Universal Language - Or Not

My family is fairly musical. I actually feel like the musically stunted one in the family because I only learned how to play the piano and sing. I have some sisters who play up to three or four instruments. All of them participated in bands and took AP Theory classes. I do, however, know music, and I was taught from a very young age.

When I moved to Spain, I had someone ask me if I would be willing to teach them piano. I'd never taught, and I didn't really speak the language, but I figured it wouldn't be that difficult. It's just using the same terms. Our first lesson, we sat down, and I asked her if she knew anything about music. She told me that she kind of knew the notes, but instead of calling them A, B, C, like we do in the United States, she called them Do, Re, Mi. It took me weeks before I could remember all of the notes and be able to help her without singing the Sound of Music in my head. If I wanted her to play an F, I would tell her Fa. If I wanted a B, I would say Ti. It was incredibly confusing, and I thought that maybe she'd been taught incorrectly.

Then I went to a choir practice for church. The director was apparently very musical and as we practiced, she used the same terms as the girl I'd been teaching piano. She would play a Do on the piano and we would learn how to read music by Do, Re, Mi. She told the class that this was the proper way to read music, and that it was the way that it was done in the United States, so it had to be right.

It's amazing how music, which seems like something that should be a common language for all, had different terms within different cultures. Music is still universal, and it doesn't matter if we're playing a C or a Do, as long as the music is there.

NaNoWriMo Music Video

Have you ever seen something and thought ‘I can do that’?

Maybe it’s just me. I’m one of those people that sees something and wants to try it for myself. A year ago, I started listening to a lot of acapella music, and I started thinking about how much I would like to beatbox. I talked to my awesome brother about how to do it, and after he taught me the basics, I started practicing on my commute to work.

I mentioned how much I was practicing to my wonderful writing friend, and the two of us started thinking about how we should make a music video for NaNoWriMo.

How hard could it be, right?

Yeah.

I had some awesome friends who were willing to try this with us.

Here’s the thing. Music videos take a lot more work than you’d think. First, there comes the actual planning part. Fortunately, two girls in our NaNoWriMo group had rewritten the words to ‘Counting Stars,’ so we had the lyrics and the song, but we also wanted to add our theme for the year. So after lots of brainstorming, I finally came up with a way to incorporate the theme into the song. Then we had to find props and somewhere to shoot.

Then we actually had to record the song. Now that took a whole lot more time. We found out that having the right microphone is a key element to recording a song. I think we spent about nine hours recording a clip that’s less than six minutes long.

Music Recording

Recording takes a lot of quiet

And once we finished that, we had to film. It took two days, and probably seven or eight hours to film and get everything together.

We had to record one by one

Can anyone guess our theme?

After that, I had to have my cousin teach me about film editing so that we could mesh all of the clips together.

It was a much longer process than we expected, but the final product was more than we ever expected.

Here’s the final product! What do you think?