My Youtube Videos: the Music

This is part of my collection of sloppy rehearsal videos I keep sticking up on YouTube, because I'm a closet attention whore. I'll put them up in chronological order, oldest to most recent... and I'll skip the ones I don't want to put up:

Me performing "1941" by Harry Nilsson. I actually play it slightly differently now, and I can now get the words right.

Tossed one of mine in here, called "Apple Core". Actually, Neil Horne gets a co-writing credit on that one, but he ain't in touch. I play this on the baritone now, but it's still cool like this.

I think I may have been in a silly mood when I did that one. Obviously, a parody of George Harrison's "Something". Notice the conspicuous use of the baritone and the capo.

That was one of my original songs. I call it "Let Me Be". This was part of my first experiments with the baritone, trying to figure out which songs to play exactly the same, but in the lower tuning I use on the baritone. Playing this song in that key makes it a hell of a lot easier to sing; I'm a fifth down from where I used to sing it. Now it doesn't hurt, and I can do good chest tones. This is known as "adapting the song to fit the instrument".

This next one...

... is actually a bit weird, and kinda embarassing. I'd sent out a MySpace bulletin, releasing my YouTube list to all my contacts, and one dude I hung out with in high school made a request, so I did it. I played the guitar and sang the backup vocals and did a webcam recording, and then I did another webcam recording of me playing the bass and singing lead (though you can barely hear the bass) while watching the other webcam video I'd just made. Man, that was so close to being clever.

Notice the Traffic I threw in there? Would've also been clever, had the Grateful Dead not done it first.

Another Beatles parody. This one's awful profane. And it's also one of those where I change the key to play it the same way on the baritone. "Gay Stripper". My brother Rusty helped with the genesis of this one.

"Don't Tell". I love playing this song on the baritone. With this one, I play it in the original key, adapting the song to the instrument by way of playing the song differently. So my new project has been to do this with as many other songs as I can. Noice I'm also trying to truly play the baritone like an instrument that actually bridges the gap between guitar and bass.

Most recent one. "Anthony's song (Movin Out)" by Billy Joel. I did the "poor man's multitrack" again, but this time I did the main meat of the song and lead vocal first, and then tacked on the backup vocals and "lead guitar" part (such as it is) while filming Windows Media Player playing the first video. Also, played in the original key on the baritone!

More to follow!