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

July 1, 2010March 19, 2011Digital 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

Testing SoundCloud for WordPress.com with My Own Music

August 15, 2009April 30, 2011Digital 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

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

Family Guy, Disney and Penguins Facebook Tagging Meme Pictures

March 7, 2009March 19, 2011Digital Citizen 7 Comments

Please check out the 73 Penguins avatars and buddy icons created from the Penguins Facebook picture tagging memes below!

Here are some more Facebook tagging meme pictures I haven’t been able to find anywhere else easily, so I’ve put them on my blog. I created the Family Guy version, with relatively few characters compared to others I created thus far. However, I was only able to find graphics of those 8 characters with white backgrounds and that’s enough work to assemble them, label them and such for me on one post. It’s for the Family Guy fans, which I don’t think are quite at the level of the other meme themes (see links below), but I’ll let the download stats speak for themselves. It’s also for people who don’t have time to tag 25 people, or daring ones who not only have their family as friends, particular Parents, but will also tag them! This is also the first time I created a pictorial Facebook meme with personality traits rather than straight character names.

The other two meme pictures here are Disney characters and Penguins (somebody need to enlighten me on the cartoon franchise from which they came). The first penguins version I created. The others I only slightly optimized ratios and edited out one extreme expletive that was simply gratuitous, and it wasn’t even funny. I’m glad someone did the personality labeling for Disney characters because I sure didn’t want to try. I had thought about a Disney set but passed it up due to too many characters without prominent distinguishing personality traits. As for the Penguins set, not knowing anything about it really, it’s just included. Here’s how you get any of these graphics for Facebook: