In my last blog post I mentioned the piano shopping I was doing during my annual leave that, unfortunately for me, will have ended by the time you read this. Back to work on Monday like everybody else... *sigh*

From the major music stores in the city, I was able to quickly cut it down to 2 digital pianos that, for my price range, had pretty much everything I was after: a full range of keys, weighted, with a good grand piano sound, and some options for a sort-of beginner piano player like myself. If you're interested in model numbers, they were the Yamaha Arius YDP-S31, and the Korg LP-350

The Yamaha grand piano sound is what I grew up on, and because of that the Yamaha had a head-start over every other keyboard I came across. The weighted keys though felt a bit tough and kinda bouncy, which weirded me out.

The Korg was the opposite: great feel, but the sound from the built-in speakers felt like they missed the grand piano sound in some notes, particularly the higher ones.

So I spent a lot of time going back-and-forth between the 2 music stores that had these models, and soon enough the staff there were able to recognize me by sight. I brought my headphones to each store, tried to remember the way the pianos felt and sounded as I went between one store to the other, trawled the internet for reviews and opinions from others, and generally spent a crapload of time getting nowhere.

Then, last Sunday, I went indoor rock climbing for a friend's birthday which turned my arms into jelly. It was the best thing to happen to me in my hunt for a digital piano.

With my arms now useless, struggling to lift a glass of coke to my lips in the lunch that followed (well it wasn't that bad, but avid readers of this blog will have learned that hyperbole is my friend), it made a difference when I next went to play those 2 pianos. First, I went to the Yamaha, and the tougher resistance in the keys made it an effort to play. I actually got tired on that piano and thought, Screw this. I'm going home.

The path home from there went passed the other music store with the Korg, so I decided to give the Korg a play anyway, thinking I wouldn't get a whole song finished before my fatigued arms would fail me and droop to my sides in defeat. I sat before the Korg, played and... made it all the way through the song. Huh, I thought, let's try another. So I did, and I got through that too.

I never noticed how much I was struggling with the Yamaha's keys until I had virtually no energy left. I don't know whether that speaks volumes about my lack of upper-body strength or that my purchase decisions tend towards the things that need the least energy out of me, but that was the tie-breaker: I went with the Korg.

I bought it on Tuesday, then waited for the delivery of it every night since then (the colour of the model I was after had to be sourced from another store, but they said they should be able to get it overnight). Like a child on the night of Christmas Eve, I couldn't go to sleep because I kept anticipating the delivery of the piano the next day. In the day that followed, no call from the music store. So I waited the next day, lacked sleep once again, and it still didn't come. This went on for a while - while enough for me to lose sleep over several days in a row such that this morning, even after the full 8 hours of sleep that I normally need to function, I woke up feeling exhausted.

After getting some breakfast in me to provide the energy I needed that sleep wouldn't provide, I got a call from the music store that they would be around with the piano in the next half an hour :D

I was very glad that I could get it before I had to go back to work on the Monday. I even went so far as to record me playing (badly) on it:

So, 2 weeks of leave, and this is what I have to show for it.

And so my first week of two weeks annual leave has just finished (and to start it off I began this sentence with a conjunction to piss certain people off with whom I had a discussion/argument about it earlier this week). There's nothing particularly special about the leave; I'm not doing any travelling or visiting any distant relatives, I'm just taking some time off now that the project I've been working on for nearly 2 years has finally been released to the customer. That transition took place over Queen's Birthday Weekend (a long weekend 3 weekends ago now, for which I was also working), and I seriously feel like I need a break.

I was supposed to have written this blog post yesterday, but as part of a ceroc friend's birthday celebrations I went (indoor) rock climbing with them and then lost all function in my arms. Heck, once I got home I couldn't even pull my socks up my legs without getting my fingers locked into some tight grip/claw shape because I didn't have the strength to straighten my fingers into their normal position.

So in this first week of leave I've managed to go rock climbing, discover I have very little upper-body endurance, and return to dance classes. I've also cleaned almost every corner of my apartment (there used to exist a thin film of dust and Farmbake cookies that settled over the carpet like geological strata - not any more!) and do a little more work on this website to make it more responsive. Mainly though, I've been shopping around for a new digital piano to upgrade from my existing keyboard: an old 5-octave Yamaha keyboard my parents bought me for my 15th(?) birthday to help me with the whole self-taught piano thing I was going through at that age.

It was the first instrument I learned to play (if you discount the ones that the numerous primary schools I attended taught all their kids) and really stuck with, even if it was an on-and-off sort of thing. I'd learn the occasional tune, practice and play it to death until I could play it blind-folded and annoy my family who had to put up with hearing the same songs over and over again, then move on. When university came around the piano-playing took a back seat to my studies and I picked-up the guitar which I thought of as an easier way to take music with me. I stuck with the guitar for several years until my guitar buddy and I stopped our practice sessions. Then, without much motivation to continue the guitar, I returned to the piano.

Compared to the musicians I listen to or those I pay to see at the occasional concert/orchestra, I'm not very good, and being self-taught means I lack all the theoretical background any normal music student would have received during their life. For example: I only learned what constitutes a chord, and how to make a triad, last year in an after-school beginners keyboard/piano course that I signed-up to because I was accused of having too much free time. What I thought of as a chord or triad, I saw as a pattern on the keys of a piano; what I knew in my head for a chord progression, I saw once again as numbers and a series of patterns that followed some sort of hidden formula or rule that to me just sounded nice.

Music for me was a series of patterns, numbers, and shapes. Without the theoretical/educational background, I didn't have any other way to express what I saw.

It was only once I started hanging-out with musicians or other musically-inclined people that I gained names for these things - I no longer had to refer to things as 'that pattern' or 'that hand shape' and I could use the names given to them by other musicians and feel a bit smarter for speaking the proper lingo.

I learned to play songs that went beyond the old Yamaha's 5-octave range a long time ago, but couldn't afford the next step up. If I couldn't get away with transposing the entire keyboard down/up an octave to compensate for the lack of keys, I would imagine myself playing those notes and the sounds they'd make during the song as I played it. I'd also grab some time on a proper piano whenever I could: sneaking a go on the super-expensive grands that sat on the floor of a local music shop during my lunch hour, or shooting out after dance classes to play the terrible-sounding upright that lived in the room next to where lessons were held.

Now that I'm on a break, have some money, and am back into playing the piano now that work has calmed down significantly, I've been digital piano shopping. Hopefully I'll have something before my second week of leave is up :)

In the past I've talked about how I show my age by sticking to buying CDs instead of buying digitally via iTunes or Amazon. I've even fallen out of grace with some friends by admitting what I've bought. The more egotistical side of me even goes on to think I'm one of the reasons the brick-and-mortar CD retail store is still around.

Well, as of a few weeks ago, that all changed. I installed iTunes.

Sunnovabitch

This isn't the first time I've tried to install iTunes. I've tried maybe 2 other times in the past year, but each time, for unknown reasons, the iTunes installer would just die on me. The instant I OK'ed the install location (which was just the default), the installer would give me its equivalent of the fail whale, before giving me 1 choice: Quit. (It's not really a choice if there are no other options now is it?)

I didn't really want to delve any deeper: there was likely something screwed-up with my Win7 64-bit install, but I didn't care; I didn't really need iTunes to help me with any part of my life that wasn't already covered by some other program or process on my computer. I was installing iTunes to pique my curiosity and trial a different media player.

But this all changed where, in the last few months, I started following a lot more independent or lesser-known musicians on YouTube. Now I love YouTube, but every rose has it's thorns. I've already ranted about how crude YouTube comments have been. I mean, where else can you find an abundance of lines like:

Uhhh...? no one forced you watch it. Please murder yourself.
- (source)

Anyway, one of those musicians posted a cover of Avril Lavigne's new single, What the Hell, that was so different from the original and gave it so much meaning that I probably added another 100 to the video's view count. Eventually, I was compelled to buy it to show my appreciation towards the artist, so I downloaded the iTunes installer again, ran it, prepared myself for it to fall over and... whoa, it installed properly.

I told my brother about it installing successfully, and he asked me, "You didn't install iTunes 10 did you?" Turns out I did, which is the version he hates with every fiber of his being for a whole lot of what he considers "UI fails". This being my first ever iTunes installation (and probably the only reason it installed properly on my computer), I kept it. When a new version comes out, I'll just be impressed by it a whole lot more (or unimpressed by it a whole lot less) since what is the 'norm' for me is already a lot lower than those who were able to have previous versions of iTunes to remember.

So I bought the song, tweeted about it, and now I'm hooked. A whole new world of music is now available to me and they just make it so damn easy to lose my money in it. Even though I keep a budget spreadsheet to track my own expenditures, there are just some things that I don't track, namely small ticket items like gum or the coins that I give to some charities on their street collection day. iTunes songs are less than what I give those charities, hell they're even less than a pack of gum! So they never really make it into there and I don't feel I've spent anything until Apple e-mails me a receipt for my past week's worth of purchases and I look at them all and think, Oh damn...

If you're reading this then you're now seeing the recently-migrated-to-OpenHost version of this site - with the old site scheduled to come down at the beginning of February. I'm pretty sure the worlds' DNS' would have updated by then and ensure that all traffic points to here instead of the old place. (I wonder what would happen though if you still try to go to the old site location when it's not there anymore... your browser shooting packets of data into the ether...)

So like I said in a previous post, if this site starts to mess-up on me, at least now I'll have the ability to properly diagnose and correct any problems.

Oh, and first post of 2011 :D

---
A few weeks ago, still thinking about the year that was, I watched a mashup of songs that made Billboard Magazine's Top 25 for 2010. Not as good as the 2009 one I reckoned, but it got me wondering: what were my favourite songs of 2010?

So I fired-up my music player and created a playlist with some very simple criteria*:

• all songs released in 2010
• sort by play count from most to least

(It's not a very fair test, I know: songs from earlier in the year would have an advantage over later ones, but I don't know how the hell I'm going to create that kind of criteria filter.)

Excluding the top result (which had a ridiculously high play count because it was a song I was learning to play on guitar - repeated stops and starts and all that), it was a 3-way tie:

1. Barenaked Ladies - You Run Away

I was very surprised to see this song amongst the results. Sure it's a nice song, but not one that would come to mind if you asked me to name my favourites from 2010. This is the only Barenaked Ladies song in my entire music collection - I don't even have their ever popular 'chickity China the Chinese chicken' song, One Week, which was released all the way back in 1998 and is the only other song I know of by these guys.

2. Ke$ha - Tik Tok

Oh now this is just shameful. I'll admit to enjoying the occasional pop tune, but how the hell this got into my collection AND make my 'top 3', I'll never know. I can't even blame magical faeries or something like that for having commandeered my computer and over-playing this song, although I did have lots of ants in my apartment once; caught them chowing-down on some banana choc chip muffins I made and left out on the kitchen counter. It's not totally impossible for them to find my computer and put Kesha on infinite loop... right?

Meh, I'm not even going to bother embedding the video. Just go an enjoy this collegehumor.com parody instead: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1935457

3. Brooke Fraser - Who Are We Fooling?

Finally, a result I can approve of.

I only became a Brooke Fraser fan towards the end of 2010. Sure, she's a local artist and has been around for several years, so everybody in the country has heard of her and heard her songs - even my friend's walking-down-the-isle wedding song was a Brooke Fraser song - but I wasn't a fan. Then one boring day I was just following YouTube suggestions, letting the links take me where they may, and after hearing someone's rendition of one of her songs that I hadn't heard before, thought, "Wow, that sounded really nice." So I went to find the original, listened to that, liked it even more, then remembered that she had been on the news just a few days before for an interview about her recently-released album.

"Isn't she touring the country for the album release?" I wondered, so I hit her site, looked at the tour dates and immediately saw the one that effectively said: playing in Wellington TOMORROW NIGHT YOU IDIOT!

I made a gamble that moment: I quickly texted a few friends who might have liked going to her concert with me (1 didn't want to come, 1 said "Brooke who?"), then tried to buy tickets the following day.

My friend Claire got back to me, said she would like to come on the proviso that it was a sit-down concert (she was on crutches at the time), which it was, and that I could get tickets at ridiculously short notice, which I managed. Everything was falling into place so easily, like - taking a spiritual sort of tack here - the universe was making the path to the Brooke Fraser concert as smooth as possible as if to tell me, "Hey man, you'll enjoy this concert."

Which I did.

I followed an interesting tangent of related topics in the gaps between work today.
It started last night as I was at home trawling through some Devil May Cry 3 and 4 skill/combo videos.
These videos are always played to some kind of metal; one of them was covered by 2 Rhapsody of Fire songs, and several others I couldn't name.
It was then I discovered another power metal band, Kamelot.

Kamelot's When the Lights Are Down was the song being used, so I found which album it was on, did a bit of reading about the album, and it turns-out the album is a sequel to an earlier concept album, loosely based on the story of Goethe's Faust.
It was this part caught my attention because my brother (film/theatre student) has been involved in several productions of Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.
Intrigued by the naming coincedence, I continued my reading and learned that both Goethe and Marlowe wrote their stories based on a German legend about a man (Faust) who makes a pact with the devil in exchange for knowledge.

I knew how the Marlowe version went from my brother, so I focused on learning about Goethe's version and about Goethe himself, and somewhere along the way I realized, "Holy crap, I've stumbled upon a literary heavyweight!"

You can read about Goethe's epic resumé and mark on history anywhere on the Internet just by Googling his name.
As I did I felt both awed by his achievements, and stupid for not having heard of this guy before.
The last time I felt like this, was when I threw "circles of hell" into Google (I was using the concept in a story of mine) and came across another epic: Dante's The Divine Comedy.
Therein lay several other Devil May Cry and popular culture references.

So what did I learn?
Plenty.
And that power metal and video games can be educational too :P

So Guitar Hero 3 is either out, or up-and-coming (depending on where you are in the world), and while I'm not a fan, I was directed to a YouTube video of someone attempting Dragonforce's Through The Fire And Flames.
If you know that song, or know power metal in general, you'll know that it will be impossible to get 100% for that song on expert level.

Continuing on the YouTube trail, I went and watched the actual music video for that song, as well as another of their songs, Operation Ground And Pound.
In that video I think the band is on some sort of post-apocalyptic Earth, surviving the onslaught of the alien race that has destroyed it.
I don't know if my words can evoke the right kind of imagery, but damn it looked cool.

So I don't know what everyone else's version of armageddon looks like, but my one has been slightly altered to have the 4 horsemen riding in not to the sound of the screaming masses, but being greeted by a synth orchestra, double-kick drums, and humankind's most ridiculously over-the-top electric guitar solo ever.

It'll be our finest hour :D