the tunes the way they were done back then… and getting them right. Part of the love is taking the tunes and putting a little of ourselves into them — playing them in a way that we think sounds good! So we’re recreating a day gone by, but also creating something new. Wow, that’s pretty cheesy. I should shut up!
Sarynna and I went to the tune-up concert for the Nashville Symphony in their new concert hall last Thursday night.
Schermerhorn Hall
Really a good night to see the symphony in general and fun to see the new building. They called it a tune-up "rehearsal", but it was a lot like a concert. Honestly, if the conductor doesn't stop halfway through every song and ask for a little less trombone, I can't recognize that as rehearsing. (Sidebar: True story. I showed up to a USC symphony rehearsal late one afternoon and was able to slip into my seat unnoticed. I barely had time to get my instrument together when I hear, "Trombone. It's too much." Hadn't played a note.)
But, then again, it wasn't a regular concert either. They only did one or two movements of most of the selections, and there were a couple of acoustics guys walking around and listening in various places. They even did a little test with a special twelve-sided speaker that put out this UFO sounding test tone that scanned really fast from low frequency to high. The idea was to test the response of the hall with people actually sitting in it. Though that appealed to my nerdy side, I had to wonder how much difference it really made to have people in the chairs. The chairs themselves are pretty soft and peopley already, I would think (for acoustic purposes). To top off the dorky part of the night, there was this guy sitting behind us:
This probably cost $10,000
You see it has to be shaped just like a person with super especially sensitive microphones buried in the little plastic ears so they really find out what it sounds like to a person. Right. Not sure I quite see the point. But from the dummy's point of view, it's a great gig. He told me he's got a cousin working for MythBusters who has to stand in a make-believe shower talking on a fake cellphone getting his face burned off by artificial lightning 40 hours a week. "Who's the dummy now?" That's what he says to his cousin.
To wrap up, the concert was fun. They did that Debussy afternoon prelude thing, a movement from Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphosis, a couple movements from the Firebird Suite, and the fifth movement of Mahler's 2nd Symphony. I have always liked the Hindemith and the Firebird, and the Mahler piece at the end was really spectacular with the chorus and symphony together. They also did Dvorak's Water Goblin which I had never heard before but was very enjoyable.
