With the dog days of summer coming up people will have a lot more time to watch movies they missed in the theaters. Besides my music I do very short movie reviews when I’m inspired. Here are some movies you might consider watching on DVD this summer.
“We Bought a Zoo” I thought was the best film of last year and was surprised it did not do better:
“Mission Impossible” 2011 to me marked what should be the end of Tom’s action roles but still had great stunts:
“War Horse” is another solid but very melancholy movie by Spielberg who apparently had to be nagged by his daughter to make the movie in the first place:
Of the three I would say “We Bought A Zoo” is the most uplifting and entertaining. Thanks for stopping by my blog. Smile and have a nice day!
Grandpa was a forward observer on D-Day when the allies finally invaded Germany. He told me that forward observers usually only lasted three hours before getting killed. It was one of the most dangerous assignments. The forward observer would sneak over the front lines into enemy territory and radio back the quardenants of the Nazi’s whereabouts so that the artillery could blow them away. Grandpa lasted really long, instead of three hours he lasted three days helping to kill off a lot of Nazis in the process. But his luck ran out and he got shot in the arm. He called it his million dollar wound because it basically saved his life. He was sent back to England to recover and did not have to return to the front. He served in the army for the remainder of his career becoming a Colonel. Despite his gun shot wound he lived to be 93, passing away last year. This song that I heard by David Allen Coe called “I Still Sing The Old Songs” I thought was touching. I made this short video in remembrance of Sanford Lorette on this Memorial Day weekend and also for all the veterans who have served or died in our armed forces. They give so much for so little and deserve a lot more after returning home. Here is my take on the song with a photo of my grandpa Sanford Lorette at the time of his gun shot wound.
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I discovered NoiseTrade which is absolutely perfect for my goal of sharing my originals online for free. All you do is download your songs in MP3 form and an album cover and people can go there and download it right away for free. And also fans can leave a tip from one dollar up to one hundred dollars but are not required to. PERFECT! Not only is it easy and legal, I can receive a few bucks legally from fans who leave tips.
My album is called “Live Today” and contains my top five songs from my YouTube station in MP3 form. I’ve been posting songs for about a year now on my YouTube Channel. There’s a great analysis chart that counts how many views each video gets and lists the most popular. It is interesting what the public likes. I notice they are my more positive songs that have some overdubbing on them. Please click here to go to my NoiseTrade artist page and Download my album for FREE, and you can ignore giving me a TIP as my goal is simply to give it away. It is light folk type music verging on light rock when I overdub.
Prior to discovering NoiseTrade I was trying to figure out a way to give my amature album away for free with no hassles to me and with no expense to the receiver of the album. First, I thought I could just tell them to give me their address and I could burn a CD and send it to them. But after looking up shipping costs plus the cost of burning my CD I ruled that out. It costs about three dollars to send a CD through the mail in a bubble package. If one hundred people want my album I would be out three hundred dollars and also it would take a lot of time and effort burning and shipping. Then I looked up the process for the online distributors like iTunes and a few others. There is a huge process one has to go through to get songs on there for easy downloading plus it is a for profit way of distribution. I use Garage Band and my guitars for my songs and was just trying to find a no hassle way to share them, NoiseTrade is that way.
So spread the word about NoiseTrade. How I discovered it was by being a fan of the Devious Angels who also have their album on there. I left them a tip and loved being able to support their music in a small way. Thanks for stopping by my blog. Smile and have a nice day! By the way here is a video of my favorite new country duo The Devious Angels:
My next original features guitar harmonic chords. There are a few places on the guitar fret where one can just lightly press on the string and pluck and a nice sound will occur. You do not press the strings all the way down but instead just put your finger lightly over the row of strings on fret 12, 7, or 5 and it makes a chord. The trick is to put your finger over the fret divider rather than in between the fret dividers.
The song is only three harmonic chords with a brief lead in the middle. The fun part of the song as a guitar player is doing the lead while also hitting the chords. This is kind of a sad tune but hey if you want bubble gum music there’s plenty of that out there.
My goal for this summer is to post all of the tunes I wrote as a teen. They all have some pretty good guitar in them and melancholy lyrics. Ironically I’m a pretty happy-go-lucky guy but when I write lyrics it is usually pretty sad. I did attempt to change the words to make more positive songs but then it came across as fake and corny. It is really tough to write a positive tune that doesn’t sound contrived or made for a commercial.
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I was looking over my blog posts and began to realize that I’ve kind of lost focus lately on the goal of my blog. Though it is not set in stone my main goal is to share my ORIGINAL guitar pieces and folk type songs. It is easy to get trapped into doing covers because it is much easier to get others to listen to covers and also it is way easier as a musician since you are just playing something already organized and proven to be liked by others. I must know a thousand cover songs mostly sixties songs from the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, and the King Elvis to name a few. Once I’ve finished posting my own music I can always share my covers later on. But for now here is an instrumental guitar piece I came up with called “Morning Light.” It may be a good piece of music to have as background music while studying or browsing. I’ve always loved instrumental music especially, of course, guitar instrumentals.
Thanks for listening and stopping by my blog. Smile and have a nice day!
After haunting around YouTube for about six months and listening to a ton of covers, my preference is for covers that are first of all not exactly like the original. Why would someone want to create a version of a song that sounds so much like the original that there really is no purpose in listening to it since you might as well just listen to the original? No, the perfect cover, in my humble opinion, will keep similar chords, but you can mix it up a little by making a major a minor here and there or doing it in a different style of music entirely – such as making a pop song into a country ballad for example. The musician, however, MUST add their own completely different ingredient to it. I sometimes hear people angrily comment after hearing a musician do a cover,”That doesn’t sound anything like the original.” If I know the person I’ll point out,”Did you ever think the musician did that on purpose to do their own interpretation of the song?” On the other hand, sometimes I’ll hear someone say,”That was great, sounded just like the original!” So I say,”Yeah might as well just listen to the original.”
Anyway, enough of my rambling, time for the music. Jamison does some really nice covers. Here’s his great cover of “Come Home” by One Republic:
And here is my cover of “If That Ain’t Country” written my David Allen Coe who was a prisoner that Johnny Cash discovered and helped free. I changed it a lot by making a short PG version of it. I’m a big fan of a lot of his songs but think he might have been more world-famous if he had made more PG versions of his songs. Here’s my two-minute watered down version of his song.
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