Sheet Music Guy !

Hello everybody!  It’s been a long long time, hasn’t it?

I realize latetly I have been kind of behind in keeping this site up to date.   It’s been almost a year (?!?!) since my last real song update, with only posts to the “YOUR Performances” section to remind people that I’m still around.  I am!  Hi!!

I can list through the standard reasons for not posting, as people tend to do after not posting for a while.  I was really busy with work before, but since then I’ve just been kind of lazy…and a little unmotivated.  The free time I spend on these musical hobbies tend to be cyclical - alternating between sheetmusicguy, songwriting, producing, and guilt for spending too much time on this stuff.

Been spending some time trying to think of other things to do with this site.  Maybe host a contest?  I’m not too sure.  We’ll see.

Things have been pretty good otherwise.  I went to Europe in June/July with my HS friends, which was pretty cool.  We went on a Contiki tour - Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Vienna.  I got to use my Canon XS, which is great for an entry level camera.   I also bought the Beatles limited edition Mono box set recently.  At $300, it’s crazy expensive - especially considering it’s not the full Beatles catalog (as it excludes the stereo albums), and you are technically getting less for it (one less channel, anyways).  However, I believe it’s the music delivered in the way it was intended.  Nobody knew Stereo in the ’60s anyways…some of the stereo mixes did weird stuff like put all the vocals through one speaker…which, i mean, that’s just strange.  Also, as a music fan, I think it’s good to physically own stuff like this.  Even if it is the price of a PS3.  ugh.

Random Jay Chou news - he’s supposed to play Kato in the new Green Hornet flick, opposite Seth Rogen, directed by Michael Gondry.  I really don’t know how I feel about this.  Each of those people have their own distinct and respective talents in their own field….but in a Green Hornet movie?  Really?  Really really?!?  We’ll see how this plays out.

Anyways, back to this site.  I’ve been working on and off over the past year - I guess that would be mostly ‘off’ - on another Jay Chou track, and I just had a breakthrough today so I think I should be able to have it up in a week, hopefully.

Oh, and to those of you in Canada, Happy Thanksgiving!  You americans can wait a month

Turkey turkey turkey

….because he has no kitchen.

Seriously.

We’re renovating.

We’ve spent the past few weeks packing up everything and moving stuff around. The weekend was spent frantically covering everything in drop sheets.

Everything.

Includinngg……

Yup. Gonna be hard to practice Lee Hom under that.

The contractors came this morning, 8am to 6pm, and will be coming every day for the next 2 weeks…and after that we gotta put everything back.  

But we get a new kitchen out of it.  yay.

…..

Wish us luck.

For all you non Canadian/Torontonians out there, if your local weather is not ridiculous you should be grateful.

The past two weekend’s, we’ve had 2 snowstorms a week of ~20cm (8 inches) of snow. One is mid week, which is okay, but the second one always has to fall on the freakin weekend, of all times. I’m tired of having to rejig my weekend plans because global climate change chooses to dump snow right after the working week finishes. Can we at least push it to a Monday? geez.

Here’s a semi-recent picture. There was a barbecue under here, once:

I miss summer. The sun through my sunroof, driving down to the beach, actually being able to wash my car, girls unbundling, patios, ultimate frisbee…yeah. It’s so much that winter brings me down, it’s more that when summer rolls around you realize all the things you’ve been missing the past few months. Without winters (and our bullshit snowstorms,) I’m worried that I’d start to take our summers and half-naked girls for granted. You appreciate what you have when you know it’s only not going to be around forever.

Incidentally, the summers in Toronto are awesome, pop by during July or August if you get the chance.

In other news, besides working on the T-Shirt designs, I’ve been working on figuring out Lee Hom’s Forever Love the past few weeks. It’s been a bit of a challenge, thanks to his seriously ambiguous chord choices.  Is it A major??  Is it C# Minor?  Who the hell knows!  They both sound slightly wrong!  I’ve had so many false starts on this song in the past few months, where I end up completely frustrated and picking up some random Jay songs instead.  (Yay Maple.)  Anyways, it’s finally coming along so hopefully that will be up soon.

Ever since second year university, I’ve developed a chronic knot in my left upper-back and shoulder that comes and goes every few months. When it gets bad I can barely move my neck. I’ve also recently found that I tend to pop and pull my right shoulder pretty often playing sports, which is fairly painful and takes a while to heal.

It should also be noted that I work in the tech industry and that I’m a pretty big nerd overall. The resulting hours spent slouched in front of a computer during my working and leisure time have given me pretty bad posture.

I’ve been to acupuncturists and masseuses, who both say I have some fairly significant problems likely as a result of this. My shoulders tilt to the left and my hips tilt to the right, and my spine looks like this:

)

When it should look like this:

|

If you get a basic acupunctural assessment anywhere, they’ll do a similar check on your hip/shoulder alignment. Ideally they should be parallel. I’m not sure whether the spine bend is the cause or the effect of this, but either way, it wasn’t looking good.

Anyways, I was at a family Lunar New Year dinner yesterday, and I had a seat facing the mirror. Glancing at myself in a neutral sitting position, it was fairly obvious that my shoulders were tilted. Usually I just move my shoulders around, but this time, I thought I’d try something different. Just for fun, I tightening my back muscles instead, forcing my spine straighten up and re-balance my shoulders as a result. It took a while to get the knack of finding those back muscles to clench, and it’s a little tiring flexing those muscles for a period of time, but I forced myself to hold this up the rest of the evening to see what would happen.

About five minutes later, my tight upper-left back almost melted completely. My shoulders relaxed and dropped. My neck, is usually bent, loosened and straightened. Before I used to feel some of my vertebrates pushing out of the back of my neck, but I quickly checked and it seemed they had straightened themselves out. I quickly looked left and right, and it seemed that I also gained maybe 10% range of motion in my neck area. All within five minutes of straightening my posture.

This was amazing. I didn’t know consciously fixing your posture would get these kinds of results this quickly. Today, my right shoulder which I had injured last week playing volleybal feels about back to normal…which was way better than a few days ago. My back is a little tired from holding my spine up straight, but it’s a small price to pay for magically fixing other parts of your body. Who knows what will happen next? Maybe I’ll run faster, jump higher, get girls, throw fireballs…..the possibilities are endless. I’m excited.

If anybody has chronic back/neck/shoulder problems, you might want to give this a try:

1) Get a chair and sit in front of a mirror. Get into a relaxed, comfortable position….what you think is ’straight’

2) Look in the mirror, and make note of the slant in your shoulders.

3) If your shoulders are not horizontal and tilted one way or the other, try to work your muscles in your back to push your spine in such a way as to straighten your shoulders. Do not straighten your shoulders directly; they should align themselves as a result of you re-aligning your spine.

4) Wait 5 minutes

5) All your chronic physical problems will mysteriously evaporate. Or not.

Happy experimenting!

*I am not a health care professional, follow my ‘advice’ at your own risk, consult a physician before doing anything, ever.

Unfortunately in the past little while, I haven’t been as productive with the sheet music as I’d like to be.. This can be narrowed down to 3 very simple reasons:

1) Guitar Hero 3

2) Guitar Hero 2

3) Buying GH2 and GH3 pretty much at the same time

Having played a real guitar for a while, transitioning those skills onto these games has been pretty smooth. I got the games a few weeks ago and I’m working on the last batch of songs on Expert Level on both games now, which is about as fun, frustrating, and time consuming as you might suspect.

A lot of people criticized GH3 for being too similar to it’s predecessors, but playing both games simultaniously you come to the realization that there are some key differences in the gaming engine.

GH3 is very very forgiving in the timing of your notes compared to GH2 and 1. If you strum +/- one-sixteenth note of where the note should be, it will still register as a hit note. One sixteenth note is 1/4 of a quarter note, so 4 of them fit into one beat. When the notes start flying at you, this can be quite the handicap; sometimes it feels like I’m just going nuts on the clicker/strummer button, and running my index finger up and down the 5-button fretboard, which works somehow. I don’t die and I pass the level and feel marginally better about myself.

To make up for this, in GH3 when you start to slip up, you slip and fall and die really really quickly.  At times it’s almost like the yellow range doesnt’ even exist anymore.  I’ll be well into the green and playing, miss a few notes and somehow find myself just about to enter the red, at which I’ll hit Star Power just in time to die and get booed off stage.   What good is Start Power if you die too fast to use it?

It feels these tweaks were made to open the door for more extra-ridiculous solos that you now have a fair chance of faking your way through, assuming you don’t slip….which isn’t necessarily a bad or good thing.  Just a …thing.

Still, at the end of the day, it’s the same game you’re playing.  Both games have some songs that are hard for very stupid physical reasons, leading to frustration and hand cramps.  However, for every one of those tracks, there is a song which is both fun to play and challenging that you find yourself going back to once in a while just for kicks.

Just….please let me finish these games so I can get on with my life.

Oh wait, but there’s still Rock Band.

Dammit.

There’s this part in the Disney/Pixar film Ratatouille where Remy, the talking rat-chef, is trying to explain the joys of the culinary arts to his brother Emil. He shows how two simple foods, with complementary characteristics, are greater than the sum of their parts when eaten together. I think he used cheese and a grape.

Anyways, keeping this in mind, I usually end my evening off on a healthy note, by snacking on a piece of fruit to stave away hunger….like an apple or a banana. One night I’m munchin’ on my apple and I see some almonds lying around, so I pop some of those in my mouth too….and WOW! What a combination! Not only do they complement and enhance each other’s flavors, but the both these foods are so basic and easily taken for granted that we forget that they are capable of wonderful things.

This moment of realization, of finding a complementary combination of two or more basic foods, will now be known as “Ratatouille” moments.

Soon after this first experience, I had a banana and a few walnuts and BOOM! Ratatoiulle moment #2.

To summarize:

Apple=good
Almonds=good
Apple+Almond=better

Banana=good
Walnut=good
Banana+Walnut=better

For all the mathies out there, assume better > good+good