Last year I attempted the RPM challenge for the first time. This is simply the mad pursuit of recording an entire album of music entirely within the month of February. RPM purists would go so far as to say that you should ideally write as well as record the material. The RPM definitiion of an album is 10 songs or 35 minutes of music, so there is some leeway for including one long instrumental jam as part of your album.
When I attemped this last year, it was fully my intention to write an album of proper songs...i.e. with vocals and lyrics. However, I spent so long on writing and recording the music that I had no time left to write — let alone record — the vocals. So it ended up as an instrumental album (a concept album no less). Given the time pressure, I was pleased with the music that I recorded.
So this year I am trying again, and having learnt from the challenges of last time, I am this time trying a different approach. Rather than work on lots of different songs at once, I'm trying to tackle one song at a time, and allow myself 3 days per song. February is a leap year this year, so we get an extra day but I still can only spend 2 days on my last song.
Writing at such speed is not easy for me. I've never been a great lyricist — and my lyrics are probably better than my singing! — it's the one aspect of song writing that I really struggle with. I'm happy to come up with chord structures and melodies and play around adding musical textures in GarageBand, but writing lyrics? Urgh.
However, I'm taking the approach that a song with terrible, banal, lyrics is still better than no song at all. So may I present to you the first efforts of my RPM 2012 challenge so far. Song number 1 is called 'Sarah Jane'. On the 1st February, I wrote the main chords for the verse, came up with the melody and some lyrics. On 2nd February, I came up with a chorus structure and some more lyrics. Today (3rd February), I finished off the — admittedly terrible lyrics — and recorded about a dozen tracks in GarageBand. It is only my acoustic guitar and vocals that are live. Everything else is done using instruments in GarageBand played with my tiny (1 octave) USB keyboard.
Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the final result. It's rough, poorly mixed, and could do with a lot more polish...but there is no time for any of this right now. Tomorrow I start on song 2!
iTunes in the Cloud is a great way of making the songs in your iTunes library available to all of your iOS devices, but it is not without various wrinkles (which will hopefully be ironed out in a later update). Here are some examples of what I mean. I believe that these are only problems when you are also using iTunes Match.
1) Playlist folders don't always sync properly
I have many different playlists, some of which are used for general housekeeping (i.e. to help find songs with no artwork, songs that haven't been played etc.). All of these are placed in a Playlist Folder called 'Stats'. But on my iPhone, I see two folders called 'Stats':
Each of these folders contains different combinations of my playlists (with some overlap).
2) You can't create a smart playlist in iTunes if it references other smart playlists
Many of my smart playlists that I created in iTunes can simply not be synced to my iPhone. When you try making such a playlist, you see this error:
3) Item counts in playlists are not respected when you sync them
I have a playlist called 'Hot 100', I deliberately limit this to 100 songs and this works fine on my Mac:
But on my iPhone, if I try accessing this playlist, the 100 item limit is ignored:
I'm hapy to wait while 100 songs download over WiFi, but I'm going to wait for over 6,000 songs to download.
4) You can't include podcasts in synced playlists
I have mentioned this before, and this is something that already has driven me to use the excellent Downcast app. If you place any podcasts in a playlist then see a warning icon appear next to the playlist name. If you click on this, you'll see the following warning:
These four issues are not problems if you don't use iTunes Match; they all work as expected if you are syncing playlists in the traditional manner of using iTunes to choose which specific playlists will be copied to your iOS device. I really hope that at least some of these problems get addressed in the near future.
On Monday morning I heard the news, iTunes Match was ready for public consumption. Having just made a full back-up of my computer, I decided to jump right in. This had been something I had been looking forward to. Not so much for my music-consumption needs today, but more for what I envisage those needs will be next year. More of this in a moment, first some background...
I have quite a lot of music. In addition to hundreds of CDs – all ripped into iTunes at varying bit rates (128 Kbps upwards) – I've also purchased hundreds of songs on iTunes, and since 2005 I've been downloading the annual free torrent of music from the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival. If you haven't heard about this, every artist who plays at SXSW donates a free song which you can download as part of a torrent (the 2011 torrent contained over 1,100 songs!). Factor in some other free downloads and a bunch of songs that I've recorded myself, and I have amassed over 13,000 songs in my iTunes library.
This was the situation at about 10:30 am Monday morning when I started the ball rolling:
The initial stage of matching my music to what is already in iTunes was quite quick. About 2,250 of my songs (~17%) are not present in the iTunes Store and so they have to be uploaded. This process took quite a while, but if I was using the cloud music players from either Amazon or Google, I'd have to upload all 13,000 songs. I went to bed with these songs still uploading and by the time I woke up the next day, the whole process had been completed…
This is apart from 26 songs which have an iCloud status which says 'Error', and 4 songs which are 'Ineligible' (due to having too low a bitrate). Essentially, all my music is now available to my iOS devices and any other Macs I want to use. I'm curious as to whether Apple will ever allow you to access your iCloud music via a web browser (probably not, as this removes the obligation to buy/use a hardware product made by Apple), but for now I'm happy just to centralize all of my music in one place (the cloud).
Importantly, for me anyway, iTunes Match keeps all of your track metadata in place. Even if you ugprade a 128 Kbps song to a 256 Kbps song from the iTunes Store, you'll keep all of your important metadata (play count, ID3 tags etc). If this didn't happen, a lot of my smart playlists would become broken, so thank you Apple for thinking this one through!
One of the other bonuses for using iTunes Match is that if any of your songs are encoded at less than 256 Kbps, you can delete your local copy and then download a 256 Kbps version from iTunes. Several years ago I was ripping CDs at 128 Kbps, before increasing this to 192 and then to 256, so I have a lot of my music encoded at a lower quality. Although I could go back and re-rip these CDs to obtain higher quality versions, I'm happier to let iTunes do it (more so, when it is low quality SXSW downloads that I can now upgrade). However, this would currently require about 33 GB of extra disk space! Another benefit of iTunes Match is that – if you trust Apple to look after your data – it gives you an additional backup of all your music (though I'm not suggesting you ever make this your only backup).
So am I stumping up $24.99 a year for this service just to get higher quality versions and have an online backup? Not quite. My iTunes library currently contains over 60 GB of music; this will be close to 100 GB if I upgrade the quality of all songs to 256 Kbps. Next year, I plan to purchase a MacBook Air and this means that I almost certainly won't be able to store all of my music on that device (assuming I want to keep other files on the computer). I could keep music on a network drive at home and access it that way, but I like the simplicity of accessing the data via iCloud and just downloading the songs that I'm going to be listening to on any particular day, week, or month.
The one grumble I have since moving to iTunes Match is that playlists will no longer sync to iOS devices if they contain podcasts. I listen to a lot of podcasts and have a playlist that I frequently sync to my iPhones and iPods that contains a selection of podcasts. The podcasts themselves will still sync to my iOS devices – they remain available in the 'Podcasts' section of the Music app – but you can no longer play those as part of a playlist. Turning on iTunes Match on an iOS device effectively wipes the local music content and replaces it with what's in iCloud. It's a bit more subtle that this. Existing synced playlists remain on the iOS device (except if they contain podcasts) but all other playlists become available to browse. The music in those non-synced playlists has to be downloaded on demand via iCloud. Another advantage of using iCloud, is that any changes that you make to your playlists (on your Mac or iOS device) are immediately synced between devices (this includes playcount information).
The lack of playlist support for Podcasts meant that I quickly turned my attention to the iOS app store. I'm now using the excellent Downcast app that fulfills all my podcasting needs (and greatly exceeds the previous capabilities of what I was able to do with the default Music app).
So overall, I'm happy with iTunes Match and with accessing my music via iCloud. The real test will be in a year or so when I may need to do more music management on my desired Macbook Air.
If you're looking for some iTunes Match tips and tricks, try out these great resources:
Last night I acted as quiz master at my 40th birthday party. The quiz was inspired by various things I like. Some more details (including the full rules) are available on the flyer I made. I am posting all of the quiz questions below, but if you want to take part you first need to decide which of the eight rounds you are going to 'play your joker' on:
Round 1: 1971
Round 2: Star Wars
Round 3: My Travels
Round 4: The Beatles
Round 5: Eating out in Davis
Round 6: UK vs USA
Round 7: Apple
Round 8: My Top Tunes (audio round)
Before you see any of the questions, you must choose one of the above rounds. This is 'playing your joker' and means that your score for that round will be doubled. The catch is that you have to make that decision purely based on the brief description of each round.
The Quiz
40 questions = 40 points total, but your Joker, can double points in any one round for a possible + 5 points, 45 max. If you want to play this properly, then allow yourself no more than 5 minutes per round...and obviously, no cheating. I'll post the answers in a few days.
Round 1: 1971 (the year I was born)
1) What is 1971 in Roman numerals?
2) How many men walked on the moon in this year?
3) Born in 1971, what singer-turned-actor would win a 'Best Supporting Actor' Oscar nomination for his role in the 2006 film 'The Departed'
4) Nicknamed 'Satchmo', this famous jazz trumpeter and singer died in 1971. How was he better known?
5) Which of the following events did not occur in 1971?
a) The NASDAQ stock market index was launched?
b) The metric system was adopted in France
c) Amtrak began inter-city rail services within the US
d) Walt Disney world opened in Florida
Round 2: Star Wars (a huge influence on my early life)
1) Complete this Obi Wan Kenobi description of Mos Eisley spaceport:
"You will never find a more wretched hive of <blank> and <blank>"
2) Only two actors have featured in all six Star Wars films. Can you name either of these actors who made famous the roles of the two droids R2-D2 and C-3PO (1/2 point for each)
3) According to IMDB which film, from the six-film franchise, has the lowest rating?
4) The Golden Raspberry awards are famously awarded to bad films and to bad actors in particular. Only two people from the Star Wars film series have ever won awards for their bad acting. One of those two people further distinguished themselves by winning the award twice. Who was it?
5) The third film of the franchise was of course Return of the Jedi. Many people do not know that it was very nearly released with a different name. By what name did we almost come to know this film as?
a) Repair of the Jedi
b) Resolution of the Jedi
c) Revenge of the Jedi
d) Reward of the Jedi
Round 3: My Travels
In my 40 years on this planet, I have spent time in 20 different countries (22 if you include principalities and Crown Dependencies). Excluding Europe, I have visited nine countries. name five of them.
Round 4: The Beatles (one of my all-time favorite bands)
1) There are many people who have, at various times, been credited as being the 'fifth' Beatle. Name two of them.
2) The White Album starts off with 'Back in the USSR'. Who plays drums on this track?
3) Their first album ('Please Please Me') was released in 1963. Their last album – before they split up – was Abbey Road released in 1969. In total, how many studio albums did they release while they were still together as a band? (UK studio album releases only).
4) After they split up in, all four Beatles released solo albums in 1970. According to their highest chart position in the UK album charts, which Beatle did the worse?
5) Which of these isn't a song by The Beatles?
a) Old Brown Shoe
b) Blue Jay Way
c) Paint it Black
d) Yellow Submarine
Round 5: Eating out in Davis
1) If you were fearsomely good at working out the answer to anagrams, then maybe one could say that you were a 'Daring Solver'. What Davis restaurant is an anagram of 'Daring Solver'?
2) Sometimes it seems that Davis is very unbalanced in the types of restaurant that we have. I want you to put the following four types of cuisine in order of their popularity in Davis (low to high). By popularity, I mean the number of restaurants/eateries in Davis that sell food of that cuisine:
Pizza
Indian
Thai
Greek
3) I like trying new places whenever they open in Davis. Excluding coffee shops and places that specialize in desserts, I count 126 different food establishments on the Davis Wiki page for restaurants. What percentage of these have I eaten in?
4) If you used the Yelp.com recommendation service in order to find restaurant suggestions, you could read the following review for one particular Davis eatery:
"This burger, ordered medium rare, is the juiciest burger on the planet. It has buffalo sauce, bleu cheese, and the best seasoned patty that just falls apart in your mouth as you masticate. Literally an orgasm in your mouth. I've cried eating it once as well. It's just that good."
The place which features this burger is also the most highly rated Davis restaurant on Yelp. What is it?
5) Three of the following four eating establishments used to exist in Davis but have since closed down. The other is a work of fiction. Which one?
a) Wok N' Roll
b) Professor Pizza
c) Richard Nixon's Dirty Little Secret
d) The Velvet Elvis
Round 6: UK vs USA
As George Bernard Shaw famously noted, England and America are two countries separated by a common language. I'm going to give you 5 words from American English, and I want you to tell me what the equivalent British English word should be? E.g. I say 'sidewalk' and you say 'pavement'.
1) The Big Dipper (i.e. constellation Ursa Major)
2) Rutabaga
3) Trunk (of a car)
4) Math
5) Vest
Round 7: Apple
1) Before his untimely death, Steve Jobs had just resigned as CEO of Apple. In his last year at Apple, what was his annual salary as CEO?
2) Which year did Apple first launch the 'Macintosh' computer?
3) How many iPods or iPhones do I own?
4) The original iPod is now 10 years old. Following the launch of this now iconic product, we have also seen iPod minis, iPod nanos, iPod shuffles and iPod touches. If you had brought *every* version of every new iPod model ever released, how many iPods would you own? This includes all colors and capacities being treated as a separate model.
5) Apple has occasionally been involved in making products outside of their primary line-up of computers, music players and phones. Which of these categories has Apple *not* been involved with?
a) Printers
b) Digital Cameras
c) Games Consoles
d) Juicers
Round 8: My Top Tunes (audio round)
Over the last 7 years or so, I have embarked on a quest to rate all of the music in my iTunes library. This task would be made considerably easier if I stopped buying new music. My rating guidelines are very strict, and only 151 songs in my library have been awarded the maximum 5 star rating. I will play you snippets of some of those songs, and I want you to tell me the artist and the name of the song (1/2 point for each).
Occasionally I really get a song stuck in my head. Last week it was 'Someone Like You' by Adele, which I think is an amazing song. I decided that the only way to get over this song woud be to record a version myself. So yesterday, about 3:00 I sat down at my laptop and opened up GarageBand.
Musically, the song has a fairly simple structure and the original is written in the key of A, which makes it fairly easy to play on my baritone ukulele. I started off laying down a few very simple, and quite sparse, electronic backing tracks (drums, bass, and a few synth parts). Then I recorded a single ukulele track across to which I added a little bit of flanger effect.
Finally I added some vocals. I'm not a great singer, and for some (many?) songs I'm actually a pretty terrible singer. But I didn't let that stop me! On songs like you this you really appreciate how fantastic Adele's phrasing is on certain parts. I think I could have done better than what you are about to hear, but by 11:00 pm I was a bit tired from recording many different takes. Anyway, I sometimes find it more fun to do everything in one go and then leave it as is. It's a moment captured in time, maybe a painful moment, but a moment nevertheless. In any case, I hope you at least enjoy the musical arrangment.
Had some friends over for a few hands of Texas Hold-em the other night. I decided to create a poker-inspired iTunes playlist to accompany our night of, decidedly low-stakes, gambling. I first came up with some very obvious selections such as Poker Face by the ever-ubiquitous Lady Gaga; and of course how can you have any card-related playlist without including this classic? But after I added some of these no-brainers I then I had fun coming up with some things which are a little more subtle (e.g. Find the River). Here is the playlist in full:
For the last 28 days I have been busy writing and recording an album as part of the annual RPM challenge. Faced with the daunting pressure of writing so many songs in such a short time, I focused on getting the music finished first and hoped that I would have time to write lyrics and record vocals towards the end of the month. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to finish writing lyrics. However, if you have heard my singing or have read the lyrics to other songs I've written, then this fact may please you.
In some ways, I'm happy to leave the album as an instrumental album. I'm very pleased with the musical ideas that I came up with and am pleased with the backstory I developed (I decided to add to the challenge by making it a concept album). Anyway, you can hear my efforts below, and you can also download the entire album as one compressed file. This music is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
What follows is a track-by-track guide to the 'story' behind the album. I hope the music affords you some small measure of enjoyment.
It is the near future and around the world people are starting to react to the grim realization that humankind's time on Earth is coming to an end. Man-made climate change has made a large portion of the world uninhabitable and millions have died due to heat stress. The ensuing food shortages have led to mass human migrations which in turn has led to wars and almost a total breakdown of rule and order. Rising sea-levels have started a deadly, and irreversible, positive feedback mechanism.
Amidst the despair, there was still some remnants of hope. A group of scientists and humanitarians had been working for decades in preparation for this day and had constructed a large spaceship which they hoped would be capable of interstellar travel. Named after the Greek god of travelers, the Hermes would undertake a journey unlike any other in human history. A small crew of just 40 people would look after a precious cargo that would hold the key to the continuation of the human species.
As the spaceship Hermes eased out of the space dock to begin it's long odyssey, its crew looked down on their planet and said their farewells. They would never return, but they would always wonder whether things could have been different. The billions of people left on Earth would not survive.
Finding a new home for the Earth colonists was not an easy task. There was no definitive proof that any other known planet could provide the necessary conditions needed to establish a colony...but there were several good candidates. It was decided that the best chance for humanity was the fourth planet of the Gliese 581 system, a system that was located over 20 light years away and which had previously been the recipient of an interstellar message from Earth.
The first phase of the mission to get to Gliese 581 involved reaching the distant edge of the solar system. This was achieved by use of a giant solar sail which was deployed once the Hermes had successfully passed the asteroid belt.
The overriding goal of the mission was to to ensure that humanity would flourish in the furthest regions of space. This happened sooner rather than later when it emerged that two of the crew members were pregnant. Crew member 41 was born as the Hermes was passing Saturn. His parents named him Iapetus, after the third-largest moon of that planet. Crew member 42 was born soon afterwards, and her parents named her Ariel after the second moon of Uranus. They would be the first humans not to have been born on the Earth.
Powered by the solar sail, the Hermes rapidly caught up with another object that humans had flung out into the void. That probe had taken 38 years to reach this distance, whereas the Hermes had reached the same point in less than a tenth of that time. Humanity had now explored further away from their home world than ever before. This accomplishment was overshadowed by the tragic death of Iapetus's father, who had served as the ship's first officer.
At about 325 million miles from the Earth lies the edge of the great Oort cloud. Home to trillions of comets, it forms the edge of our solar system. It's near-incomprehensible vastness means that it will take the Hermes a further twenty years to navigate to its outer edge and reach interstellar space. During this long passage of time, the crew would finalize their preparation for phase 2 of the mission. This period would also see Iapetus and Ariel blossom into adulthood and fall in love with each other.
Once the dangers from comets in the Oort cloud were successfully navigated, the crew could focus their attention to the even longer journey ahead. Back on Earth, scientists had considered many different technologies to get the Hermes to Gliese 581. In the end, they pinned their hopes on a design based on the, never realized, Project Daedalus. Even with such state-of-the-art technology, it would take decades to reach their destination. To ensure the survival of the crew, they placed themselves in a state of suspended hibernation; the ship's computers would successfully wake them if they made it to Gliese 581.
Against all odds, the Hermes reached its destination and awakes the crew. They discovered that Gliese 581 g was an Earth-like, class K planet. It had water, vegetation, and was populated by primitive life forms. However, it's atmosphere was not breathable by humans. Scientists on Earth had planned for this eventuality though, and the crew began the long process of ecopoiesis. Two decades later, Iapetus and Ariel would become the only surviving members of the human species. Yet they also became the first humans to set foot on another planet and breathe its air. They lived long enough to ensure the continuation of humankind and they fervently hoped that this new era of humanity would not repeat the mistakes of the past.
A couple of years ago I had a stab at the NaNoWriMo challenge...an annual event which encourages people to try to write 50,000 words for a book all within the month of November (NaNoWriMo = National Novel Writing Month). I had never written anything of that length before and it was a real struggle but I did it. The novel was completed within the thirty days and I can now claim to have written a book (though it could still do with some editing and polish before I let anyone read it).
This year, I thought I'd try a different challenge...namely, the RPM challenge which is sort of the musical equivalent of NanNoWriMo. Rather than write 50,000 words, the task is to record 10 songs all within the month of February (presumably they picked the shortest month to make it that much harder). The rules actually state that the album needs to be 10 songs or 35 minutes in length. So can you just record one long dirge? To quote the RPM website:
Is it a good idea to record 35 minutes of jaw harp through a delay pedal while someone chants the names of all the fast food restaurants?
Yes.
So I guess anything counts as a song, though don't expect any rave reviews if you record such material. Actually, don't expect anything in return for whatever you record because, just like NaNoWriMo, the only 'prize' is the satisfaction of saying that you did it. The rules don't say that you need to write your material in February, only that you record it. However, I think that RPM purists think that you should write and record, all within the month of February.
I occasionally play guitar, sing somewhat badly, and I can just about get my head around using Apple's excellent GarageBand software, so I thought that I should join in the fun this year. I've been in bands before and have written and recorded songs on a few occasions. However, I have never done this on my own, and have never written so many songs within such a short space of time (my all-time peak musical output was probably no more than one song per month). It's a very daunting task. Even more so, because I'm trying to write all new material and not use any half-finished song, or 'ideas' for songs that I've written down over the last decade or two. And I'm going to do it all on my own and not resort to calling in any 'expert' help from those friends of mine who play instruments or sing.
I'll probably write some more blog posts about my progress (or lack of it), but for now I thought I'd share with you what my 'studio' looks like, and what equipment I'm using. Enjoy.
One of the first pieces of music that we agreed on for our wedding was the song to be played for our first dance. There is an English folk singer called Kate Rusby who Mel and I both like, and one song of her's seemed particularly fitting. Given the outdoor nature of the wedding, we ensured that our first dance was danced underneath the stars to a song by the same name (at one point this did mean that we had to consult sunset times to work out whether any stars would actually be out by that point in the evening):
We didn't want to start our first dance until everyone had gathered in a circle around us. However, certain key family members took a while to track down and we had to wait for what seemed like an eternity surrounded by a large crowd of expectant onlookers. By the time we finally started our dance, time seemed to slow to a standstill. We both felt that it was the longest three minutes of our life, and we mistook a brief lull in the song for the end of the music. We stopped dancing prematurely...only to realize that there was still another minute to go! It became hard to retain any sort of composure and we descended into giggles. Within seconds, those giggles became uncontrollable laughter. Not sure what our guests thought...we were not exactly giving the moment the seriousness that others might have expected.
After this somewhat comic performance, we danced with our parents to this song:
It dawned on me that this was the first time that I had ever danced with my mother!
With these formalities out of the way, it was time to move on to the party music! I had prepared several hours of dancing music in a long iTunes playlist (with cross-fade turned on). The geek, and Mac-fan, in me thought that it would be fitting that the initiation of dancing should be signaled by the Mac start-up chime:
The opening phase of music had two aims. The first, and rather obvious one, was to get people dancing. The secondary aim was to not alienate anyone from 'older' generations by playing anything a little too modern. So the first few songs were firmly rooted in the 1960s:
'Guitar Man' might not have been a very obvious Elvis song, but it is very fast-paced and great fun! The last song in this segment is a huge, huge favorite of mine. From a music production point of view, I admire everything about this song. It also has an element of what I would call 'disco pop' that made it a good transition song to take us into phase 2:
The theme here was happy, modern (ish), pop I suppose. It has always been a life-long goal of mine to play Video Killed The Radio Star followed by One More Time at an 'event'. The former is cheesy but I think that Daft Punk owes their entire sound to that song. The last two songs in this section were the only two songs I bought from iTunes. I'm still dismayed that one of my friends had never heard of Lady GaGa! I should also point out that my music selections were picked to suit the audience (mostly American). If the wedding had been in the UK, there would have been a very different feel to the selections. We next transitioned (via the Ting Tings 'That's Not My Name' to a brief spell of 'pop-rock':
This then allowed me to take the music to a slightly harder rock sound from more modern bands:
Note to any UK folk who are planning a music-related event in America. The people here do not know, let alone appreciate, the musical majesty of Pulp. This was one of the few choices that I would (sadly) omit if I was to pick the songs again. After this section, I wanted to take it back in time to some sixties pop, but first we first needed the transition of some older rock:
Mel's dad is a huge Status Quo fan and so I had to include a couple of their songs. I made some edits in iTunes such that the two songs were not played in their entirety (one of them has a very long intro before it gets going, and I cut that out). Before I could take the music where I wanted it to go, I had another short linker section. And it seemed only fitting that a Californian wedding should have some Beach Boys music:
Then it was time for some oldies again. There were many more Beatles songs that I considered including, but I didn't want it overpowered by any one band, and the number one thing I was keeping in mind was 'danceability'.
By this point I think we had reached the 10:00 pm noise curfew and so we had to move the dancing from the outdoor decking to an indoor studio room. This last segment also includes the lesser known 'The Nitty Gritty' but this took me nicely to the pop-tinged 'ABC'. And from 'pop' we could then jump forward a couple of decades to 'Brit-pop' (I treat 'Lust for Life' as honorary Brit-pop):
Bear in mind that many people had left by this point as some people had already been present for eight hours or so. I'm somewhat guilty of putting less work into the remaining sections and therefore, the next segment is a little vague in structure. Sort of grungy, pop/rock:
And again, this was followed by another sort of misshapen section (no pun intended). Once again, the fantastic Pulp song drew a complete blank from people and so many people resorted to doing a strange 'airplane' dance (no I don't understand this either):
We ended the evening with a song that I had previously written for a friend who was also one of my best men. This song is well known amongst many of the people who were still there at that point. As the song was written for, and about, him, it seemed only fitting that he should dance to it in the middle of the room.
This last song took us to midnight and it was time for the music to end. Planning all of this music had been immensely pleasurable for me and I hope that our guests enjoyed dancing to it as much as I enjoyed putting it all together.
A couple of weeks ago I became a married man. Our wedding had been in a state of preparation for over a year and yet one of the things that started to occupy my mind from an early date was the choice of music to be played during the ceremony. I love music and I have a lot of music. Currently my iTunes library consists of about 14,000 songs; a diverse selection of music that spans several decades (from the 1920s onwards). So choosing just a few pieces for the ceremony was a task that I initially found quite daunting.
My wife knows how much music matters to me, and so was happy for me to find suitable pieces for the ceremony as this would impart some of my identity on the proceedings. Having said that, she had also singled out a piece of music that she wanted to have accompany her entrance to the (outdoor) ceremony. More on that in a minute. You could argue that wedding ceremonies need only two pieces of music: essentially the entrance and exit music. Any other music is likely to play an incidental role. But I wanted to have at least two other pieces of music if possible, and those pieces had to fit two main criteria:
Be moving and uplifting without being too serious – we very much wanted an air of informality to permeate the wedding day
Not be religious – I'm an atheist and we wanted this to be a humanist ceremony
Somewhat unusually I chose some music to be played before my soon-to-be-wife made her entrance. This was not just background music for the guests to listen to as they took the seat. No, we waited until everyone was seated and then we played the piece. This was a little bit of emotional manipulation as I wanted something that would put people in the right frame of mind and gently tug at their heart strings. My choice was the fairly recent cover of the Magnetic Fields song 'The Book of Love' by Peter Gabriel. I considered many other pieces, but this packs a major emotional punch but avoids getting overly sentimental.
This certainly achieved the desired effect of getting people 'in the mood'. The last line of the song was a perfect introduction for what was to follow. After a moment of silence, my lovely wife made her entrance. This was the great, and lovely, song that she chose to have played:
During our rehearsal I did fear that the song would be too short to allow enough time for bride, bridesmaid, and flower girl to all make their entrances. But it was a perfect length, and everyone made it down the aisle in time. After we started the ceremony we first had some readings and then we got on to the business of exchanging rings and vows. After being pronounced 'husband and wife' we called our mothers forward to act as witnesses and to therefore sign our marriage license. This gave a perfect opportunity to play some more music.
I found this stirring piece of instrumental music from a band that I adore for their easy-going, mellow folk-tinged tunes. It's by a group called Hem and this piece is called 'Eveningland'. I find it very moving and uplifting...it was also a short piece which worked out well.
So all that what was required after this was some music to escort us both back down the aisle. This was the hardest piece to choose. It had to be something fun and light-hearted. I'm a huge, huge fan of the Beatles and so one of my first thoughts was to play 'All You Need Is Love'. But then I was in two minds as to whether this piece of music should be instrumental or not. I actually have four slightly different versions of this song by The Beatles, and two other versions by other artists. However, none of them seemed quite right. I struck gold when I discovered an album of Beatles cover songs...all played on the Ukulele! I absolutely adore the Ukulele – I own a couple myself – and this album by the Ukulele Players contains many great versions of Beatles songs. Most importantly it contained this...the music we used to walk back down the aisle as husband and wife!
About six or seven years ago I was given my first ukulele. It was a very cheap and basic uke, but I loved it, and really enjoyed the tone it had. I quickly tried writing a song based around a simple ukulele hook and this was the result:
A few years later I discovered the joys of the baritone ukulele and swiftly purchased one (by Lanikai) from the fantastic Watermelon Music in Davis. People have often remarked to me 'That's a small guitar!' to which I always respond 'No, it's a big ukulele'. When I bought the baritone uke, it was the only non-standard uke in the store. Fast forward a few years and things have changed a lot. First off, Watermelon now have a huge display of ukuleles:
The range at Watermelon comes in a myriad selection of styles and shapes. However, what really amazed me was discovering that you can now buy an electric bass ukulele! The strings on this baby were really thick and rubbery. Hard to hear it if not plugged in.
Just when I was recovering from the shock of seeing a bass uke, my eyes then spied this gem:
A thin-body 'travel' ukulele! If it wasn't already obvious, ukes are already small, so the idea of making one even smaller seems a little unnecessary. Despite the tiny body on this, it still produced a noticeable sound. I then noticed the most pointless ever feature on a musical instrument...ladies and gentlemen, I give you the ukulele-headstock-compass!
Never get lost while playing your Ukulele again. In addition to all of these wondrous musical instruments, they also had some 8-string ukuleles and behind the counter they had a mysterious 10-string ukulele. Took me a while to work out how this worked. Normally, you can just have two sets of strings on some instruments with the second set of strings being tuned an octave higher. The 10-string uke, had the higher and lower strings doubled up, but the middle two strings were tripled, with both additional strings being an octave higher. Not sure if that quite makes sense. But anyway, thank you Watermelon music for being a feast of ukulele goodness. I'm severely tempted by some of the electro-acoustic ukes....when do I next get paid?
This was a little screen capture I just made featuring a 'performance' on lullatone.com's Raindrop Melody Maker. Beautifully simple and simply beautiful. Very addictive too!
You wait ages for a child prodigy to turn up, and then two come along at once. This week I came across two videos on YouTube of very young boys (one of them is only four) who are simply amazing at what they do. It's not just their ability that is impressive, they both really seem to enjoy playing music and their enthusiasm is very endearing.
