comparison

Guitar and Ukulele Tabs for The Comparison Song (by me)

Digital Citizen 3 Comments

This was the first song I ever wrote, with a friend named Lis Soderberg singing it in the recording above. I’m posting the chords and tabs to share with friends who play guitar and ukulele.

The song requires an octave range to sing, and you actually have numerous opportunities to practice your octave singing jumps in the song. Sure beats scales! 🙂

The song came from a sonnet I wrote in 1995. It was inspired by my reaction to Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet XVIII (18) – Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Shakespeare dwells on this, comparing the subject to various aspects of a summer’s day. By nature, I’m a concepts person and not one for details. I can do details if I need to, but it’s not my natural mode. I’m all over the place. So instead of asking shall I compare thee to a summer’s day, I generally said I could do that, or compare you to this and that and those and these things. The kicker, or closing couplet that sums things up, is that I can compare you to all these lovely things, but that none compared to you.

It’s as simple as that.

So if you liked the song and want to learn to play it on guitar or ukulele, please click on one of the links below. Chords and notes are included.

Comparison Song, Minh Tan Guitar Tabs Letter Sized PDF

Comparison Song, Minh Tan Guitar Tabs Tabloid Sized PDF

Comparison Song, Minh Tan Ukulele Tabs Letter Sized PDF

Comparison Song, Minh Tan Ukulele Tabs Tabloid Sized PDF

These tabs all fit on one page to avoid the inconvenience of page turns. However, the letter size tabs (8.5″ x 11″) may be too small for your eyes. If so, you can either enlarge to tabloid size (11″ x 17″) using an automatic enlarge feature on many photocopiers, or download the tabloid sized versions for printing. The tabloid size tabs can be inserted into a typical letter sized binder on the 11″ size, and folded almost in half to fit. You just open each tab to use it.

Please RIGHT click here and choose Save Target As (or Save Link As) if you would like to download the MP3 of my “Comparison” song.

It’s free! 🙂

Please click here for guitar and ukulele tabs and chords to other songs on this blog.

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Reading Level: 5.3

Barack Obama’s Barackets Still Doing Well After Round 3 Because Most People’s Brackets Are Also Busted

Digital Citizen 2 Comments

Barack Obama / Sarah Palin Spoof (show this to your friends!)

Please click here for how Obama’s Barackets has fallen mightily after Round 4.

Despite having his 2010 NCAA Barackets busted open with teams picked to go far knocked off in Rounds 1 and 2, President Barack Obama’s Barackets is still hanging in there ahead of 88% of about 5 million brackets submitted on ESPN’s website. Obama’s Barackets is ranked 570,093 after three rounds. It’s a drop from 341,292nd place and 92.9th percentile after Round 2, but 88% is still an A.

Obama’s Barackets is still doing relatively well because most people have also had their brackets busted open with all the upsets happening so far. However, on this last day of Round 3, the Cinderellas pretty much all went home. For this, Obama and others who had picked favourite teams that have been booted from March Madness will really start to feel that impact. There are now fewer games from which to get points, or compensate for those lost, and the games from now on continue to double in value from those of the previous rounds. Obama only has a potential 360 points remaining when each round remaining, including picking the overall winner, is worth 320 points each.

My ESPN brackets are also rather busted, but I have done well to this past round to jump from 846,668th place after Round 2, to 63,616th place or better than 98.6% of the brackets on ESPN. I’m beating da Prez now, 610 points to 550, but he has Kentucky and Kansas State remaining for elite teams potentially moving to the Final Four. I have West Virginia, Kansas State and Baylor, with the first losing an excellent player due to injury earlier this week so they’ll be in tough against Kentucky… and I have them in the Finals as well so that would be a devastating loss to my brackets.

Oh, well. At this point, I’m just enjoying March Madness as it’s been one of the better tournament in a long time. That Kansas State and Xavier game was definitely something else!

Let’s see what will happen this weekend!

p.s. Congratulations to Obama and the Democrats for passing that health care bill. It’s a good thing they passed it cause his Barackets might need some serious health care soon! 🙂

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Reading Level: 8.0
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Testing SoundCloud for WordPress.com with My Own Music

Digital Citizen 6 Comments

This is my own song, uploaded for the purposes of testing out the SoundCloud music player features newly integrated into WordPress.com blogs. Please do have a listen while reading some general descriptions of the SoundCloud platform following to see those features in action. I wrote the song, but it was beautifully sung by Lis Soderberg, with background parts, recording and mixing all done by the very talented Allister Bradley in the summer of 2008 at Humber College. I just strummed on a guitar. Lyrics are at the bottom. 🙂

Please click here for the guitar and ukulele tabs PDF containing lyrics,  chords and notes for The Comparison Song

Up till Aug 2009, there wasn’t a music player, and not one with social media features, on WordPress.com blogs. If you wanted to share audio files with such features, your best bet was probably to make a “static video”. You know, those “videos” with just one image and sound? Either that or get a space upgrade to be able to upload MP3 files, but there wasn’t a real music player with it

SoundCloud logo (I like it!)

Well, I’m so happy to see WordPress.com finally has a system to integrate sound media files into its blogs the way video was been integrated for a while! They chose SoundCloud.com as their platform, the way they had chosen VodPod for videos.

“[SoundCloud is] …a really useful service that is part Flickr for music, part professional music collaboration hub. Artists such as Beck, Moby and Sonic Youth now use the service to distribute tracks through their blogs and connect with their fans.”
— WordPress.com blog, Aug 13 2009

More than just another free music player, though, SoundCloud has some quite awesome features.

  • You can leave comments at specific points in the track so you don’t have to go find the time, or try to describe it awkwardly, etc.
  • You can just click a share button to share it on Facebook and various other social media or social bookmarking sites! That’s very nice!
  • The sharing of music otherwise among members is similar to the combination of notification on Facebook, and Inbox notifications, on your account via SoundCloud’s side. You can “follow” people like on Twitter to get the info via newsfeed, or get notice similar to a tag or email sent to you and/or your email off the site.
  • There is even code provided for people to embed it into their blogs and websites, with the player included! That’s really cool!
  • Their music player is like “fab five” man! You can also control lots of privacy features, and you get your own URL for your account on their site that the public may also visit like how MySpace works.
  • A free account can be had with 10 tracks for sharing, an Inbox, detailed statistics, viewing, privacy and other features of popular music and video sites at least as good as most of those other sites.

The WordPress folks really picked a fantastic platform in SoundCloud! Well done!

Of course, you should not be uploading copyrighted material that isn’t yours to SoundCloud. That was to be expected. But how nice, was it then, that I just happened to have a song I had written and recorded in the past to use? I don’t devote enough time to my singing/songwriting, and I don’t exactly go pimping my music a lot, even to many of my friends. So here’s hoping there’s something new here for some of them, and you, to enjoy, aside from the tech review.

I will be further checking out SoundCloud’s features in the upcoming weeks and months. It’s given me a whole new set of motivation to write more songs and record more. In the meanwhile, if you want to know more, you can take the tour on their site.

I would highly recommend it!

LYRICS

I could compare you to a summer’s day,
Or, if you prefer, a winter’s night.
I could compare you to the moon unphased,
Or the sun at dawn, noon or in twilight.
All lovely things I can compare you to,
But there’s not one that can compare to you.

I could compare you to the sweetest tune,
Or, if you prefer, the sweetest kiss.
I could compare you to a sacred rune,
Or the lores, that tell of eternal bliss.
All lovely things I can compare you to,
But there’s not one that can compare to you.

Choose any flower that blooms in the spring,
Or any leaf that turns in the fall.
Choose stars, or rainbows, angels, songs birds sing,
Or the sky, or sea – any thing at all!
All lovely things I can compare you to,
But there’s not one that can compare to you.

No, there’s not one that can compare to you.

07.?.2003 – 07.31.04