My own instrumental; "Cliche"

My first attempt to do something my own - back in 2015. Played over a backingtrack found from Youtube. Guitar is - or was, the cheapest Ibanez you could find from Thomann, a GSA 60. But as you know, Ibanez is Ibanez - high quality no matter how cheap. So name's "Cliche" as in my opinion at the time it contained so much kinda sugarish licks, but anyway, I was proud of it! :)

It's been awhile!

Quite much has happened since last post and perhaps the major one is the fact that I've got more into Japanese rock and even some Korean poprock. It just doesn't stop amazing me the level of the talent in these countries. Anyways, this is my first post since... ages and to announce I will activate the blog again.

Meanwhile, here's one of my favourite groups, a Korean Dreamcatcher. Despite of very Kpopish start, the song is heavier. Dreamcatcher is known to have rock / metal elements in their songs. Worth checking!

 

Dreamcatcher / Boca

Guitar cover: Cum On Feel The Noize / Quiet Riot

“Cum On Feel the Noize” is a song by the British rock band Slade released in 1973. It was written by lead vocalist Noddy Holder and bassist Jim Lea. Song reached No 1. in the UK and remained in the charts for 12 weeks.

Picture: Slade

In 1983 American heavy metal band Quiet Riot recorded their own version of the song which success drew huge nationwide attention to the 1980s Los Angeles metal scene and also helped to break Slade belatedly in the US in 1984.

Picture: Quiet Riot

Originally, Quiet Riot’s lead vocalist Kevin DuBrow was strongly against of covering the song, because he wanted the band to write every song on the album. In addition, he was not a big fan of Slade. Instead, the band decided to try to cover the song as badly as they could so the label would refuse to release it. Plan didn’t seem to work very well as the single was a million-selling hit in the United States, reaching No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. Song made history as the first heavy metal song to ever reach the Hot 100.

Slade was a little bitter about Quiet Riot’s success with their song. Slade version was big hit in other countries, but not in US and later Quiet Riot’s version overshadowed Slade’s worldwide.

Source: Various articles of Wikipedia

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I’ve planned to cover Quiet Riot’s version of the song many times, and finally did it. Song has great melody with powerful open chords and Carlos Cavazo’s beautiful solo makes it one of the best rock songs ever recorded.

I made history as well as this is the first guitar cover I did solely with iPad! Learned the song with Anytune Pro which I also used to change the song pitch from E flat to E to prevent re-tuning my guitar. Also used Anytune to increase the song speed by 3%. I then exported the tuned song into Cubasis.

Picture: Anytune Pro

Played the Harley Benton Fusion-II FR Pro guitar via Apogee Jam guitar adapter into JamUp Pro guitar amp app, recorded it with Cubasis 2 where I mixed it with the original song, mastered the song in Final Touch app, imported the final song into LumaFusion where I edited and composed the live Quiet Riot video and my playing video into one and made the final edits and exported into Youtube.

Picture: Positive Grid’s JamUp Pro with the setup I played the song

Picture: Cubasis 2 recorded the guitars (few takes) and mixed with the original song

It really seem desktop & laptop computers are soon history as there’s so much you can do with iPad. Also very good thing is that there’s not much piracy in iOS platform and that means users actually buy apps and developers get money, which in turn encourages them to develop apps further. Also app’s are inexpensive compared to desktop versions.

My cover of Cum On Feel The Noize:

BITS & PIECES

Made a video how I played this song in my cover video. I’m not claiming this is the only way to play, just a way I played it. Didn’t want to do a traditional guitar lesson video, only some parts of the song and if you are familiar with the song, I’m sure you know what part goes where. If unsure, please see my cover above.

Slap It!

Hello Guitar – and Bass friends!

If you’re a long time guitar player, you probably have gone through all the degrees of “guitar boredom”. Whether you’ve tried to improve your technical ability, scales or learning new songs, the boredom is always lurking behind your shoulder. Sometimes keeping your guitars in rack do the trick and sometimes you might find something totally new, inspiring thing to do – like I did!

As I wrote in my post of Japanese pop singer/songwriter/guitarist Miwa (https://jannesmusic.blogspot.com/2019/08/artists-bands-miwa.html) , I started to look at the Japanese pop and rock. While browsing this new exciting world, I came across to a YouTube video of Japanese female guitarists. It’s amazing how skilled guitarists there are! One guitarist, TOMO-ZO led me to dig out more of  the band she was playing, a Gacharic Spin. Group is playing fantastic energetic rock. It’s actually unfair to put them into any genre as style drifts between pop-rock-metal. What really caught my attention was the band leader KOGA’s slap bass that felt like totally new thing in this kind of music – most of the songs are fast paced rock and imagine a slap bass in there along with distorted guitar and pop-keyboards… well you don’t have to imagine, I’ll put an example for you. There has been way more ”wtf?” moments with Gacharic Spin that I’ve experienced with any other band. All players are skilled musicians, for example Hana in drums plays 10 Instruments (has moved from drums to guitar & vocals recently) and in best players of all instruments Koga was voted 15th best bass player in Japan - being the only female player in any top lists. I will make a post of this amazing band, but meanwhile, here are some examples:

And from the lighter side:

Anyway this band is a fresh breath to the music I’ve listened… and the seed of an idea of starting to learn slap bass was planted.

There’s a small stock of rarely used guitars under my bed – not to hide them from my wife, no no… and one bass; a cheap short scale Harley Benton from Thomann that I bought years ago to have a bass should I need one in my covers / songs. After dusting and tuning it was playable – even with the old original strings, not great but playable. But there’s no such thing as too bad excuse to let your GAS flow freely, so I ordered a ”Jazz bass” from Musicstore.de. It’s similar to Harley Benton Jazz bass but as its delivery time was 2 weeks, I chose J&D instead. Very good nicely finished bass (pics), couldn’t find any problem what so ever.

Basic bass playing with the pick is not the hardest thing to do, but playing with fingers and slapping is another story. It seem to take quite some time to get your all fingers in sync. Slapping with thumb is not hard, but “popping” with your right hand index / ring finger requires training to get it smooth.

I’ve learned bass only a month or so – every now and then, and though that in order to prevent premature Bass Boredom by playing with metronome, I need to start to learn a song as well. I’ve always liked soul / disco bass lines and found nice song “He’s the greatest dancer” by Sister Sledge. Lerned it and uploaded a video in to the “sister channel” Janne’s Bass that I created for my bass stuff:

This cover video is special; I played & mixed with iPad and also for the very first time, edited the video with iPad. Stay tuned as soon there will be a post ”iMoved from iMac to iPad” :) 

Will post my bass progress (if any), follow ”Janne’s Bass” tags if interested!

Thanks for visiting and see you soon! :)

Artists / bands: Miwa (J-pop)

Miwa was born in Hayama, Kanagawa, however moved to Tokyo at a young age. Since her father had a great love for music, Miwa naturally began to enjoy music as she grew up.

Miwa began writing songs at 15. She began to teach herself how to play the guitar after she entered high school, but gave up and paid for professional lessons after discovering she wasn't making much progress on her own. Her high school had a ban on students having part-time jobs. Despite this, Miwa secretly worked, and eventually used these savings by her second year of high school to buy a Gibson J-45 guitar. After this, Miwa played live concerts mostly around Shimokitazawa in Tokyo and in Okinawa in the summer (her parents had a house there). Due to her high school also having a ban on students working in the entertainment business, she had to do these lives in secret (without even telling her school friends). In this time, Miwa released two self-published independent singles, "Song for You/Today" and "Soba ni Itai Kara" in 2007 and 2008.

Miwa was signed to Sony Music Entertainment Japan during her third year of high school. She debuted as an artist in 2010, while attending Keio University. Her debut single, "Don't Cry Anymore," was chosen to be used for the drama Nakanai to Kimeta Hi's theme song. The single was a minor commercial success, breaking the top 20 on Oricon's single charts and being certified by the RIAJ as selling 100,000 full length cellphone downloads a month after its release. In April 2010, the song won the award for best drama theme song at the 64th The Television Drama Academy Awards. Miwa released her second single, "Little Girl," in late June. Her third single, "Change," was the twelfth opening theme song for the Bleach anime, and was a top 10 single.

Miwa considers her favorite Western musicians to be Sheryl Crow, Deep Purple, Carole King, Avril Lavigne and Taylor Swift. Her favorite Japanese musicians are Aiko, Angela Aki, Radwimps and Yuki.

Miwa released her first album Guitarissimo on April 6, 2011 (was scheduled to release a week earlier on end of March but was delayed due to the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and its aftereffects). The charts performance was miwa's best overall: the album reached No. 1 in the Oricon's album charts, making Miwa the first Heisei period-born solo singer to reach a No. 1 on the album charts in the history of the Oricon.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miwa_(singer)

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel

Instagram: https://instagram.com/miwa_official_38?igshid=1mhp6sx55zn6y

Website:  https://www.miwa-web.com/sp/bio/

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So I got fed-up with the music I was listening and playing all the time, even surfing on Spotify didn’t bring much of interest; there’s just so much music that sounds all the same. Surfing in Youtube searching Japanese rock group Loudness’ old song, Youtube started to recommend Japanese music in my feed. At first I just ignored, but then thought why not and clicked one - it was Miwa’s ”Don’t cry anymore”, so nice song and nice voice. Started to look more Miwa’s songs and found ”chAngE”, which was totally different than ballad ”Don’t cry anymore”. I liked ”chAngE” a lot and it started to spin in my head so much that decided to make an instrumental version of it - or at least an instrumental influenced my ”chAngE”. Played it with my new Epiphone Les Paul Express mini guitar and uploaded it in to my Youtube channel:

”chAngE”:

”Don’t cry anymore”:

I still plan to do an instrumental of the ”Don’t cry anymore” at some point. Anyway Miwa was a door for me in to totally new world of music; Japanese pop (J-pop) and rock (J-Rock). Lots of great groups with huge talent and browsing continues. Will post some of the most interesting ones in this blog - there are really good rock and metal groups there as well. Interested? Follow my blog’s J-Pop and J-Rock tags!

Improving Floyd Rose tremolo - or not? Tremolo Stabilizer.

I have two Floyd Rose guitars; a LTD and Harley Benton Fusion-II Pro that I got a month ago from Thomann. Floyd Rose is not necessarily for my playing style, but is nice to have for those whammy bar moments and they keep tuning very well. Problem with all Floyd Rose guitars is that when bending a string, all other strings goes flat. It’s basically impossible to bend and play string below at the same time while saying ”in tune” - if you know what I mean. That results lots of dust on my Floyd Rose guitars. That was a shame as especially this Harley Benton with split coils and stainless steal frets is unbelievably nice guitar to play. So I thought to try something and got myself a tremolo stabilizer from ebay. It was around 11 €/$ so wasn’t big deal if it wouldn’t work.

I checked many Youtube videos for installation and found out there were as many styles as where installers, so the first thing I did I downloaded the instructions from  http://www.fu-tone.com/images/accessories/BLACK-BOX-STABILIZER.pdf

The workflow I used:

1. Make sure your Floyd Rose is properly setup and your guitar is not resting on tremolo in any phase of the installation.

2. Remove back plate from your guitar and re-arrange the springs so that tremolo stabilizer can be installed as center of the tremolo block as possible.

3. It wasn’t necessary to disassemble the style of tremolo stabilizer I got, but if you have the model with two mounting screws you might need to, or tighteng the handnut from the tremolo block side until you’re able to install the mounting screw in the hole below it. Make sure the left handnut is in flush with the inside rod, so you have enough room for adjustements.

4. Position the stabilizer so, that the right end of the rod is just touching the tremolo block. 

5. Screws. I don’t like the idea of drilling a small hole in the soft wood with big power drill and after seeing many installers drilling a) oversized hole b) all the way through into the cavity of the pickup, I decided to try something else. So I took a small hammer and small nail and just tapped the nail enough to make some room for screws. It went perfectly, no cracks and screws were easy to install. Even though my guitar got no cracks, it doesn’t mean your guitar won’t! So proceed with your own responsibility and with caution.

6. The adjustment. Make sure tremolo is still setup correctly, is in tune and guitar is not laying on tremolo. 

6.1 If the rod is not touching the tremolo block, turn the LEFT handnut counter-clockwise until it’s touching.

6.2 If rod is touching the tremolo block and the left handnut is not resting on the stabilizer body, turn the RIGHT handnut clockwise until the LEFT handnut is resting on the body. Check tremolo setup & tuning

Image: Left handnut is not resting on the tremolo stabilizer body, the tighteng of the right handnut is required.

7. After each adjustment, adjust the tremolo and tune the guitar. All this takes time, but it’s required in order to setup the system correctly.

8. Test the tremolo stabilizer setup by bending a string while observing the rod on tremolo block. If the rod loose its contact, turn RIGHT handnut clockwise until rod is again touching the tremolo block through the bending. Check again that LEFT handnut is resting on tremolo stabilizer body, the tremolo setup is ok and guitar in tune. Continue this until you're satisfied!

After adjustments the tremolo shouldn’t move at all when a string is bended, like this:

So how does tremolo stabilizer feels? For me, great! For my rock style of playing, I can now fully utilize this great guitar for my daily usage, all the bends double bends or whatever can be done just like in my Les Paul. Stabilizer doesn’t bother when doing wvibratoa, but when doing very sight vibrato, then it is noticible. Thing is, when you push tremolo arm down, tremolo stabilizer rod looses its contact to tremolo block and when tremolo block returns in neutral position, a ’tap’ and resistance can be felt (see video above). So slight vibrato with bar down, up, down, up doesn’t feel good. But could be one get familiar with it - after all tremolo moves up and down, it’s not locked in any way. Also could be stabilizer can be adjusted in another way to compensate snapping - if you have experience of it, put a comment!

Additional benefit of having stabilizer is that you can play power chords with strings damped with your right hand palm without getting guitar out of tune!

Edit 10.8.2019: Didn’t like the d’addario .10’s the guitar came with so replaced them with .09 Elixir Nanowebs that I have basically in my all guitars, just love them! Changing string gauge with stabilizer was surprisingly easy to do; first adjust tremolo then proceed with instructions above. Everytime you must adjust either, re-adjust the other as well. Step by step you reach the balance between strings, springs and stabilizer. Adjusting everything seem difficult when reading instructions but in practise, it isn’t that hard at all.

Anyways, tremolo stabilizer is so good, it will stay in my Harley Benton for sure. I can play all styles of music and even dive bombs if I want to.

Welcome to my blog!

Welcome to my blog where you find all things of guitar and bass & playing as well as the music things generally in my life! You’re very welcome to participate to this blog with your comments! :)