It’s funny how if I’m exhausted at the end of the stream I’ll completely forget what I did that day. I know I ended with a bunch of noodling, because I was already tired early and starting to feel a headache coming on.
A good portion of the stream was spent talking about BoyWithUke with a big fan of his, and that was pretty interesting. I’m only familiar with a handful of his songs, but I got to learn a bit more about his backstory and current status. Seems like he’s now a man with an electric guitar, but these things happen. If the music is good, it doesn’t matter how its made, right?
Well, I’m still musing over the latest book I read on the Political Economy of Music and chewing over the idea that most “successful” musicians are pawns of the powers that be. I’ve been resisting that – I don’t want to be an Amazon employee. I don’t want to work for YouTube, or Meta, or Patreon. In my misfortune, I’m lucky enough to be in a spot where I can make music without my daily bread on the line, so then, what do I want to do?
We sang a lot today. Uh… well, I guess that’s every day! There were a handful of new folk who joined in the chat, which was cool. They seemed to enjoy themselves, and I hope they come back. Also got a bit of a nudge from a viewer to do more Hawaiian songs, and as I’m gearing up to try play on the beach and in public here in the islands, its probably a good idea to start expanding my repertoire in that direction.
Yesterday it seems I got a copyright restriction in certain regions for playing audio from a random Spanish song from the 70’s. Apparently, my hilariously bad attempt at singing “Informer” sounded exactly enough like a pop song that our robot overlords flagged me for a wrist slap. What a world we live in.
Today we started off with more review of memorized songs from the performance set and a few more I would like to get on the list. Then I went through a few of my favorites from this latest batch, again with the intent of memorizing them eventually. I also started spending a little more time trying to noodle over progressions, because its been really bothering me a lot lately that I can’t free play neat sounding instrumental breaks on demand. Only way to get there is practice!
Someone commented that it was odd for me to sing a Blondie song, which I’m still not sure is actually weird or not. I dunno, I like the song so I’m gonna sing it. Toward the end of the day, I had a viewer with requests for songs I hadn’t heard before, and did the “interpret off the chart to make a version” thing. It was actually pretty fun, and they seemed to like it. Plus they led me to a bunch of new songs that either got added or will probably get added in the next batch!
In anime news, I finished watching “Farming Life In Another World” Season 2 this week, and it was good fun. The isekai slop I live for. What a great show.
I was working up to it all week: getting my hair cut, practicing on the tenor uke, going through songs I have memorized. I woke up a little later than I wanted to and almost made an excuse to not go, but I did it!
It took 12 minutes of upright time from preparing to leave to getting flat on the beach. I got really lucky with an open space under a tree very close to the beach entrance so I didn’t even have to open up the umbrella I brought. Not bad. I think next time I’ll jump into the water for a second before settling in to play.
It was really weird to play with no monitoring whatsoever, so I had no clue until afterward if the stream was working or how the sound was. It seems the data gets choppy and lags on occasion, but overall I think it sounds good. I was worried that the sound of the waves would be overwhelming, but the balance seems quite ok.
Playing from memory was mostly ok too. Good thing a lot of my memorized songs are relatively beach-friendly. It definitely feels strange to play certain songs out on the sand. Now I want to start memorizing more too though so I have more new songs to sing away from the charts.
If I place the camera in such a way that people can see me I won’t be able to monitor or respond to chat, which isn’t often a problem but I don’t know if that’s really a good plan. I can’t really think of a good way to capture me and the beach and watch chat in on a single phone. Even with ordering some of the gear I’m thinking of to support this kind of thing it might be tricky. I hope with an Ipad I’ll at least be able to check chat between songs? Maybe.
I had to cut the stream short because I forgot to bring sunscreen and I haven’t been outside in quite a long time. I was already feel the sun on my arms after an hour, and usually by the time you feel it its already too late. Luckily I don’t seemed to have gotten burned, but I definitely need to use the sunscreen. The number one rule of the beach is “Respect Nature”. The ocean is bigger than you and owes you nothing. The sun will get you, its just a matter of time.
The return trip home totaled 30 minutes of upright time. There was extra time for packing up, dusting off the sand, and showering afterwards. The additional activity and pushing my upright time to the limit did leave me on the verge of a headache for the rest of the day, so I rightfully chilled out and didn’t do much afterwards. I was glad I only spent an hour outside, though maybe the extra time between upright activity might work out a little better.
All in all I think its a good start. It might be some time before I’m able to do this without several days of recovery in between them, but I think I’ll be able to make it a habit.
Had a really bad headache today, so I wasn’t in the mood to sing at all. Played through some instrumental stuff and noodled around all day. IF that’s what you’re in to, here’s a bunch of it!
We started early today to accommodate the Ukulele Underground Open Mic, which is always a good time. I spent most of the day trying to figure out what I was going to play, and settled on Cicada Days by Will Wood and Heart of Glass by Blondie. It was surprisingly difficult to settle on songs that I thought would be good for that audience. In the end I think it went well though, and I was happy with the performance.
Also did a thing where a viewer had written some lyrics, and I just turned it into a song on stream. That was pretty fun, though it feels weird just making stuff up on the fly. They had turned the song into music with AI, which I still need to listen to, but I’m guessing its going to be an interesting experience to try cover an AI song. Never tried it before, but there’s a first for everything, eh?
Today we were practicing to go out to the beach, so I tried to do as many songs as I could with as little reference to the charts as possible. After having over 700 songs of options, cutting it down to the small pool of songs I know well enough to play without reading chords or lyrics felt super restricting.
I was still able to fill a good 2 hours, could probably have done a little more even, but my focus waned. Turns out I mostly remember songs I learned a long time ago, and ones that I put a lot of focus on in the recent past: a lot of Ka’au Crater Boys, some Iz, and several tracks from my 2025 performance set. Getting to the beach this week sounds complicated, but I’m still hopeful I can make it work. Maybe Sunday?
Today’s stream was a little unique, and nobody actually noticed why. One of my goals for this month is to get out to the beach and try to stream by the ocean, but I actually don’t want to take my nicest uke out to the beach for the first time, so instead of playing my normal baritone ukulele, today I’m playing a tenor. This means all the chords I’m used to play are all different shapes than usual, and I often default into the completely wrong chords. But, nobody seemed to notice, so its all good right?
After writing the monthly review, I decided it was time to overhaul the website entirely. I’m hopefully going to be writing reviews here about what I just did on the day’s stream, but man, this stream was yesterday and I totally forget what I did. What did I do? Watch and you can tell me XD
