Thursday 23 January 2020

Did I inspire Sammy G?

I find Sammy G quite an engaging internet personality and quite often watch his videos when they pop up in my feed. I was watching this one and he mentioned he'd seen a cover of "Here Comes The Sun" when he was in grade 11 or 12, and then played a bit of it. It sounded _a lot_ like my cover, the timing is about right (I posted it in 2006), and that video has over a million views as it was featured back in the day.

The arrangement is basically a copy of an arrangement by John Keans, I changed very little. But he never played it on youtube as far as I know (I wish he had!) So... maybe I was there just at the right time for Sammy G and I didn't know it. There sure were a lot of other players who were there at the right time for me...the universal cookie jar continues to supply cookies! :-)

Check it out below, I've set the relevant start times for you.


JAW

Monday 20 January 2020

Tabs into Musescore backlog

For years I have been tabbing out my arrangements and transcriptions. It's part of my music arrangement process. I don't need to do it so much anymore, especially on songs that aren't complex. So I have around 70 tabs from the last 15 years of effort. In the early days I used PowerTab version 1. It was fast and I knew it well. But it had known bugs, was no longer in development, and as Windows moved through versions it was increasingly less supported (I have a Windows XP virtual machine I use if I ever need to make PowerTab changes).

So I switched to Musescore a few years back. It is fully featured, I'm talking fully. So fully that I barely remember how to achieve all the different things I want. I'm constantly googling it, and saying "oh, that's right". Which says to me that it is a tool that you need to use regularly, and it is not completely intuitive. I still struggle with the hotkeys, I find myself pressing escape a lot and "starting again". Its concept is great (it is more "strict" than powertab) and the flexibility is outstanding and the scores are beautiful.  So I'm sticking with it.

But now I want to convert 50 of my old tabs from PowerTab to Musescore. Musescore does not support old PowerTab, but GuitarPro5 supports both. So I managed to PTB->GP5->MSCZ. Unfortunately I need to spend at least 10 minutes on each to standardise templates, fix errors, that sort of thing.

"JAW, why haven't you been using Guitar Pro all these years?" I have tried each version, but I always liked PowerTab more. Maybe I was being a bit anti-change and too used to PowerTab. I've scored out a few multi-instrument parts in the last few years and I have more planned, Guitar Pro is very guitar oriented, so it suits me even less these days.

So there you have it. I've got probably ten hours of effort to get all my tabs into Musescore up to a standard I will be happy with. It's only my OCD that will eventually drive me to do it - I don't need those tabs anymore, and I don't get paid for producing them, so I don't need to!

But it is really nice having them all up to date :-)
JAW