Rain, Rain, Go Away!

Last week, I had a football match scheduled against an Indian football team. Just as I was ready and rearing to go along with the rest of my squad, we have received a short phone call that the Football match was cancelled because there was rain, and the pitch was too soft and wet for playing football.

That really took the wind out of our team, and we spent the remaining of the team excessively bored out of our minds before putting our misery to rest by going out to eat some japanese barbecue buffet. For our opponent, I heard that the night before the scheduled competition, our opponent were on a crazy mode trying to assemble a team to compete with our team that many in their team cancelled their planned vacation.

Anyway, for the next weekend, we were planning to reschedule our match. Hopefully it won't be rained out this time :P

On related news, I've finally got my DSLite. Thanks Bic for getting it for me from Japan :)

"The only mystery in life is why the kamikaze pilots wore helmets"

Hmm... I haven't figured also O_o

Reverse Engineering a Song

During my younger years, I remember that a number of musically talented friends have this uncanny ability to be able to transcribe music after hearing it a few times. Some of them were more proficient, being able to play sections of the music immediately after the first few listens. Some of them take some time to slowly extract note by note for the whole song. For myself since I'm lazy and not really confident of my ear, I usually use the internet to find MIDI songs and get the sheet music from there.

I used to have this joke that when we are trying to get the song back without the notes it becomes the process of reverse engineering. If you are in a computer program development field, you know that reverse engineering is the closest you can get to that process in Music - in which I don't know what it is called exactly. To me, I find using the computer is the easiest way :P

During the last month at my music class, my saxophone instructor told me that he wanted me to join one of the bands in the school and play a song at the annual "end of the year talent show". I was kind of relunctant to accept that considering that I started to play the saxophone just as a relaxing hobby and I didn't have time to schedule practice with other people considering my rather loaded workload.

Since my instructor said that there isn't any need to join a band, I decided it might be possible to play a simple piece. Initially I thought about finding a midi/music backing track, turn off the saxophone part and play over it. That would be simple as the notes are already there, so basically I had the sheet music of the song.

After taking some more to decide, I wanted to play a minimum piece in which had the fewest instruments on it. After deciding for a while, I got stuck on a piece called Forgotten Saga from the fusion jazz band called T-Square. A video is embedded below:



After a few listen, I wanted to play that piece. The bad news is that I don't have the sheet music. I decided then to start extracting the notes by ear. After a few hours of frustration, I managed to extract nearly the whole song (some slight mistakes there nad here), though I excluded the whole ending improvising session which I plan to end the piece before that part in my new simplified version.

If I ever happen to record the piece, I'll place it back here again.

Which do you prefer?

I was pondering on a few things the last few days and I can't seem to get it out of my head. I was wondering what would be better to do. If given the choice would you prefer to do as many job as possible (get the most money but have the least time), or simply just do nothing and enjoy the peace and free time?

Can't make a decision yet, but at the moment, I'm trying to load balance my schedules better.