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“No Excuses” (Alice In Chains Acoustic Rock Cover)

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By Jeff:

Welcome to Thumpin’ Thursday!  I’ve got a great alternative song that I had completely forgotten about up until recently.

Two weeks ago my wife & I bought a Nintendo Wii after a long time of debating whether we wanted it enough to buy it.  Well, thankfully that answer is yes.  We bought a few games we knew we’d like, which included the line of “Wii” games (including the Wii fit, which i’m happy to report is actually quite effective), and I also bought Guitar Hero III and Guitar Hero: Metallica.

Well,  next week I hope that I can actually…cover a Metallica song!  An acoustic cover?  You bet!  I’m sure those that are reading this will probably narrow the possibilities down to about 3 songs.

But the reason I mention Guitar Hero: Metallica (besides the fact that I love it and am currently working on 5-starring all the songs on Hard) is because today’s song is in this game.  It helped to remind me that it existed, and that it would make a great session entry.

So today I bring you “No Excuses” by Alice in Chains from their 1994 album “Jar of Flies”.  This song always sounded like it’d be more difficult than it actually is.  The lyrics and song always made me sing along throughout my teenage years.  I love the chorus that fits right in to the mood.

The song is very easy to play.  Tune the guitar down 1/2 step, and play a standard A barre chord, but only press down on the low E string with your index finger, leaving the B and high E string open the entire song.  Slide that up to the 7th fret, and back again for the verse.  For the chorus, bring it down to G, then A, B, A, G, A, then E in standard position (I use my middle, ring, and pinky to play the chord so it allows me to return to the barre position for the verse).

I tried to use a slightly different position today, facing the sound hole from the guitar towards the camera.  It seemed to work for “Hello, it’s Late” from last month.

I hope you enjoy today’s entry, and next week perhaps I’ll see you for another great session!  TTFN!

Editor’s Note: Unfortunately, Jeff’s acoustic cover song music videos are no longer on YouTube, but we decided to keep his cover song blog posts up.  We figured these music blog entries would be good for posterity’s sake and because Jeff always gave such insightful posts each Session.  We hope to see Jeff’s impressive catalog of acoustic rock songs here on the Laptop Sessions cover songs and original music blog again in the future.  But, for now, please make sure to check-out hundreds of other acoustic cover songs from all of your favorite bands here on the Laptop Sessions music blog!

Editor’s Note: Unfortunately, Jeff’s acoustic cover song music videos are no longer on YouTube, but we decided to keep his cover song blog posts up. We figured these music blog entries would be good for posterity’s sake and because Jeff always gave such insightful posts each Session. We hope to see Jeff’s impressive catalog of acoustic rock songs here on the Laptop Sessions cover songs and origianal music blog again in the future. But, for now, please make sure to check-out hundreds of other acoustic cover songs from all of your favorite bands here on the Laptop Sessions music blog!

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Jim Fusco reaches 250,000 YouTube Video Views!

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Tonight, I just checked my YouTube stats and noticed that I am over 250,000 YouTube video views! This represents a combination of acoustic cover song music videos, how-to videos, and original songs.

I thank everyone for their support. At this rate, I’m on par to reach 500,000 total views by the end of the year- that’s doubling my current total, which took me sixteen months to originally get! Now, I’m looking to double my views in only eight months. And, if our past data shows us anything, it’s that the Laptop Sessions acoustic songs music videos only seem to gain in popularity day after day.

So, here’s to the first quarter-million (wow, that sounds good) and on to the next! It is a life goal to get to 1,000,000 views on YouTube- many people have views in the thousands, tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands, but it’s a very small percentage that can get to a million and that’s exactly what I’d expect from myself and the Laptop Sessions over the coming months.

Thanks to all viewers and keep watching!

~Jim

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“Development of a writer” – A retrospective by Jeff Copperthite (Part 2/3)

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One of the things that anybody who knows me well is that I am into a very special type of music.

No, it isn’t anything mainstream.  In fact, I can think of only 3 other people who enjoy this type of music as much as I do.

Quite simply, it is soundtracks from video games.   Especially Role Playing Games.

I have what I feel is a very impressive collection of OST (Original Soundtrack) from a variety of games.  One reason I think I enjoy the music so much is because I did grow up listening to the music from these games almost entirely.  When it comes to my favorite activity both now and then, it certainly is video games.

More so than any of my other hobbies.  It even surpasses the playing and writing of music.

So I have an ingrained affinity to the music.  I always had a great auditory memory as well.  I can still hum music from old Nintendo games I haven’t played in over 15 years.  If you say “Flash Man from Mega Man 2”, I will hum it in tune and on key.  You may even get some of that terrible synth drum channel that NES was notorious for.

But the ones I latched onto immediately are the Final Fantasy series’ OSTs.  I have them all.  And not just some remixed versions or user-generated remixes.  Just like I was playing the original version of the game.

Why do I enjoy listening to the music so much?  Plain and simple – it is something for me to listen too, and I can do almost any regular task while I listen.  Simply put, many papers got written while I listened to “Dancing Mad”, the final boss music from Final Fantasy 6, and other songs from those series.

As I discovered the fact that some more uncommon OSTs existed, I found as many of them as I could and got them.  I have the OSTs for such obscure games as Emperor: Battle for Dune (a favorite actually), Dune 2000, StarFox, Perfect Dark, Super Mario RPG, Secret of Mana (and all of it’s prequels and sequels), Ogre Battle (and it’s derivatives), and the F-Zero series.  Simply put, there’s a soundtrack for all kinds of moods.

Actually, now that I mention the “Emperor” soundtrack, it reminds me of a story.

About a year ago, I did something that I was always a bit afraid of, but knew I had to do – I donated blood.  I’ve always been a bit squeamish about things like this, but I knew it was the right thing to do.  To get me through it, however, I popped up the Emperor Soundtrack because the music had such a driving beat to it, and the tunes are so engrossing overall (I even asked the Phlebotomist to cover the donation bags so I couldn’t watch my blood being drawn).  I looked up at the ceiling of Sacred Heart’s Field House for a while and enjoyed it.  Hey, it got me through it.  I may even do it again in the future.

Well anyway, point is I have always enjoyed VG music.   I downloaded MIDI tracks as well.  But then I found a game that had a great soundtrack, but very few MIDI files for its music.

And so, I began the Final Fantasy Tactics Battle Music Project, which at the time was a regularly updated website with the files that I created using various implements, most notably a program called Noteworthy Composer.  My methods were this easy.  I used an audio recorder to tape the particular song of interest off of the TV while the game was playing.  Then I systematically tried to pick out the different instruments and parts, then try to transcribe them on the keyboard.  Once I had figured out one or two instruments, usually the rest were easy to pick out as well.  This method certainly wasn’t the best, but at the time I was very mad that these files didn’t exist, and I wanted to change that.

I ended up transcribing quite a few of the songs from the game, and within the next two years, I noticed lots of fan sites posting my MIDI files.  I also got lots of great comments, emails, and requests.  I did the majority of the work for files in this game within those two years, but I would go back periodically until I was done in college to update some of the songs that I knew better.

I also at one point in college (~2000 I think) did a similar site for Final Fantasy 9 called (how original) the FF9 MIDI Project.  Similar to FFT, I transcribed select songs due to not many being transcribed at the time.  I still find both of the MIDI files from these games around the internet.

It wasn’t long after this that I began composing music similar in style.  There will be more on that in the next edition of this series.  Stay tuned for that next month!

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“Wishlist” (Pearl Jam Cover)

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For Pearl Jam chords & lyrics, CLICK HERE!

By Chris Moore:

You know what I wish?  I wish that I would wake up tomorrow and there would no longer be anyone on the entire planet who smoked cigarettes.  Never mind the health risk — which, by the way, there are few ingestible products that come with a “may cause cancer” label.  The concept of breathing tar into your lungs aside, let’s consider the ramifications to non-smokers on the road. For instance, I sat in a McDonald’s drive-through tonight for ten minutes and was delighted by not only the automobile emissions but two smokers puffing away.  The breeze was such that my car was filled with noxious fumes.

In a sense, this was great, because the fish filet and large fries actually seemed healthy by comparison!  🙂

Seriously, though, what really gets me is the disposal of the butts.  It’s happened so many times recently that I’ll be driving down the road and someone in the car ahead of me will flick a lit cigarette out of their window.  I don’t know if it’s due to me being older, a generally law-abiding dork, a teacher of transcendental texts like Emerson’s “Nature,” or a combination of the three, but this is enough to drive me crazy recently.  To paraphrase our friend Matt Griffiths from the WCJM morning show, it’s just enough to tweak my hypothalamus and send me into an uncontrollable rage!

I suppose I simply can’t imagine driving in my car, holding a lit piece of paper in my hand, and saying to myself, “I’m done with this.  Why not chuck it out the window?”  Since when did that become the acceptable form of cigarette disposal?! Think twice ye smokers, lest you piss off the drivers behind you (such as myself tonight when a highly tossed butt bounced off my car, lit ashes flying everywhere)…

For those of you wondering what this has to do with my post tonight, prepare to be dazzled.  Well, maybe not dazzled…

Just as I have ranted about something that has bothered me and later wondered if it was too negative, so did Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam decide that he should try writing something positive.  Out of a lengthier “stream-of-consciousness exercise,” we have the “better wishes” presented in this little gem of a song.  It was an instant favorite of mine upon first listening to Pearl Jam’s 1998 album Yield.  As with Binaural, I wasn’t sure what to expect with this album, as it sold less and seemed generally regarded as at least somewhat inferior to previous releases such as Ten and Vitalogy.  But I love this album, and I love this song.  For once, the song I love most is actually in my vocal range!

Okay, so that’s not entirely true.  My first pick for a song to learn and play would have been “Do The Evolution.”  For any of you familiar with that song, you should be sitting at your computer laughing at simply the notion of my attempting to sing a song like that!  I understand my own limitations!  🙂   That being said, you should take the time to search on YouTube for “Pearl Jam Evolution” and watch the official music video; it’s simply amazing — a very cool use of animation to visualize the lyrics to a song.

Along with my acoustic cover song music video tonight, I also send a shout out to my girlfriend Nicole who is a big fan of this song.  (I hope you like it!)  As she is currently in possession of my CD copy of the album and my iPod is tied up with my Bob Dylan playlist (518 out of 622 tracks!), I had to rely on my iPhone to listen to “Wishlist” tonight as I wrote out the lyrics and chords.  What a Mac nerd I am… but I love it.  Speaking of Macs, if I don’t end up writing a full review of U2’s No Line on the Horizon, please allow me to go on record saying that “Unknown Caller” has to be the worst track on the album for a number of reasons.  It’s only redeeming quality is that Bono makes lyrical references (“force quit and move to trash”) that bely his computer loyalties…

Although I have so much more I could say — about Pearl Jam’s re-release of Ten tomorrow, this song, other music, the fact that my dad and I just bought tickets to see Bruce Hornsby at the MGM Grand on Friday(!), life in general — I think this is enough for one night!  As a final note, please allow me to point out that this is officially the tenth post in the Pearl Jam category here at the Laptop Sessions, rounding us off to an even ten just in time for the re-release of Ten for tomorrow’s New Music Tuesday, March 24th, 2009!

See you next session!

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