Isekai Ukulele

Category: Vocal Covers

Cover songs sung and strummed on the tenor ukulele. Requests accepted!

  • April in Review

    Has it already been a month? April was an interesting one, filled mostly with process improvements and a growing understanding of “what I actually want to be doing.” YouTube has continued to be the biggest winner, starting the month with 100 subscribers and growing to just below 130 over the course of the month. Shorts still seem to be performing well, and a handful of regulars have started showing up to the streams, so that feels pretty awesome!

    I (and my voice teacher!) have also noticed good developments in my singing. Both the quality and range of my ability has significantly improved. I’m not singing for 4 hours every day for nothing! 

    4 hours? But you only stream for 3? That’s right. I realized I needed more time to practice off stream to drill deeper into certain songs and techniques. So, I do a warm up and practice for an hour, take a short break, and then do the stream.

    By the end of the stream I’m completely exhausted, but I’m hopeful that I’ll get used to it eventually. The three hour streams were rough to start with too. There’s just so much music to learn, and so many things I can work on to improve! 

    Speaking of, I’ve updated my Streamer Song List with 160 songs that I picked up over the last two months. There was another 50 songs I had picked out to work on but haven’t gotten to yet, so the journey continues!

    This does mean I’ve been pushing myself to exhaustion like every single weekday though. In March I was able to get a lot of work done over the weekends, but this month I lost two whole weekends to severe migraine episodes. Its really not fun. And whenever I have these multi-day long episodes, my mental state suffers. I tend to get depressed and lose all motivation, as you might expect when one’s head feels like it wants to explode for several days straight. 

    The first one I think was triggered by my brother coming home from college: I stayed upright too long having a conversation with him over breakfast. It wasn’t particularly long. Probably closer to an hour instead of my normal 30 minute routine. Problem was I wasn’t tracking time. I had to excuse myself because I felt it coming on, and then did my stream, and then… well, it just got worse and didn’t clear up until taking the migraine meds. 

    It’s a whole story with the meds too. The doctor recommended something and gave samples and they worked pretty well. But insurance said no, so I got some generic something else instead. It was also kind of a nightmare to navigate this stuff within our basically rural healthcare system. It took 3 months from my initial visit to when I got my meds. So I’ve been kind of stingy with them and not wanting to have to deal with refills. Even when I do take these generic ones, it feels like they take several hours to kick in, and it only stifles the sharpness of the migraine – a general malaise still lingers. But well, that’s the monkey paw that gives me the time and freedom to pursue music like this. So it goes.

    Streaming and Socializing

    Leading up to the launch of this streaming phase at the start of this year, I intentionally avoided social media. I’m very much an introvert, perfectly happy to be alone in my room and not be bothered by anyone. In fact, I stopped looking at most social media because seeing normal people doing normal people things was kind of aggravating. It’s frustrating to have your limitations be constantly thrown in your face while everyone goes about taking their normal lives for granted. It feels like most posts are either boasting, complaining, or advertising. Ugh, yeah, I can live without that. 

    But the game of being a musician is to connect with people, and given my situation, social media is the way that is relevant and accessible to me. It’s been a struggle to find a balance between shameless self promotion and genuine networking. This month I leaned into shameless self promotion, and while it worked on YouTube, I haven’t seen similar results on TikTok or BlueSky. The strategy of screaming into the void didn’t really produce satisfactory results, and I’m not really sure what to try next. I’m thinking I may just pivot away from those two platforms. 

    The one interesting thing that came from BlueSky was finding a new streamer who does use it effectively and joining her community. It’s a strange feeling for me though, like, watching her stream she proudly admits that most people in chat are also other streamers. I guess networking is essentially quid pro quo, but I’m not convinced that that’s a winning strategy for me. It reminds me of that thing I talked about last month where musicians congregate just to try mooch off of each other’s audience. 

    Then again, it worked on me, and I do genuinely enjoy watching her and her friends play games. Sometimes you do just need the introduction. At the same time, there’s that overhanging feeling of reciprocity. It’s like an extremely inefficient method of “buying” views with time instead of cash. But having that social validation of 20+ people watching your stream does help attract people and keep them around. Then again, if all those people are all streamers who are only there to try to get your attention and steal your audience, is that really a good community? 

    The question then returns to, what am I trying to accomplish? Who am I singing for? What’s the point of my project here? I want to find people who genuinely enjoy my musical performance. I want people to find me fun and inspiring. Kind of. I actually… am at odds with myself. I don’t really care about being heard. In fact, I kind of prefer singing alone in my room with no one to witness it. But also, that drive to be a productive member of society is so deeply ingrained that it’s hard to ignore. It just feels better to be exhausted after a day of “performing” than to constantly have to find new anime to watch to waste away the days. 

    Another part of the idea was that if I ever needed to work, I’d want to be a musician, and the best time to lay the groundwork for that is before I need to turn it into a profitable venture. So part of this is motivated by fear: I’m currently on disability insurance and being supported by my family, but there’s no guarantee that both of those resources will be there forever. If either of those things fall away, it will be tough times for me. So like the proverbial ant, I feel like I should prepare for whenever winter comes.

    Finally, I’ve had the thought for a long time, but wanted to definitively prove that there is a relevant non-traditional path to becoming a professional musician. A professional is someone who gets paid to do whatever they do. I see a lot of musicians who would like to be paid to play music, and I myself would like to be paid to play music, so I’m trying to figure out what it takes to make that happen. So far, the playing music part is fine, it’s all the work to find people willing to pay you to do it that’s the challenge. 

    Right now I’m struggling to find people willing to listen to me play music for free, so first things first. It was clear from the beginning that it’s not enough to just play music. It does seem to help quite a bit if the music you make is actually good though. These days the competition for attention is vast, and when it comes to music, people can opt to listen to their favorite songs at the touch of a button at any moment instead of listening to your crappy cover. So there’s a lot of not-music work that needs to be done to turn a hobby into a business. 

    Even though I have basically all the time in the world to devote to this project, my mental and physical energies are limited. I’m thinking I might bite the bullet and pivot back into Meta platforms. I hear the ukulele community on Facebook and Instagram are pretty robust. As cool as vTubers and hungry streamers on BlueSky are, I’m starting to think that it might not be a good use of my time. I’ll probably keep my account open and post occasional updates, but I think I’m deciding that it’s maybe not the platform for me. Also I still can’t stand TikTok so that’s an easy one to drop too. 

    But Father… I want to sing~

     At the moment I don’t care that much about what I’m singing in particular, as long as I’m singing. The idea is that I’m in the process of building up my vocal muscles so that I can sing well in a variety of styles. I think of it like running for exercise: it doesn’t matter as much where you run, as long as you do it regularly. To that end, I’ve been learning anything and everything that gets shouted out or comes to mind. There are definitely some songs and styles that I prefer over others, but I’m able to find the merit in almost every piece that comes my way. 

    My brother came back from Japan with a Miku Stomp, and I needed to learn the right notes to sing for this, so I had to do it.

    A decent chunk of time this month went into learning “Not Safe For Work” (NSFW) songs for a NSFW day, which were filled with foul language reference sex, drugs, and violence. Honestly it was a lot of fun. But also, I don’t want to be known only for that. And it can be kind of embarrassing when someone jumps into the stream for the first time in the middle of an incredibly raunchy song… which somehow happens a lot. Could be an irony attractor. 

    But if it’s what people want, then it’s what I’ll sing. I think most artists have this issue of wondering if they should do what they want, or give the audience what they want. The best art seems to balance both, and present something wanted in an interesting or unexpected way. Once a level of success if earned 

    Somewhere Over the Rainbow is a perfect example of a song I’m putting a decent amount of effort into learning to sing well because it’s a popular tune for ukulele. Left on my own it’s really not something I would sing for fun, but if people want to hear it, I want to be able to sing it well. Maybe someday I’ll care more about what I’m singing in particular, but for now everything is practice. There are many lessons to be learned.

  • Marching on into the night

    The third month of streaming has been another one full of experiments and lessons. There’s been several adjustments to the approach across platforms, with varying levels of success. The big wins this month were reaching 99 100! subscribers on YouTube, qualifying for “affiliate” status on Twitch, and building up a decent library of cover song playlists:

    Here’s a link to the full spread of playlists: https://www.youtube.com/@IsekaiUkulele/playlists

    80s is mostly the cure and the smiths, the 90s has a bunch of pop and alt, the 00s and Emo set has a bunch of overlap, and the modern pop set (2020s+) featured above has been filled out.

    I had talked about the idea of cutting up my streams into individual songs last month’s review, and this month I did it! And whoa, it was a task. I kind of burned myself out in the first two weeks, and then spent the latter two Saturdays not doing any “work” at all because its really not my favorite thing to do.

    I like making music. I don’t like making content. But, I do like people hearing my music. And making content is how new people come to hear my music.

    Streaming alone is basically like busking on a corner, except in the online world the foot traffic is entirely engrossed in their own bubbles and you need to be a certain size before the algorithms start organically recommending you. My channel is far from that size, so the random people who drop in is very limited. You don’t get that big without extra work.

    Networking is another effective way to gain viewers, but I’m still figuring out how to approach this in a way that works for me. More on this later.

    So far, YouTube Shorts have been my biggest draw, and I think that is because YouTube is trying hard to push Shorts to compete with other the other short form content platforms that are the flavor of the times. I’ve had several people pop into the live stream saying “I saw your short!” and they stuck around for a while.

    The idea of creating playlists seems to have paid off as well. After finding the button that says “do not notify subscribers” buried in the advanced settings section, I added about 150 songs chopped out of my streams. This is part of a “long tail” strategy where I’m hoping that they’ll pop up whenever people might want to hear an ukulele version of whatever song I might have played. And I’ve been getting some random comments and views on certain ones.

    While shorts seem to lose steam after about a week, I’m expecting these full song videos to continue being useful until I rerecord them when I can sing better. Now that I’ve got a decent library to be searched, I’m planning to start releasing them daily with the notification to my subscribers instead of dumping them all as soon as I finish editing them.

    Time to complain

    Let me tell you why I don’t like making content. Using a computer while in bed is hard, and it runs the risk of triggering my migraine episodes. It’s super frustrating to be so limited in doing basic tasks like using a mouse and keyboard, and then to run the risk of several days of intense pain on top of it makes it hard to motivate myself to do this work.

    Another issue is the time it takes to review my streams to cut out the songs. More often than not I want to review the entire song to make sure I didn’t mess up horribly (though sometimes I let that slide anyway), so every video takes some multiple of the song length to prepare. Whenever I watch myself its always through a lens of self-critique, so I tend to pick out all the negative aspects of my performance (because I want to improve, of course). But this makes the entire exercise rather disheartening. I rarely think “Wow! That was a great take! I can’t wait to share this!” and instead think “Well… that’s… good enough to share… I guess…” So its like, a continual barrage of me facing my flaws, and knowing I can’t even catch everything bad at my current skill level. Let’s go~

    A third issue is that video editing software is clearly designed for people sitting at a desk. Using keyboard shortcuts and having precise mouse control makes the workflow so much easier. I find myself unconsciously sitting up to do some things just because it feels that much easier and comfortable. Alas. When there is a will there is a way: I can get it if I really want, I just must try, try and try, try and try!

    In one small win, I did find a software that kind of helps to cut down the stream length and pull out the songs a little bit easier. It’s not designed specifically for this task, but it still helps. And with a bit of discipline, I can change my streams to work better with it.

    The secret weapon is called “Recut” and its a tool to remove silence from videos. You may have seen videos where there’s these little micro-skips in the talking heads, but it still sounds pretty natural. That’s what this program does, and its mostly designed for podcasters and video-essayists, but with a little attention I can place silence before and after my songs and it can help cut out the non-musical sections.

    So instead of scrubbing through 3 hours of a stream, I can cut out the talking and sort through the 1.5-2 hours of actual music content. The program also spits it out as a new clip, so I can also use that to make the vertical format shorts. A little editing up front eases the difficulty of chopping on the back end.

    I approached streaming as a “part-time” endeavor, aiming to devote about 20 hours a week to the task. Since I stream for 3 hours every weekday, that’s 15 hours there already. I also do a session on Sundays to learn new songs by playing along with recorded music that I can’t play out loud on stream.

    And actually, for the past week I’ve been trying to add an extra hour of practice before the stream. I realized I needed more time to hone specific musical skills that I don’t think are particularly amenable to practicing on stage. It’s pushing my physical abilities to the limit, but I’m hopeful that I will adapt.

    There’s just so much music I want to learn, and skills that I need to acquire. I want more practice playing in front of people, which is what the streaming is about. But I also need to keep honing my abilities so the quality of my performance also improves.

    When it comes to music, I’ll play all day. I thoroughly enjoy all the practice and performance. However, adding in this push to make content has ballooned the amount of time spent on this project. For the first two weeks of March, I spent at least an extra 20 hours on the content creation. Basically my entire weekends were spent editing and cutting and uploading and naming files.

    It was too much. I did nothing for the second two weekends because… ugh. And then I felt bad that I’m procrastinating the work, like I should be doing this thing that I don’t want to do. I don’t like this feeling at all. But then, its also not annoying enough to actually get me to do the work. So it just hangs over me. Lol.

    Perspective is difficult

    I should keep the output in perspective: if I released one video per day, the 150 videos would have basically been 5 months of content. But because I wanted to build my library I just pushed it all out at the same time. I decided to keep the Shorts releasing at 1 per day, so I actually do have a nice pool to choose from for the next several months. And if I keep doing the work that pool will just keep growing.

    After getting over 1k views on a couple Shorts, its easy to feel down about getting a mere couple hundred on others. But like, that’s 100 people who watched my little clip. That’s a win! I haven’t really cracked the secret to getting high views on every post yet, but I’m starting to get less completely surprised by the performance of certain Shorts. So far it seems like posting the most popular songs on Friday seems to be the best strategy. That’s basically the best idea I have about how to make a good performing Short.

    It’s also difficult to keep comparisons to other channels in check. Its not uncommon for me to see channels with like 2,000 subs and think what? why? how? I don’t… I don’t get it at all. But then, the path to get there is entirely obscured, right? How long they took to get there, how much work they put in, what worked for them and their audience in particular… it’s all hidden by the march of time. And I bet they look at those with 20,000 subs in just as much awe.

    Will I ever get there? Well, I’m sure I can if I stick with it. How long will it take to “get there”? Where am I even trying to go?

    I have to constantly remind myself: its not how big your numbers are that matters. It’s who is behind those numbers. Every view from a real person is someone taking their time out of their life to listen to me play. That’s what its all about. If I can’t connect with one person, why would I presume I could connect with 1,000?

    Who you know is everything

    I’m a classic introvert, happy to sing to my four bedroom walls and more bothered by attention than elated. However, music is a social activity. Business is a social activity. Being human is a social activity.

    Almost all metrics of “success” are defined by the impact one has on those around them.

    Money flows to things that positively impacts lives. Admiration is earned by those who excel in leading others. Music is great when it is loved by those who hear it.

    To be a great musician is to play the right music at the right time for the right people. My goal is to be a musician. So it follows that I need to learn the right songs, find the right people, and play it at the right times. You can’t please everyone. I want to find the people who I can please, and not worry about the rest.

    I often feel my musical taste is a little eclectic, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who likes what I do. It’s been a challenge to find those others who like what I like. I still don’t know what the right music for me to play is. I don’t know when or where to play it. But, it wouldn’t be much of a journey if I had all the answers from the start.

    There’s a culture on Twitch that I’m not sure I entirely vibe with. There are the streamers who have “made it” and have huge followings with hundreds of loyal viewers throwing seemingly ludicrous amounts of money at them. There are those who are moderately successful, that regularly draw 30-100ish viewers and seem to be relatively well compensated for their efforts.

    And then there’s the rest of us, struggling to reach 10 viewers and having a really good day whenever we get raided by a larger streamer. “Raids” are when a streamer signs off and sends their viewers to another channel. The channel that gets raided sees a message with the number of viewers added to the chat.

    The bigger fish seem to understand how it was to be small and are tolerant of raids with small numbers. The raid announces that you are a streamer, and are choosing to support the recipient of your audience. It’s a strange quid-pro-quo situation. Raiding a big streamer is a way to interact with their larger audience, and to potentially gain follows back (for having the good taste to raid a beloved streamer).

    It seems kind of shallow and shameless to me. I don’t like it, but maybe I just need to get over myself. But yeah, I get it. It’s a digital version of the kind of networking we used to do in live shows back when I played in the indie rock scene. I’ll come to your show if you come to mine. Let’s play a show together so our audiences can mix and mingle. Of course, there were many nights were people just show up for their band and left as soon as their friends finished playing. Never really liked it back then either, but that is the game.

    I mentioned this at the start, after a raid from a mid-sized streamer I’ve been following, my channel finally met the requirements to be a Twitch affiliate. If I accept the promotion, I’ll be able to receive subs, do things with channel points, and upload my own custom emotes.

    Being an affiliate also means that you have to run ads on your channel. If you choose not to run ads, new users and non-subscribers will need to watch a “preroll” of ads before entering your stream. Or you can run adds every hour and that will be skipped. Another thing is that Twitch keeps half the value of all subscriptions until you reach a certain threshold. I’m not sure how the compensation for discounted subs works, but I’m still processing my feelings about fully buying into the ecosystem.

    If billionaires are a blight on society, shouldn’t we boycott their products? If I stay at my level my channel may suffer, but I could keep leeching off of their infrastructure… is leeching better than a boycott? Steal from the rich and give back to the poor…

    I’m not particularly eager to monetize yet anyway, but that could just be a cop-out. Networking is hard for me. I don’t like meeting new people because it takes time and effort and energy to figure out the filters I need to apply to have a comfortable conversation. I’m the type who likes to have an idea of what the answer will be before I ask a question. Its hard to do that with someone you just met, especially online.

    I tried a couple different strategies on BlueSky this month, none of which produced the outcomes I was hoping for. I started with an approach of “do what feels right” and held that course for about two months. It was ok, but I never used Twitter/X and don’t have the instinct for how the platform works. I then changed it up to try focusing a bit more on myself and my views on things. I shared a bit of my backstory and tried to start conversations in new spaces. Alas, not very satisfying results with that either.

    For the next month, I’m going to try a new strategy I’ve dubbed “scream into the void” in which I repurpose my YT Shorts and just post one every day. I’m also going to do this on Tik Tok because I objectively hate that platform, but they say its good for musicians so whatever. I found a service on which I can front-load posts about a week out on both for free, so I’m just gonna spend a little time each weekend doing that and let it rip.

    Putting in the care to try craft interesting conversations and coming up empty handed wasn’t fun, so I’ll try the opposite. Musicians should let the music do the talking anyway, right? My “be human” approach failed, so let’s see how a month of “post like a bot” goes.

    Where do we go from here?

    I caught a bug to start writing some original music. The idea was there from the start, back when I thought I wanted to be an instrumentalist. But then I got sidetracked by singing, and there was so much to learn in that space that it consumed most of my attention.

    Now I’m in a spot where I’m basically trying to build up my vocal muscles. I’ve only been singing with real guidance for about a year, and my teacher says that if I want to get to the more nuanced stuff, I really need to develop my vocal chords more first. That’s part of the motivation behind the 3, and now 4 hours of daily practice. I’m training myself how I imagine a professional musician would, focusing most on where I need the most improvement: singing and stage presence.

    Starting the channel and posting covers was always supposed to be a means to an end, the end being the production of original music. I have seen too many musicians make posts saying “I just spent the last <far too long> making this album, now how do I get people to listen to it?” Well, my answer is to start gathering those ears well before the album is even a glimmer in your eye.

    The hope is that by the time I’ve taken my original music as far as I can and am ready to publish it, I’ll also have found the audience to appreciate it. I think now more than ever, the music doesn’t matter as much as the personal connection to it. I hope that those who have been with me from the start, who are reading this post now, will find whatever I make exciting because you have been part of the journey.

    You can summon your favorite song with a few simple keystrokes. You can ask an AI to generate whatever kind of song in any genre with any lyrics you like. But you can only hear what this humble ukulele player thinks is worth devoting his life to play if you stay connected. I hope you stay tuned, and hope the adventure is worth it for you too.

  • It’s the end of the month as we know it

    Well, a month it has certainly been! Time for another monthly review. I lost week because of medical travel, and am still feeling the effects of it. But I’m slowly getting back on track and back into the groove. While I was away I got a couple emo songs stuck in my head, and so when I got back the first thing I did was play them! It feels good to be back home in my bed to belt away with no reservations. Such fun!

    So, one week and $20,000 of imaging later, the doctors found nothing to move forward on. I still need to have it reviewed by the specialist who initiated the imaging request, but the whole idea was that we would find a target for surgery and doctors who oversaw the imaging would be then be able to recommend an operation. But alas, no such target was found and so we go back to the drawing board.

    Since it seems like I’ll be this way for the foreseeable future, I guess I can double down on plans for this project. Growth of the YouTube channel has been slow and steady, and I’m starting to think its mainly because I’ve been making more Shorts content which I guess its what’s being pushed by the platform. Two of my shorts last month actually got over 1000 views, which is not a lot compared to big channels, but for me it kind of blows my mind that so many people viewed one of my little clips.

    It took a moment of reflection to change up my process to make the vertical format video for shorts, but a little workflow improvement has made a big difference. Before I was taking recordings of my streams and then chopping them up into chunks, and then resizing each clip into the vertical format. Then I realized I could just convert the whole stream into vertical format once, and then chop that already resized video up into the shorts. It may seem minor, but significantly reducing the amount of mouse and keyboard time spent on resizing was a major win.

    As it looks like I’ll need to be doubling down on this virtual performer thing instead of preparing to do live shows in real life like I was hoping to do if I could get better, the idea crossed my mind to chop up my streams into videos of individual songs so that people interested in a specific ukulele cover will be able to find it and pull it up. Until now I’ve been treating my streams as sort of live events: be there or miss out! I have not typically tracked what songs I’ve been playing or going back to add time stamps or anything so the streams are all kind of just big blobs of music being sent into the void.

    But what if I take those blobs and chop them into individual songs to create a library of long-tail search terms? Could be good. Only thing is I’m playing from a pool of about 600 songs, 100 which I’ve added since the start of the year. I know this because I updated my Streamer Song List, which is a service that lets people request songs using chat commands:

    https://www.streamersonglist.com/t/isekaiukulele/songs

    It only works on Twitch, and for now my primary platform has been YouTube so it’s been of limited overall value. But for me its a handy database of all the songs I could play if requested. Actually its not quite all of them. It’s really just the charts I’ve saved off of Ultimate Guitar. There’s a handful of songs I play from Dr. Uke charts, or my jazz stuff that comes straight out of fake books. Almost all of my instrumentals also aren’t really included either. But overall those are pretty minor parts of my repertoire.

    My current dilemma is that I’m not sure about flooding my subscribers feeds with hundreds of videos. At least with Shorts they’re kind of out of the way and easily ignored, but if I suddenly start publishing multiple videos every day…. well, I would be annoyed if someone I subscribed to started doing that. My personal approach is to treat every subscriber like a human, and so I’m hesitant to change things up so dramatically. I feel like my approach has been to publish a low volume of high quality videos, while the streams and shorts being more of average content.

    So I’m thinking of creating a second channel specifically for the purpose of posting ukulele covers. It might be an interesting A/B test to see which strategy works better. But also, its extra work to have to manage a second channel. It could be also be just my own personal peeve and I am just thinking too much.

    Fate, up against your will

    In the weeks leading up to my medical travel, a rather curious thing happened. Two different people with absolutely no connection from two very different walks of life happened to both give me different books by Dr. Joe Dispenza. So far I have only read through “You are the Placebo” but “Becoming Supernatural” is next on my list. Actually the first person also gave me a copy of Eckart Tolle’s “The Power of Now” that I’m just finishing up before diving into the next Dr. Joe title. I had read Tolle before, but its been an interesting experience revisiting it now with a new perspective.

    In a previous mindset, I would have thought of it as some divine indication that there would be ideas worth adopting within. These days though, I am much more cynical and tend to view it as an interesting coincidence more than some form of providence. Anyone who promises a miracle is trying to sell you something.

    One might think that in my current situation where modern medicine has basically failed to address my issues that I would be more open to exploring alternative paths to healing. And in truth I am – I have given faith healers their fair chance at fixing me as well. I still read the book. But my current worldview is rather frustrated by the underlying theme of a consciousness-first reality.

    The idea that the primordial substance of reality is “consciousness” is an ancient idea. The idea that you, as a spark of divinity, are responsible for your situation in life because of how you think is at the core of many new age thought patterns. If only you could change what you believe, you could change your entire experience. With but a little faith you could move mountains!

    I see a kernel of truth in that mindset. I vehemently believe that you get what you believe. If you believe that Jesus will answer your prayers, when you pray you will hear Jesus. At least, what you think is the voice of Jesus talking to you. You need to believe in miracles to experience a miracle. Otherwise, it will just be a happy coincidence.

    I have no problem with other people believing whatever they want to believe. If it makes you happy, by all means harm none and do what you will. But personally, I have a distaste for the idea that I consciously or unconsciously asked for the challenges I face for the sake of mental or spiritual growth.

    The truth is that a certain perspective of history does validate the idea that you “ask” for every experience you receive, no matter how random. You were “asking” to be hit by car by virtue of crossing the road. The actions you chose literally opened up the possibility of the future you experienced. Was it your “fault”? The faith healers would say yes, it was your soul yearning for change and creating this opportunity to change your ways.

    So, did I ask to be in this state? Well, I certainly distinctly remember a point in my life where I wished that I wouldn’t have to work and could just watch anime and play video games and make music to my hearts content all day every day. But I no longer believe in the benevolent hand of divinity, either in the form of an internal spiritual compass or some external guide. I think that life happens, and our challenge to deal with our situations in whatever ways we think are best. If my situation is not a happy accident, then I would have some very choice words to offer my guardian angel.

    I prefer to think of the world as purely physical, a world of cause and effect. Modern advances in quantum physics have spawned ridiculous conceptions of “quantum consciousness,” but indeterminism is not contrary to an ordered universe. It’s well known that weather effects are inherently chaotic and unpredictable. Yet while the weather at any particular point is incredibly hard to predict, we are able to understand the larger weather patterns in great detail.

    The idea that it’s human observation that collapses the wave function is a gross misinterpretation of the Copenhagen perspective and crumbles under the slightest scrutiny. But if you want to believe, when someone like Dr. Joe suggests its how you can access the quantum field of infinite energy, then surely you believe.

    Instead of Dispenza or Tolle, I would recommend the thinking of Alan Watts. There’s been a wierd trend to create AI generated lectures of his, or remix his talks over chillstep beats, but the original works still hold muster:

    What does this have to do with this musical project? Two things: first, one cannot help but be an expression of your beliefs. Whether or not you are actively proselytizing, any time you get in front of a crowd and say “look at me” you are inviting inspection of your way of life. We are social creatures that copy what we see, even if we do not see the full picture. I think it is important to have a clear internal understanding of what you are representing whenever asking for someone’s attention. It’s better to be consciously aware of what you are projecting.

    I don’t think that I want to start singing protest songs anytime soon, but I do appreciate the challenge to examine my current philosophical stance and incorporate it further into my artistic pursuit. These books have helped me to re-evaluate my approach to art.

    Its very difficult to be completely satisfied with the current situation while also yearning for an improvement in the position. Of course I want more subscribers, that’s the game. But also, it’s already very cool that I’m getting as much attention as I am. The yearning for more is mere vanity. I can scheme and try to “do better” but in truth just playing for myself alone in my room is enough to celebrate. I feel lucky that I can enjoy playing at all. The middle path is certainly a challenging pursuit.

    The second thing is that I’m getting a sneaking suspicion that I may actually want to be a teacher. Just like with the singing, it really never entered my mind as a specific thing to pursue. But also with like with the singing, it seems like something that I’m naturally drawn toward. I will gladly explain what I’m doing and why I do it to anyone who will listen. And I admit its actually kind of fun. Whether it turns out to be teaching musical things, or having philosophical discussions, I’m starting to get that similar feeling that I may wind up pursuing these things whether or not “I” think I want to.

    Perhaps there actually are forces out there in the universe pushing me toward a certain future. Who knows?

  • Let there be art!

    After a year of existence, I finally got a proper logo and branding for this project! Big shout out to SugarDogStudios for working with me to come up with the design. I was stubbornly resisting using AI and hoped to find a local artist that I could rely on, and she really came through! I need to do a little work to integrate it here on the site, but I’m super happy to finally have proper art for all my social channels.

    Generic Isekai Protag-kun was the vibe I asked for

    Plus extra applause for Cheesecakes from the Uke Tribe Discord for making and sending the awesome bed sign over for me that became the basis of the logo! She’s the one who made those little ukulele’s I put on the bed as decor, and if you tune in from now on there’s a cool new sign to keep them company. Not sure if you can tell from the videos, but they’re hand-sewn ornaments made of felt. I think the original idea was to go on a Christmas tree or something, but they just happened to be a perfect accent for my little stream.

    Speaking of streams, I managed to make through the month without calling in sick, which was honestly the main goal. I’ve talked a lot about planning here, and the thing to do once you’ve made a plan is to execute it and see how accurate reality is against your projections. I came up with a schedule that I thought I could keep, and I was able to keep it! Being satisfied with that means I don’t need to fret as much over things like follower counts. I don’t know enough to make those proper goals, so any growth is basically bonus points.

    And there have been many bonus points! I somehow gained as many new Youtube subscribers in this month as I did in all of last year. I think a major part of it was that big guide to noodling aka improvisation on ukulele that I created. That seemed to be the most impactful activity. I have been trying to keep up with doing Youtube Shorts, and of course the daily streams too though, so it’s kind of hard to say exactly what the source of new subscribers is.

    But the number did shoot up after sharing that tutorial. Because of that I’m working on another one, but it’s also going to be on a rather difficult “intermediate” level skill that I’m still far from mastering, so, that’s taking some time to write. Its fun to see number go up, but also being able to reach more people more effectively with my music is kind of the goal.

    Twitch Happens

    Twitch growth has been slow but steady – started from 0 and now at 16 followers! I’m pretty sure at least half of those are real people who have actually talked to me, but it’s not quite the same as when I basically knew who over half of my Youtube subscribers were.

    Twitch strikes me as a much more social activity than I had initially anticipated. My idea was that if I am ever able to be upright again for extended periods of time, that I want to gain experience performing so that I could hold my own on stage at various venues around me, like restaurants or bars.

    But streaming on Twitch is much more interactive: chat is there to, well, chat. It feels sort of natural to latch on to whoever decides to say anything because otherwise… you don’t really know if anyone is actually there. At least, I’m not able to easily monitor my viewer counts given my current setup.

    I’m a little jealous of all the fancy overlays and chat commands and emotes that the bigger streamers have, but we’ll see. I have some medical stuff coming up this month that will tell me whether I should hold hope about getting better, or double down on the whole Twitch thing. I’d kind of rather not be another minion of big Bezos, but it kind of is the place to be. As if Alphabet tube is any better.

    There’s also the aspect of getting to know other streamers. Raids, where chat is forwarded to a new streamer when one is about to end theirs, is a whole thing. I’ve been watching more streamers recently to get a better idea of how it works, and there’s a sort of “pay it forward” mentality. People forward their chats to people they know. So like, hanging out in chat and getting to know streamers seems to be something worth doing. I honestly don’t know what button to push yet to do a raid, but also haven’t had the audience to make it worth doing either.

    “Hanging out” to get to know people is not a thing I do naturally for fun either. Part of it was that seeing normal people made me bitter so I learned to be ok with being alone in my room. Don’t mind me, I’ll just be playing uke and watching anime. But also I guess I’m a classic introvert in that it takes energy for me to be around people. I can’t help trying to create mental models of everyone I encounter to predict their behavior and act appropriately to create the outcomes I desire. Sound exhausting? Yeah, it kind of is.

    It’s the same game with the videos, with the streams, with the social media posts… and honestly I’d just rather not. But if there is hope that I can get better, then I want to lay a foundation for to hit the ground running. And if there’s no hope that I can get better, then I also want to lay a foundation for success. So I guess I really rather would. Ugh. Work is always going to be work. But this is something that I can do. And, actually, I do typically enjoy being in the company of like minded people, so I guess it’s just something I need to embrace.

    The other channel I’ve been working on developing is Blue Sky, but I don’t really get it. I made a tik tok account but I somehow have an innate distaste for that platform and don’t really get it either. Well, plenty on my plate for now.

    I’ll be doing some medical travel in the middle of this month, but otherwise, you should be able to find me playing live weekdays on Twitch and Youtube! Come say hi

  • Re:Streaming – Starting my social life over again in another world from zero. 

    1/1/26 marked my very first stream on Twitch! Here’s to starting a new venture from nothing. Up the 3 followers already! Luckily I don’t need to return-by-death to try something new. I think it’ll be an interesting experience to see how far I can get in a year.

    Last year I started the YouTube channel, and though getting new subs wasn’t really the main point, I managed to get 34 subscribers which I think is pretty neat. I also think it’s neat that I feel like I know a majority of those subscribers from the various uke places online that I’ve been hanging out in. It’s never about the numbers, but the people behind the screen. 

    There are two ways to get good: experience and prescience. You can learn by doing, or you can learn by those who came before you. Streaming is definitely a new experience, and I’m revising my thoughts about it rather quickly.

    I asked some experienced streamers some questions and they told me to just “do what I love” and said not treat it like a job. Well, I kind of feel like the stuff I love is not necessarily what is going to lead me to my goals. I love playing music and watching anime, and I can indulge in that entirely fine without being on stream. I get where they’re coming from, but I strongly feel that I need to treat this like a job to get what I want out of it. I need to show up consistently, and I need to do things I don’t necessarily enjoy to reach the outcomes I desire.

    Art is a conversation, and talking to people who are only interested in talking about themselves gets boring. Being a musician means guiding your audience to feel certain ways. And finding an audience when you have none means showing up with something worth paying attention to. I strongly believe that I need to meet my audience at least half way.

    Case and point, I spent a day playing some of my favorite goth and emo songs. I had a great time, but I it really didn’t feel like it was quite right. I’d wager that if I kept grinding at it I might eventually find people who would like this kind of music on ukulele. You can get it if you really want, but you must try, try and try, try and try. Is this what I want to try so hard for?

    I don’t think so. My current idea is more about treating streaming as a proxy for busking. But one thing I realized yesterday is that the people who watch streamers actually want to interact with the personalities. It’s not like playing music on a busy sidewalk where people are in transit from point a to b. It’s a conscious decision to watch someone else do something entertaining, with the chance to talk with them.

    I’ve been watching other popular Music streaming channels, and I was surprised to see that a large part of the stream is often dedicated to talking. Then during the music parts people like to spam chat with emotes and walls of texts. It’s not really about the music as much as the chance to be seen.

    Its a curious thing. I wouldn’t mind participating in that form of culture, but I fear that setting up the back end to make those kinds of things happen will be very difficult given my difficulties with using a computer. In an ideal world, I would find a friend who would be willing to moderate my stream and help me build that back end. Well, first I’d need to build up my chat to be something that needs moderation.

    Further, I was approaching streaming as a proxy for gaining experience to become a restaurant musician. You know, the kind that plays music in the background while people eat lunch or dinner. There’s typically not a lot of crowd work involved in that type of thing.

    So how do I balance my intentions with the prevailing interests of the platform? I’m not sure. I’m not sure if I want to be a “streamer” as much as I want to be a “musician.” I guess the distinction would be that former connects with the audience through the streaming experience, while the latter connects through music. Its a matter of what skills you hone.

    Right now I think streaming as a means to an end. It is a venue that I can perform at as a musician given my current situation. Next month I have a medical thing coming up that will hopefully definitively determine if there’s an operation that might return me to normal, or if I’m just going to be like this for the foreseeable future. If by some miracle I do get better, I’ll get to reset again and try figure out where to go from there.

  • Matter over Mind

    So I found out that you don’t need 50 subscribers to stream live on YouTube. I guess that’s just a requirement for the mobile app or something. I still have a lot of issues to work out, but it’s all sorts of these little details that I don’t consider until I run into it as a problem. Like, somehow my eyes keep creeping up out of the frame XD

    And this is a perfect example of the “matter over mind” perspective I’d like to share. I thought I couldn’t do a thing, and so I didn’t. But the truth was, materially, it was possible. I just had to look closer at the actual situation. What the mind thinks is real is irrelevant. What is actually real if the material world we exist in. Matter is the prime substance. 

    In a similar way, the biggest thing I learned last year was that what I thought I wanted to do is not what I actually wanted to do. The mind is an unreliable narrator. 

    I used to be very goal oriented. Decide what you want, make a plan to get it, execute and refine until successful. Having the rug pulled from under my feet with no reason or recourse made me reevaluate my perspective. Despite having a very mind-first approach, it could do nothing to remedy my situation. I believed then and still firmly believe now that when there’s a will there’s a way. But there was nothing I wanted enough to push through the extreme difficulty and pain to obtain. My will was insufficient. And so I came to believe instead that will is a function of the brain – that is, of matter. 

    Case in point: I told my body to play music every day, and that I wanted to do instrumentals. I fully intended to do so. But when I picked up the uke, the body kept singing. Instead of focusing on transcribing anisong, which I thought I wanted to do but rarely pursued because it was a super frustrating process due to not being able to use a computer effectively, I’d learn to sing some new song that got stuck in my head instead. When it was pointed out that I seemed to just be singing a lot, I agreed and eventually just accepted that maybe what I really wanted to do is sing. And I’m quite happy with the outcome so far.  

    So I’ve been trying on the perspective that the body will do whatever it wants to, and the best thing to do is adapt the mindset accordingly. There are ways in which you can encourage the body to do things, but ultimately the body controls the mind. You are your body, and the mind is a reflection of your physical state. Some may call it fate, or soul, but I am currently a hardline materialist. What is real is material, all the way down. There’s a whole practical line of reasoning behind this, see the works of Daniel Dennett, and Michael Graziano’s Attention Schema Theory of Consciousness if interested in learning more.

    Many can and do train the body to reflect the wishes of the mind. For example, I’ve met many who dedicated their lives to making money and have found great financial success. Whether or not that leads to a happy life or inner fulfillment is a different question. We do the best we can with all we got. 

    In the past, if the mind wanted more than what the body could handle I’d say work hard and you can get there. You can get it if you really want, but you must try, try and try, try and try. I still believe in this adage. But now I say, well, maybe change the mind to reflect where the body is. Am I sure I really want it? If I don’t have it, in reality, I must admit I didn’t want it enough to try, try and try until I got it. In truth,  the body actually wanted something else. 

    The path of a solo singer is very different from that of the solo instrumentalist. I started this blog with a vision for how to create a platform for an instrumentalist. Now I have to pivot. It’s a little strange because I don’t feel super mentally compelled to walk this path – no bolt of inspiration or “good idea” appeared that I just have to explore further. But here we are. 

    I thought I felt perfectly fine being a recluse and not singing for anyone else. I just find myself at the foot of this mountain and it feels like the body wants to climb it. So the new theme for this year is how to find an audience for the aspiring singer-strummer. I know there are many people out there who also want to have their singing be heard, so perhaps I can still light a path to follow. 

  • Chapter 1 – A hikki-neet turns on his camera

    So, I want to be a streamer… 

    A decade ago I graduated with an MBA and was working hard as a development coordinator raising millions of dollars for a nonprofit organization. Then I got horrifically sick.

    I became bedridden in near constant agony, eventually had to move back in with my parents, and had to totally let go of being a highly proficient productive member of society. I had a lot of time while staring at my ceiling for contemplation and self reflection. Thus I embraced being a hikki-NEET loser (and watched a ton of anime). My physical condition has improved significantly after some treatment, but I’m still effectively bedridden and prone to random bouts of severe migraines. 

    For the uninitiated: “Hikki” is short for “hikkikomori” which is roughly translated as “social recluse” aka one who stays in their room all day and never touches grass. Sort of like a reddit mod (which I (un?)ironically was for a bit). “NEET” stands for Not in Education, Employment, or Training. Basically no job and no prospects for one. I mean, I am disabled, and trying to do real work often results in excruciating pain. So, there’s that.

    Still, these are rather derogatory terms, which became normalized in isekai (“other world”) anime where the adventure starts after the pathetic main character dies in an accident and gets reincarnated into a fantasy land with cheat powers and gets the girl(s) and saves the world.

    One of the big questions they asked as we trained to be the business leaders of the next generation was: what would you do with FU money? That is, the amount of money in your bank account that you would say F U to anyone who asked you to do something you didn’t want to. 

    Funnily enough, my answer is that I would probably want to play music, and video games, and watch all the anime. Which is pretty close to what I do now. If I actually had money I’d have the family and security and even more musical toys, but eh, if I don’t look on the bright side it’s easy to fall into the pit of despair. Maybe one day those things will come.

    So I have been playing the music. Lots of it. Last year I launched this blog and a YouTube channel to document my progress. I can’t say it was a resounding success, but I definitely learned a lot along the way. It was a step back toward being “productive” which is such a deeply ingrained mindset that it’s hard to ignore. I don’t work and I still get to eat, but the fragility of the situation is hard to ignore. My parents won’t be around to take care of me forever. 

    If I had to work, I’d want to be a musician. If that’s the case, I should start preparing for that now. And so I blog. And make videos. And have decided to try be social and start streaming… right now I’m only playing in a few discord channels I’m comfortable in, but soon enough I’ll make the jump to Twitch. 

    I’d kind of rather just stay on Youtube, but apparently you need 50 subscribers to start streaming, and I didn’t manage to find that many in all of last year. But, I didn’t really care about that either. I feel like I would recognize the face (or ukulele!) of about half of my subscribers, and that feels better to me than a big number.  You get what you ask for.

    I started an account on bluesky today. Guess I’m really asking for it…

  • Not all who wander…

    On one hand:

    “If you fail to plan, plan to fail”

    on the other:

    “If you don’t care where you’re going, it doesn’t matter what road you take.”

    Upon reflection, it became very clear to me that I like practicing and performing music more than recording and blogging about the process. So, instead of doing weekly updates like last time, I just learned and performed a new set:

    These are all songs from 2020-2025 that I picked out of a massive playlist of “hits” so I could get a better sense of what modern popular music is like. I’ll post the setlist timestamps and charts at the end of this post (they’re also in the video description). When I say jpop here I actually mean anisong, but I didn’t want to go through that whole explanation lol.

    This performance isn’t as clean, but I had a much more enjoyable and stress-free experience. I’m sure the right way to grow the audience would be to break each song into its own video and drip feed them to the algorithms, but ugh. Editing and uploading and spamming feeds is not my idea of fun. For now, fun matters more.

    I also realized that I’ve put off telling my full story a little too long. I’ve added it to the About Me section on the About page, and will hopefully summarize it for the next video for the channel.

    In the time that I’ve just been chilling and doing my own thing, I’ve started to form a new idea of the direction to take this project, so I’ve started to write the plan out for that. Please look forward to it.

    I’ve also been making steady progress with the voice lessons and playing jazz. That’s been a lot of fun, but it also takes up a lot of brain power. Hopefully next up is a proper jazz set. These songs are taking a lot more effort to learn though.

    Oh, I also acquired a new Fanner electric ukulele, which I posted a bit about on the channel and did a mini blog of the experience over on the Ukulele Underground forums. I really like it, though I think I still prefer the Sparrow overall.

    Speaking of UU, I have been participating in their weekly song challenges which I mostly post as unlisted videos, though they all can be viewed on this public playlist of challenge songs.

    So, that’s the update for now. I’m hoping soon I’ll have my plan together and can start working toward that bigger goal again. And I hope you’ll join me on this journey as well.

    Charts for the Modern Pop set songs: https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/playl…

    Timestamps

    0:00 Intro

    1:03 Too Sweet by Hozier

    4:26 Blinding Lights by The Weeknd

    7:40 Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter

    11:09 Play with Fire by Nico Santos

    14:10 Birds of a Feather by Billie Eilish

    18:08 Lose Control by Teddy Swims

    22:33 A bar song (Tipsy) by Shaboozey

    25:36 I like the way you kiss me by Artemas

    28:13 Austin by Dasha

    30:46 August by Taylor Swift

    34:27 Die With a Smile by Bruno Mars (feat Lady Gaga)

    38:19 Stick Season by Noah Kahan

    41:31 I Had Some Help by Post Malone

    44:20 Mood by 24KGoldn

    47:05 Heat Waves by Glass Animals

    50:42 Good Luck Babe by Chappell Roan

    54:31 Ghost in the Machine by SZA

  • A Big One: Performance Set 2025 Run Through

    Here’s the end of the first chapter in this new story I’ve begun.

    It started with a semi-new year’s resolution challenge to put together this blog and start a YouTube channel. Mainly it was to see if I could handle making weekly posts and content, and it was mostly successful. I managed to make the videos every week, but I did miss writing this blog and sharing the content once. Here’s the whole journey so far in a playlist. I’ll go deeper into what I’m thinking will come next further down the post, but first I’d like to review a bit about the journey.

    So first of all, this whole endeavor was an experiment in doing the “thing,” you know, that thing that everyone tells you when you say you want to get better at making music:

    1. Practice a set of repertoire daily.
    2. Record yourself, critically review the recordings, and improve to the best of your ability.
    3. Get lessons from an expert.

    As I write I’m listening to my performance, and I’m mostly satisfied with the improvements. There’s a couple points where I drop the ball and space out on lyrics, but all in all I think it’s rather presentable. I think the progress is real. It was not always fun, and it was not always easy, but I surely think the overall quality of my performance has improved. The goal of the thing is to make better music after all, not to have fun or enjoyably pass the time. Don’t get me wrong, it was often fun and enjoyable, but it was definitely also work and stress.

    Of course, it’s hard to be objective about improvement when you’ve been so close to the work for so long, so I definitely appreciate any feedback or constructive criticism. I think I’m happy enough with this to try go out and play it in public… unless one of you out there convinces me I need another few months in the woodshed!

    There’s been a lot more distractions along the way than I expected. I’ve been participating in two different weekly song challenges (which have been mostly unlisted, but you should be able to see all my entries on this playlist here). Then there was the voice lessons and unitar study on the electric ukulele that added extra important musical things to focus on. And there’s been the whole challenge of learning to use my recording gear, both audio and video. It’s all progress, but not necessarily in the directions I had initially anticipated.

    Actually this whole adventure has been a bit different from how I had initially envisioned it. Originally I didn’t think I wanted to be a singer at all. My first intention with this project was to transcribe instrumental anime songs for uke, hence the “isekai” moniker. I still want to get back to that, and I fully intend to pursue that soon enough. Key word intend. We’ll have to see if the body follows the brain this time around.

    Actually the voice teacher just mentioned that it’s important to give the voice regular breaks, and instrumental sections or songs often actively serve this purpose. I had never thought of it that way, and mostly been just singing the instrumental lines… which I now know is not ideal thanks to some off-hand expert advice.

    So getting some instrumentals solid, and actually learning good instrumental breaks is more than just about being a well rounded musician. It’s not just showing off. It’s a practical way to extend your vocal stamina. I definitely hope to give instrumentals more attention in this next phase.

    Giving the throat breaks is also why you may notice I take little sips of water throughout the set this time. There’s a practical reason why singers do this, and it’s another new healthy habit I’m trying to pick up. I had always seen singers have water but never really knew why. And on my own I never really felt like I needed it. But then I rarely ever sang for over an hour at a time. Once the teacher gave me warm ups that flexed the muscles and pushed my range, it added an extra half hour of daily practice, and I started to actually feel the strain.

    Compared to the first set, things are clearly much more refined. The vocals have definitely improved. Instrumental breaks are ok when they do exist. I think the audio and video quality has slightly but noticeably improved. I don’t think its good enough to coast yet, but it’s a good step forward. And everything is memorized! So now I can play with my eyes closed instead of fixed on the charts lol.

    My voice is kind of shot by the end, but that’s also partly because I unexpectedly had to do my voice lesson on this day as well. I figured things like this happen in real life too, so might as well give it a go anyway – can’t always just change the date of your scheduled performance, right? So while I’m pretty sure I could do better, I just have to be ok with how it is. And really I am ok with it. For the most part. At the present moment.

    The path forward

    It became clear about halfway through this exercise that a single pass over these songs in this manner over these songs will not be sufficient to get them to where I want them to be. At the same time, I am… kind of sick of singing these same 21 songs over and over every day.

    So I’ve decided that this is just going to be the foundation of my setlist for this year. I’ve put together a second set list of songs to consider that I’m mostly familiar with but would still need to memorize and work out instrumental nuance. I’ve also identified another set of songs released after 2020 to try pretend like I’m hip and modern. In truth I’m a total pop poser. I’ve mentioned it before, but left to my own devices I like to listen to much more eclectic, typically darker music. Haven’t quite figured out how to play Skinny Puppy on uke… yet…

    I also have a fascination with jazz, and so I’d like to learn a set or two of standards, which hopefully will double as instrumental pieces. And as mentioned before, instrumentals were part of the goal from the start, so I’d like to have a set of those to pull from as well. So… that’s like another 80 songs to learn? Ah, such ambition!

    Well, I am disabled and bedridden with no remedy in sight, so I do have a lot of time to kill. It’d be nice if I could figure out a way to get to a beach or pool to start gaining experience properly playing in public, but that’ll depend on my family and my physical condition.

    While I can happily play ukulele all day, recording and blogging and posting is a much more difficult task for me to manage. Moving forward I’m thinking to really only focus on improving a single song per week to record. I’d also like to start doing more writing on anime and fingerstyle transcriptions, so I expect the more focused efforts should open up space for that. I’d like to start making and posting some tabs alongside learning the instrumentals as well, so. Hopefully. We’ll see.

    Hopefully you’ll continue enjoying this journey with me, or at the very least appreciate this record of the struggle I’m leaving!

  • Week 6 and 7 Updates

    Wow, well, I missed a few days due to headaches and that threw off my schedule, and then it seems a week has already passed so I missed an entire update. I guess its a reminder of why I’m disabled and doing this low stakes musical project instead of traditional work where people expect you to be reliable and consistent. I’ve been mostly consistent with my practice and recording videos at least, but this extra layer of writing and posting and sharing with the world is a bit more of a challenge.

    Anyway, here’s last weeks and this week’s videos. Looks like I even failed to make the week 6 video public, though I did share it with the Uke Tribe. Better late than never!

    Week 6 progress

    Blind Melon – No Rain

    Song Choice

    Its one of my favorite songs from the 90’s alt rock radio era, and I resonate with the lyrics pretty strongly. Even before becoming disabled, I always had a rather unique perspective on life that often left me feeling awkward and strange. And now my life really is pretty strange. Plus I really just want someone to always be there when I wake. Maybe some day.

    Instrumentation

    I know a lot of new players struggle with the E chord, and this song is a great one to practice it because the chorus is literally just switching between D and E. For me the major challenge was figuring out something interesting to do for the instrumental break, which I think I managed to simplify enough while keeping it interesting. It could always be better though.

    Vocals

    This song always makes me want to sing in a somewhat nasally voice, maybe in an imitation of the original? I’m not sure why or how I picked it up. I guess I like it because I keep doing it though. The original line is “read a book to stay awake” but I think replacing it with “isekai” is rather apt, and it does truly rip my life away sometimes.

    The Killers – When You Were Young

    Song Choice

    I’m quite fond of The Killers, and felt like this song was probably the most appropriate to include on this list. The runner up was “Human,” which I do know how to play, but mastering it seemed more difficult so I went for the easier route. I can also play Mr. Brightside and Somebody Told Me, but they seemed a little too much for the context. And Smile Like You Mean It didn’t really seem to fit either. I’m down with the theme of this one, and its fun to sing too. It’s the closest nod I could make to the 00’s post-punk revival bands I like that I could think to squeeze in.

    Instrumentation

    This one was a little tricky just because of the rhythm and chords for the key that I’m singing it in. It’s also a rather unconventional song structure, but it mostly makes sense so it wasn’t that bad. The descending chord break is something I still don’t have complete accuracy with yet either, but luckily I landed it for this take. I decided to sing the synth line that follows most of the verses because… I couldn’t think of a way to play it. I also didn’t like the way that the chart I was using came out of the bridge, so I just came up with something that made more sense to me for that. It may not be how the recording works, but they’ve got a whole band to work with.

    Vocals

    In some ways, a song like this that doesn’t have a standard verse and chorus structure is a little easier to memorize than something like Lovesong by the Cure where each verse is altered by exactly only two words. I also feel the voice lessons have helped immensely in the progress that I have made. I definitely got much further than if I had been doing this solely on my own.

    Crosby, Stills, and Nash – Love the one you’re with

    Song Choice

    This is another song I picked up from Uncle Wilmont down at Castaway Cafe. Like I mention in the video, I like the ambiguity of the lyrics. I also like how it suggests accepting the position you find yourself in, instead of wishing for something different, which is a very prescient message for someone disabled. Its really easy to get disheartened by focusing on what other people can do freely. No, I need to love what I got, because well, I do have a lot, and it could always be worse.

    Instrumentation

    That instrumental break was bugging me immensely for this entire month, but I think I figured out a decent enough way to play through it. Playing in a group that section really opens up to very fun solo time, but having to carry the rhythm through the break while playing solo is a real challenge. I’d like to have gotten even more intricate in the instrumentation, but alas, good enough has won out over perfect this time.

    Vocals

    Memorizing the order of verses was a little tricky on this one, as was getting good at hitting the initial pitch. Otherwise though, the main reason it took so long to get this one playable for me was that instrumental break. It’s a fun one to sing, and I’m pretty happy with the way I’ve sung it here.

    Recording

    It’s quiet for some reason, but since I didn’t write down my thoughts immediately after doing it, I honestly don’t remember what I was trying to do. So it goes.

    Performance

    Aside from the volume, I’m overall pretty happy with the progress. I made it through without dropping anything completely, and actually played the instrumental breaks. I’m feeling pretty good about the vocals, and even though I know I still have a long way to go, I think that the progress is sounding good.

    Week 7 progress

    Old Crow Medicine Show – Wagon Wheel

    Song Choice

    This is yet another Uncle Wilmont special! I’m told this is actually a rather popular song, but I had never heard it before. It’s a bit outside of my usual musical preferences too, but it is a fun one to play. It’s kind of a very nice warm up song. It’s straightforward enough to play and sing, and the message is relatable enough even if you don’t recognize the song.

    Instrumentation

    There’s a couple sections where the original song features banjo picking, which I try to emulate, but actually struggle with while using a pick. And I normally play this with a pick and skip the plucking. However, I have learned that I need to not change between fingerstyle and pickstyle while doing videos, so whatever I start with is what I need to stick with. There’s a button on my flyrig that I need to press to boost or cut the signal if I want to swap between styles. I have more control with fingerstyle, but my nails don’t last so I prefer using a pick for most of the rhythm heavy rock stuff I do.

    Actually, I tend to play all three of these songs pickstyle, but I guess I just wanted to be more accurate and not risk messing up, so I chose to use fingers for today’s recordings.

    Vocals

    This is a quintessential warm up or break song, one that doesn’t push the voice too much so I can recover and push on the harder ones. And this is another one I tend to try add a twang to just to mimic the original. I’m not sure how convincing I am it it to a native southerner, but I’m happy enough with my style at least.

    Neil Young – Harvest Moon

    Song Choice

    Have I mentioned how influential Uncle Wilmont has been on my song choice for this setlist? Well, the idea was to make a set of songs to play by a poolside bar, and Castaway Cafe is literally a poolside restaurant that’s facing the ocean so. The songs are essentially safe battle-tested bets. These selections are a combination of the songs I liked, and what the audience of people who could afford to eat at a restaurant liked to hear. I had never actively listened to Neil Young before this song, though I did recognize his name from the annals of rock and roll.

    Instrumentation

    This is actually a pretty fun one to play on uke. This is one of the few songs I’m actually using a chart written for uke that described how to play that iconic riff. It seems that the notes that ring out at the start of each verse are typically harmonics, which can be done on a guitar or bari uke, but harmonics are also a lot easier when you can look down at your instrument to see exactly where to pluck. Unfortunately laying flat like I do makes that rather difficult, so I typically don’t worry much about harmonics where possible.

    This was another song that kept getting pushed back because the instrumental break was important, and difficult for me to figure out what to do with. Also because I couldn’t really work on those sections during the whole unitar exercise. But I think it came together, and was mostly successful for this recording.

    Vocals

    I cracked a little here because I was trying to sing softly and in a high pitch, but overall the song is pretty straightforward. I like the change in tone during the bridge sections. I also like how the lyrics describe a kind of peculiar situation (“when we lovers”) which is a unique challenge to try and embody. Its an interesting challenge,

    The Platters – My Prayer

    Song Choice

    This one was actually inspired by Fallout 4. I mean, classic music is timeless. It shouldn’t matter where I heard of it, just that I liked it and wanted to play it. This was intentionally chosen to push my vocal abilities. I felt like I still didn’t quite nail it, but it’s coming a long. I kind of like this as an ending song because its somber but hopeful. And hey, if you are also a Fallout enjoyer, even better!

    Instrumentation

    I missed a chord. I had one job, and I blew it! So it goes. This one has been hard to memorize because of its somewhat unconventional structure. I think its the only song on this setlist that actually uses a diminished chord as well… and that’s the one I missed. Go figure. I want to play more jazz, but never felt my vocal chops were up to the task. Maybe now after the lessons settle in a bit I’ll think about trying out some proper standards soon.

    Vocals

    As mentioned earlier, this one was supposed to be a challenge and I didn’t quite nail it. Maybe a C grade. This was always kind of a stretch goal. But I do think I have improved quite a bit from the first attempt at the start of this journey. Hopefully. Actually I have yet to listen to my progress side by side with the original. Guess that will be part of next week’s adventure.

    Recording

    I boosted the level a bit on my uke and on the mixer, and I think it came out well. Last week I had tried recording some of my baritone uke and it came out super quiet, so I decided to double check my volume levels this time.

    Performance

    I think it sounds good. And I think it could sound better. But overall, I’m satisfied with the production this week. I’m a little bummed about missing last week, and subsequently being stretched a little thin by doing two performance reviews on the same day. Always better late than never though. Missed notes aside, the music is pretty okay, but the process of sharing needs work.