Matt Chung's Site

Category: Music

  • YouTube Review: “My Guitar Teacher TOMO FUJITA Gives Words of Wisdom”

    YouTube Review: “My Guitar Teacher TOMO FUJITA Gives Words of Wisdom”

    I recently watched a YouTube video titled “My Guitar Teacher TOMO FUJITA Gives Words of Wisdom”. In this video (below), YouTuber Mary Spender interviews Tomo Fujita, a guitar instructor who taught at Berkelee school of music for over 20 years; he takes his years of accumulated knowledge and shares some words of wisdom. From this interview, I took away three lessons: practice music that you are drawn to , identify 5 inspirational guitarists, and record and analyze yourself playing guitar.

     

    Practice music that you are drawn to

    Here’s the gist: stop trying to be someone you are not.

    Many of us aspiring guitarists incorrectly believe that in order to be a “good” guitarist, we need to be able to play either classical, blues, or jazz — even if that’s the type of music we don’t listen to.

    Tomo shared an example of one of his students who declared “I want to get good at Jazz” and his student proceeded to enumerate all the ways in which he would become a Jazz player, declaring that he’ll begin with learning all the Jazz music theory. Tomo Fujita responded,  “What sort of Jazz do you listen to?”.

    Radio silence.

    The student admitted they don’t listen to any Jazz and Tomo shared his philosophy: that unless you practice the music that you love, you’ll never get good at it. At best, you’ll nail the mechanics. But ultimately, the playing with feel empty. He’s right.

    So stop practicing music you don’t enjoy — right now — and just be your authentic self. Enjoy pop music? Play and write pop songs! You like getting down to reggae ? Drill Bob Marley songs! Also, don’t feel like you need to restrict yourself to one genre either. But once you’ve identified the types of music you want to pursue playing, then you should identify 5 guitarists who inspire you.

    Identify top 5 guitarists who inspire you

    Another useful exercise he mentioned was name 5 guitarists that inspired you. Not six. Not 10.

    Then, once you identified the top 5 artists, research them. Learn their history and how they became the artist they are today. Identify their inspirations, recursively tracing inspirations to the root. This exercise helps inform and influence your own style.

    Record yourself for feedback

    If you never record yourself — using audio, video, or both — then it’s difficult to improve as a guitarist. You miss out on feedback, miss out on opportunities to discover your own habits and area sof improvement.

    I recently started recording myself and publishing the videos to YouTube. I upload videos not to generate millions of views, but for multiple reasons. First, I’m documenting my progress, something I wished I did when I first picked up the guitar a couple years ago. Second, through recording and more importantly, watching and hearing myself allows me to analyze my playing, allowing to identify skills that need to be brushed up on. Finally, recording is a forcing function, pushing me to generate a large volume of work, the only real way, I think, to improve music craftsmanship.

     

  • Not putting all your eggs in one basket and Daily Review: Day ending in 2020/10/14

    Not putting all your eggs in one basket and Daily Review: Day ending in 2020/10/14

    Mental Health

    Best Part(s) of My Day

    • Swinging on the swings with Elliott. She was sitting on my lap, facing my direction, as swung us on the swing back and forth. The entire time she was smiling and when her cold chubby cheeks brushed up against mine, some dad love feelings ran through my body.
    • Eating a kick ass lunch. My wife whipped up a delicious Vietnamese dish with bean sprouts and pickled cucumbers and fermented tofu.

    Therapy Session

    • Vented about on call the past week. I shared the handful of times that I was paged out of bed at 03:30 AM and the operational issues that lasted until 10:00 pm on the evenings and being tied to the computer.
    • Shared the sense of betrayal I felt at work. How someone who I thought was in my corner, rooting for me, actually no longer advocates for me after I declined their “opportunity” to lead a project.
    • Declining the project that “sets me back for a promotion” allows me to bring my best self to work. Although one could argue that me not accepting the “opportunity” to lead a project (that would’ve easily tacked on additional 5-10 hours per week) sets me back for my promotion, I did it so maintain a balance between my professional and personal life, which quite frankly is what I am all about: living a balanced life, not one where I am endlessly pursuing the next thing.
    • Realized that I need to build a stronger community of supporters. Take away from this sense of betrayal is that I need to widen my network of supporters and not to put all my eggs in one basket, so to speak.

    Random

    Cool Quotes

    • “Academia is ripe for pursuing ideas on the lunacy fringe”.

    Graduate School

    • Skipping Java and Spring (for now) and jumping into Distributed System lectures. I almost always follow the curriculum in the order prescribed by the syllabus. But I’ve decided to skip (for now) some video lectures on Java and Spring… and this makes me a little bit anxious. Honestly, I find the Java and Spring lectures a bit boring (to be fair, I might actually enjoy them once I start watching the lectures). Right now, I’m interested in learning more about the fundamentals and theories of constructing distributed systems so I’ll jump to those videos.

    Music

    • Dusted off and played the ukulele for Jess and Elliott. I feel like I abandoned the ukulele after picking up the guitar. And strumming my beautiful Soprano ukulele yesterday reminded me that the instrumental has its own vibe and own personality, the strings sounding much more … bright.

    Family

    • Fell asleep at 06:30 pm. I normally fall asleep between 08:30 and 09:30, on both weekdays and weekends. But yesterday I was shattered after my sleep was interrupted several times throughout the night, the most notable when Jess had a coughing fit at around 03:00 AM, at which point I was pretty much unable to fall back asleep.
    • Slept in the same bed as Elliott and Jess last night. This was pretty sweet actually. Although I woke up multiple times throughout the night, I loved having Elliott and Jess in the same bed since I’ve been sleeping alone — well, with the dogs — for the last six months or so.
    • Wrapped a baby net around stair railings. Installing the net (my sister’s idea)  prevents little Elliott from slipping through the rails. Although I do not think her head could possibly squeeze through, the net gives Jess piece of mind and that’s important since she’s the one watching her throughout the day.

  • Guitar practice journal #1

    Today I practiced my guitar for 20 minutes, a generous amount of time these days (if you are parent you’ll understand). During this practice session, I worked ear training: I looped the song The Funeral (Band of Horses) on my iPhone and played along, plucking the individuals notes in chord progression on my Traveler’s acoustic guitar.

    Just before my 20 minute practice guitar session: jamming with Elliott
    Just before my 20 minute practice guitar session: jamming with Elliott

    During the practice session, I was able to nail down all the notes from the first two chords (triads) and was also able to determine that song was written in the key of G# (thanks music theory). However, I am a bit confused because the 2 of a major key, normally a minor chord, was played as a major. Is this swap of minor and major chord an example of modal mixture?

    Ultimately, I was unable to play the entire chord progression by ear and ended up finding a guitar tutorial1; uploaded on YouTube. Despite that, I’m happy with the progress I’ve made over the last two years of working on my music craftsmanship.

    References

  • My first singing (and guitar) recital

    This past Saturday, I sang and accompanied myself on the guitar, my first time singing in front of a crowd of about 20 people.  I played my arrangement of one of my favorite songs: No Regrets by Mike Love.

    Leading up to the actual performance, so many nerves and anxiety ran through my body. What if I mess up? What if I forget the lyrics? Minutes before I took the stage, my brain started playing tricks on me, suddenly unable to recall the lyrics to the chorus, despite me practicing this song probably over 100 times (bless my wife for listening to all these hours of practice). But because I’m familiar with my brain playing tricks on me — it does the same thing when I publicly speak — I simply drew in a couple deep breathes and put those thoughts to rest, trusting myself.

    All in all, I feel proud. The performance went well and my wife recorded my recital and you can watch it here:

  • Why I picked up the guitar

    Although I’ve been playing the ukulele for over a year, I decided to pick up the guitar four months ago, when I returned to Seattle after spending the Christmas holidays in sunny southern California.

    During my visit, my little 13 year old brother and I would occasionally jam. Me on my tenor ukulele strung with a low G, him on his electric guitar (and occasional grand piano).  We’d take turns playing rhythm, a steady tempo of 80 beats per minute.  I would start with strumming a simple I, IV, V progression (i.e. C, F, G), him soloing in the key of C. Then we would swapped roles, him shredding his guitar, me applying my (little) music theory, picking and plucking away, one note at a time.

    One day, while driving in the car by myself from Orange County to Northridge to my mother’s house, I was playing Spotify on my iPhone, music blaring through my Black Mazda hatchback’s speakers, acoustic and indie songs playing, one after another.  Spotify was playing songs listed in my “discover weekly”, a playlist algorithmically Spotify created based off of my listening behavior (i.e. listening to a handful of 80s music and acoustic guitar, over and over and over again).  Anyways, I’m driving up the 405 freeway, two hands on either side of the steering wheel, passively listening to the music in the background. And then, my attention shifts to the song playing, which was about already two minutes in, a song titled “When you love someone — James TW”.  At first, my ears perked up at the beautiful sound of the acoustic guitar, a combination of picking and strumming with an upbeat tempo.  In addition to the guitar, the melody was catchy, although I couldn’t really make out the lyrics.

    With two eyes glued to the road, I hover my right hand over to the center console, grabbing my phone and swiping the phone unblock, tapping on the back, restarting the song to the beginning. And then I intently listened to the song, as I continued to drive up the highway.

    The second time around, the song hit me emotionally, forcing tears to my eyes. Unexpectedly, the song’s lyrics revolve around a young boy whose parents are divorcing. “It don’t make sense. It don’t add up. We’ll love you. No matter what. ” – for some reason, those words shredded me apart. To be honest, I had not cried that hard in a long time (last time, if I can recall correctly, was during the episode of “This is us”, the episode where, spoiler alert, Randall’s father laid in the hospital bed, passing away and dropping words on wisdom before his consciousness faded).

    Anyways, after listening to that beautiful song play about three or four times, I decided that I wanted to learn the guitar and not only play that song, but accompany myself (i.e. sing).

    And for the past four months, that’s what I’ve been doing. Learning that song on the guitar, and only that song, one bar at a time.

     

  • Practicing my ukulele

    Over the past month, I’ve been investing more time in learning the ukulele, sitting in the office area in the morning, strumming and picking my soprano ukulele for at least 30 minutes either in the early mornings or just before hitting the sack.  In addition to my daily routine, I’ve not only been taking weekly, 1 on 1 lessons from a local instructor in Seattle but I’m also reading books (favorite one so far was a short, 40-page book on music theory) and watching videos, playing along with the instructors from The Ukulele Underground.  I find this website very impressive not only for the content itself, but how well organized it is, breaking down the website into different levels: beginner and intermediate and advanced.  The organization of the website allows me to find exactly what I’m looking for. And when I cannot find the content I’m looking for, their staff is very responsive, replying to my messages.

    In addition to my practice routine, where I drill scrumming patterns and drill my understanding of music theory, I make sure to carve out time (even if it’s just a few minutes) to just enjoy the instrument, playing songs that I like.  Isn’t that the whole point—enjoying the beauty of music?

    Speaking of songs that I like, here’s a video of me practicing the introduction to the song Stand by me. If you watch the entire 20 second video, you’ll be blessed with the special cameo appearance.