Tag Archives: music video

If We Were Having Coffee on the 24th of December, 2022 #weekendcoffeeshare

Hello and Welcome! Come in quickly! It is cold and windy out there. We are at 6F/-14 C now, but I think we got pretty close to 0F/-18C. It is windy, but not terribly so. Enough that you want to stay in wind shadows! Brrrr. It was 55F/13C yesterday afternoon, and then, with a wind like I haven’t seen – I opened the door to prove to the dogs nobody was out there and closed it, me being afraid – it sounded like every tree in the woods were falling. I used a flashlight to look, and it looked like every tree was about to be ripped up… It didn’t last long, but the cold followed behind. Oh, where are we? Some of you may recognize the picture at the top as being from New Hampshire.

The storm wasn’t as bad here as some places. We are cold, but not in the extremes – 0 F in New Hampshire is winter. The rain yesterday was awful and there was a lot of flooding in our state, but we didn’t have the snow fall some places got. We lost power twice – once for less than a minute and once for less than an hour. I played piano by candle light during the longer outage 🙂. Fiyero sat beside me.

Oh, thinking of Fiyero and the piano, if you didn’t see my Thursday post, I always play piano for the dogs when I feed them (they expect it now!) and on Thursday I came up with a new arrangement for Greensleeves. I will put the video at the bottom – Don’t worry, I don’t sing!! lol Yes, I did three recordings in a week, including writing a song and doing this arrangement (you can see the Thursday’s post for the third).

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Greensleeves – New Video

Yesterday morning I was playing breakfast music for the dogs on the piano. Yes, I do that every day – Idina sometimes refuses to eat unless I play the piano for her! Anyway, I started to improvise an accompaniment for a waltz. I whistled along and discovered I was whistling Greensleeves! So I went up, turned on my music equipment and recorded it. OK, I had three meetings and wrote a report while I was recording (!) so it took several hours, but it was less than an hour on the keyboards from the idea to finished recording. i.e., no rehearsal, just picking a sound and recording.

(No singing, so no terrible voice in this one ;) )

Anyway, here it is.

(Click here if you don’t see the video below)

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New Song and Video – Silver Bells Played on the Radio

Part of my ride home from Cape Cod on Saturday was in the cold pouring rain. There were Christmas songs by indie rock bands on the radio. I thought “I need to write a Christmas song!”

In the mean time, there were so many jerks on the road that evening, and one super huge jerk tailgating me for miles. At times I could see his ultra angry face. I really thought he was going to pull out a machine gun and start shooting at any moment.

By the time I got home I had all of the words and the melody for a new, dark, Christmas song.

I played around with it Sunday morning and then recorded all of the instrument parts Sunday afternoon and evening. I recorded the vocals after work on Monday and did the video Monday evening.

OK, a lot of issues – it was a rush job! Truthfully, I don’t know if I can sing any better – my voice is always bad, so… Anyway, here it is Tuesday and I am sharing it with you. (It is dark, but with hope at the end.)

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Odds and Ends for the Week

Just a few random things I wanted to put out.

Did you see the cover reveal for my upcoming book of short stories, It’s Cold Outside? Take a look here if you haven’t.

Why am I bringing it up?

I had started with a drawing I had made in an art class that I thought was perfect, but I couldn’t get it to work, so I started over with a different image, a drawing I had made from a photo, one I have used many times on the blog. I really liked how it come out :) But then, the day before my cover reveal, I went back tot he original drawing of the first image and played with it. Darn, I actually liked what I came up with! After passing it by several people, we all decided that I need to stick with what I used. It fits better. Anyway, a few changes in format, here is the alternate version:

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She Talks Each Night to Ariel – Music Video

On Friday I post a new song onto Youtube. This was a pop/rock tune, which might be good after posting several classical pieces in a row.  A quick comment – in this song “Ariel” refers to the moon of Uranus (in a way), not a person of that name – just wanted to point that out since I do know some Ariels and this song is not about any of them.  OK, here it is:

(Click here if you don’t see the video below)

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Piano Sonata in c# minor 1st Movement

A couple of weeks back I posted a video for the 3rd movement of my Piano Sonata in c# minor. After thinking about it, I have decided to put up the entire sonata, one movement at a time. So, without further ado, here is the first:

(Click here if you don’t see video below)

A little background. Well, a very little, since I already wrote about this piece of music, here. Anyway, long story short(er), As I was working my series of 24 piano preludes, I was posting them to a music forum. A lot of people told me to make a longer version of the prelude in c# minor, so I did. I wasn’t quite satisfied with ending there, so I renamed it “1st movement” and went on from there, not calling it complete until I had the four movement piano sonata completely written.

At the time, late 2007, I was very much in a learning stage and every piece of music I wrote served a purpose in my musical education. Until this piece. Yes, I was still learning, and tried to push my boundaries, putting new ideas into practice, but the big thing here was that this was the first piece of music that I wrote in my “classical phase” “just because”. It was the first piece of this time period that was written because I was inspired to write.

Because this was something composed because i was inspired instead of because i was learning something new, it has a special place in my heart. Of course I also like it better than most of what I wrote in that time frame.

Anyway, I hope you like it too!

Briseis: That was Yesterday – Video (Reprise)

You may have noticed that with my new start/emphasis in music, I have been digging through old things I have written and recorded. Here is one I just listened to and want to bring up again. Yes, “again”:  I have posted this twice before!  I am going to combine those two posts into one here.

Real quick (I’ll go into depth later ;)), this is part of a song cycle about Acilleus that I planned on writing when I was doing “classical” music.  It never happened, but I later did a “light-prog-rock” version. The song, “Brisies: That was Yesterday”, takes place just after Agamemnon, in the ultimate political slap down, takes the woman Brisies away from Achilleus by force.  Achilleus knows he can’t fight the whole Greek army who he has sworn allegiance to, so he stands by and lets the Trojans kick some Greek butt.  In this song he realizes that he is in love with the woman who started out as a spoil of war. 

Here it is:

(Click here if you don’t see video below)

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Viral Video! (For Me) House of the Rising Sun Repeat

Back in July of 2017 I posted a cover of The House of the Rising Sun on Youtube. My vocals were awful, so I redid it as an instrumental and posted that. This second video did OK (for me) but soon drop off the radar as most of my videos do.

Last year I started to see some views on this video. Not a lot, but they trickled in. And then I started see at least one a day, and sometimes four or five. And then I started seeing four or five, and occasional a dozen! By the end of 2021 I was averaging about 10 views a day of this video. I received more views of this the last 90 days of 2021 than all other videos combined.

But the numbers kept growing!

In the last 48 hours I have had almost 120 views of this video.

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If We Were Having Coffee on the 22nd of January, 2022 #weekendcoffeeshare

Hello and Welcome! Come on in (close the door quickly!) and I’ll get you a nice large mug of steaming dark roast, a piping cuppa tea or a (very) hot cocoa. By my adjectives you may understand that it is a wee bit chilly out there. I think it was -8 F/ -22 C when I got up this morning. But don’t worry, it has warmed up significantly! Yep it is now a balmy -1F/ -18 C! OK, it is early and it might hit 22 F/-5.5 C later in the day. So, yeah, come on in and warm up a little. Oh, where are we? Some of you may recognize the photo at the top as being from New Hampshire.

I drove back to New Hampshire Saturday evening, cutting my trip to Cape Cod a little shorter than usual. I had a few things to do Sunday, so…. We had snow on Sunday night into Monday, but it rained all Monday morning. Yuck. Several inches of slush. It was wet and nasty to clean up, and then it all froze. So, yeah, it’s pretty icy out there.

My wife took the dogs up to Maine for the week, but I still did a few walks a day on my own. That being said, I didn’t get as much exercise as I would have liked. I had an appointment Tuesday morning. Work was super busy. The cats needed a lot of cuddle and play time.

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For Her Heartbreak – Music Video

And wait, there is more…

Back when I was chatting with Resa, I had a few ideas for music running around in my brain. I did do the recording of The Great Blue’s Blues, but the other blues based song I had thought of was still in my head. Last night I finally had a chance to go back and play with it. I don’t know if I’d call the results “the blues”, but I like it a lot. I hope you do too:

(Click here if you don’t see the video)

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