If anyone ever wanted to see me play live, now's your chance....
Live from Tokyo, it's my most recent show or the first 15 minutes to be exact.
Ironically in 2025, it feels 100x easier to get 10 people to show up to my concert than it is to get a single person to watch a 15 minute live video of someone they aren't obsessed with.
To be fair, you are literally competing with everything in existence for every single person's attention. There's all the other music in all of existence, both recorded albums, and live performances....not to mention every movie, every game, every book, everyone speaker, every celebrity, every single individual on social media...and I'm hoping you take 15 minutes out of your day to listen to my strange psychedelic folk.
When I put it like that, it makes perfect sense.
You don't have the same easy access to a live performance by every band in existence so maybe that's why it's not too hard to bring people to the show.
I felt kind of shocked to listen to the recording though. Aside from the major slip up in the beginning when my loop pedal stopped working (twice!) it sounds really solid! I actually love how it sounds.
It's amazing how much good 3 months of seriously drilling scales did for me, not to mention the new sounds I make with electric guitar compared to acoustic which I played for years.
The video kind of masks one weak point though. Tone.
Today I spent a good hour talking to a music producer friend from overseas about tone. His advice was extremely helpful. I seriously feel as if I got a year worth of professional education from a few useful metaphors he gave me.
He explained to me how when you strum the guitar, each string is hit with different intensity and if you pluck too hard or if you don't push the fret with the right pressure, an A can sound closer to an A sharp or an A flat.
This leads the note to be out of tune with the other notes in the chord and makes the instrument sounds muddier which makes it harder to mix with vocals and other instruments.
So when you hear at 7:00 I start the loop, I'm actually making a big mistake that only a well seasoned musician would recognize. I'm playing the guitar a little too hard and creating a sound that will repeat through the entire song, but that sound is muddy.
That causes the guitar to sound a bit more muffled and makes it harder to hear my vocals, which already need some work.
I'm just knit-picking here, but that's what a passionate artist does, that's how you get good enough to get people's attention in a world where everyone is spread paper thin.
Overall, I think this was a great performance though.
I know there are many people who don't understand certain aspects of it. The first 7 minutes are completely improvised. There are no lyrics until the second song at 7:00. Both tracks are 7-8 minutes. And they aren't poppy radio stuff, that's for sure. But if you are down, I encourage you to take a the journey with me into my world, in this wonderful mushroom venue that's become a home base for me over the past few months.
I feel very satisfied with my ability to create guitar solos on the fly and string them together into a cohesive layered melody, and also how I turned this once earthy acoustic song into a layered fractal of light that shoots out into the universe.
At the very least you can get a feel for the man behind the pineapple, and the technical difficulties lead to a hilarious finale near the end.
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