Saturday, January 31, 2009

FAWM 2009

FAWM 2009 starts tomorrow!  I'm looking forward to it.  I tried it in 2007 but failed to complete 14 songs in 28 days.  Last year I did finish, so I was happy.  I like it because it provides a motivation for me to write.  It seems I always need some kind of artificial constraint on me to motivate me to do anything.

I took one of the songs I did in 2007 and polished it up a bit, adding a needed bridge and made a video of it.  It's about a poor, lowly dishwasher named Fang Pi whose dream is to go to Taiwan and meet his idol, Ella Chen, of S.H.E.  Actually, I was thinking of making a series of videos.

In 2006, Ella Chen appeared in a Taiwan drama Hua Yang Shao Nian Shao Nu, known as Hana Kimi, where she plays a student from America who goes to Taiwan to meet her idol (by enrolling in an all boys school where he attends).  So my video is a play on that.

The song I used from FAWM 2007 didn't actually have a title.  It was a bunch of typical cliches I stitched together (on purpose), but I felt it fit in very well for the purposes of this video.

I used the Fender Stratocaster on it.  I find that this Strat (American made 2003/2004) has a very bright--almost harsh and metallic--sound, so I always have to tinker with rolling off the highs with it and try to smooth out the sound.  Once again, I recorded it through the POD 2.0 using the Vox AC-30 Top Boost setting.

In some ways I like the sound of my 1986 Fender Squire Strat better, as that seems to have more of the traditional glassy, bell like tone of a Strat.  I don't know--I must not be doing something right.