TAB: Another You – Cromok (Tab Revision 2 - Latest)

(updated)

The final version of the tab is not yet now ready.

I’ll post it here when it’s ready. Tak cukup mase nak buat sume in two weeks.

It’s 11:48 pm Pacific Time – I met my own deadline. :D
So ni la yang aku buat since dua minggu lepas. I will write lengthy comments regarding this video and the new revision of the tab. You may find some information useful. Check back later.
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So here’s the write-up. Some are educational that you may find useful, some are reminders for my future stuff, and some are simply for my personal kenang-kenangan.
This is gonna be looooooooong. Aku letak pasal tab dulu, so takyah scroll down if you’re not interested in everything else.

New Tab Version

  Get the tab here

Electric Guitar Solos

For this version, aku tab the intro all over again from scratch. The reason is first of all, kalo playback the tab, the intro is not as close as I want compared to the original recording. It doesn’t matter much to me. Timing bagi aku tak penting untuk intro, as long as the notes are accurate. But since some people may use that to judge my tab without knowing what it involves, and since I can make it better, I did it. (I’m obsessed about detail, remember?) Lagi satu sebabnya is that now that I have better equipment (better headphones at least), and better ear and knowledge, I thought I should give it another close look and fix some notes. Also, sebelum ni aku tak amik berat sangat pasal intro, aku focused more on the acoustic parts. This time I thought I should give it more attention.

In previous versions, intro dia punya tempo aku fixed at 70bpm. Well, since part ni takde tempo, the playback wouldn’t be close enough to the original. But rhythm-wise, it’s clearer that way. Long notes appear long in writing.

For this version, aku buat some thorough analysis of the timing, and aku ended up pakai variable tempo (in fact some measure has two or more tempo). That way the playback is closer to the original, while keeping the score neat. But if you know how to read music (at least rhythm notation), it may be slightly confusing, since one note in a measure isn’t as long as the same note value in another measure. GP5 is also better at handling tempo changes compared to GP4 or GP3, so I can do this now.

The notes in previous versions were more like how I used to play it rather than the original. But in this version, aku memang tulis ape yang aku dapat tangkap. Aku still main some phrases differently, just because I’m more comfortable with it. But when it comes to writing it down, it’s my best guess of how Karl played it. For example, katakanla la aku dengar 3 notes sound cam legato together, it implies that he may have played it on the same string. So even though aku prefer tuka tali to play one of the notes, I’d still write it down as one string, in the spirit of being faithful to the original. Here’s an example:
 

 

Acoustic Guitar parts

Sebelum ni aku tak penah try main lagu ni entirely. Mase aku buat tab ni dulu, the purpose was to give people a good reference. Since aku takde acoustic guitar, I didn’t see a point of spending time learning it myself. I just tabbed what I heard.

But after some time, lepas main lagu ni based on what I wrote, I thought that some things should be changed to make it a little easier. Well, the song is not that easy, but a few things would help making it more manageable.

The changes on acoustic guitar parts are very minor. Kalo tak compare side susah nak nampak beza dia. Aku tak try pon checking every note with the recording again. I trust my old work, plus, it’s very time consuming.

Oh since GP5 has improved a little bit, aku fixed the grace notes. Otherwise they got played “before the beat”, I want it “on the beat”.

 

Video

First off, it wasn’t raining when I recorded. In fact, for lighting purposes, aku record time malam. But I thought the rain the week before was appropriate for the song mood. And bile aku mix part intro tu, it just occurred to me that some lightning noise in the background is cool (probably because of the noise my neighbor was making mase aku playback the intro). So I put the subtle lightning sound effects (kat region ni jarang guruh/petir actually). Pikir-pikir balik terasa cam intro lagu Taman Rashidah Utama plak. (Maybe I should do that song later).

The lighting was low in the video. Memang aku plan to make it that way. It’s a sad song, the video should project the mood. Tapi problem aku is that bile aku punya light low, it’s hard to get the right color balance (in fact video lain pon had that problem even with a lot of light). My skin looked a little too pale and lifeless.

Aku actually nak video tu to be a little more yellow and brown, like this picture that I took many years ago out of boredom. (Note to self: Make use of video color adjustment plug-ins in the future). But I couldn’t do it, not enough time.


(Note to self: next time when colors matter, cover the blinking blue light of the desktop tower when taping. It’s harder to do it when editing.)

Personal Stuff

This video is very personal to me. The choice of release date has a personal significance (no, not the Valentine’s Day, well, at least it has very little to do with it).

Many things in the video, in the background and foreground have their significance. Even minyak wangi yang aku pakai pon ade significance nye. I will not discuss what and why of everything any further here.

The only thing I would discuss here is the shirt yang aku pakai time main part acoustic tu. A few of you may have seen it before. Remember it? Here. 

That’s from the video of me demonstrating how certain part of the 2nd acoustic guitar should be played. Aku post video tu around the time aku released the 1st revision, in 2003. It’s available in the GSHBB Materials page (but don’t watch it, I spoke bad English at the time). :P

Tu baju abah aku actually. He died when I was in Form 5, around this time 10 years ago. At the time we didn’t have much money, and since aku punya baju pon tak banyak yang muat lagi, I ended up inheriting some of his clothes. This was my favorite one, it’s comfy.

 

Performance

Kalo compare ngan original recording, it’s obvious that I was playing this song at a slower tempo, especially part acoustic tu. For the record, I have no problem with the tempo in the original recording. It’s a good recording. But bile main lagu ni, I tend to prefer a slightly slower tempo. I personally think that I could be more expressive at slower tempo, so every note has more say. This is a very emotional song, and I wanted to do this the way I feel.

For previous videos, aku buat backing track pakai computer dulu. The tempo is usually fixed, and I just played along for the whole thing. But for this one, aku record part 1st Acoustic Guitar dulu, which dictates the tempo of the whole recording (that’s why aku tak pakai headphone mase main part ni). Naturally, the tempo varies slightly throughout the song.

Lepas record part tu, aku pakai Cakewalk punya transient view and manually set the tempo of each measure. That way bile aku masukkan background chords (synth track), every chord will be on time. So katakanla la for two bars (measures) aku main laju sket, the synth chords will follow it accurately. Here’s the tempo map. See, it fluctuates almost every bar.


For 2nd acoustic guitar part aku pakai thumb pick (that yellow one). That makes it easier to play the fast phrases.

Electric guitar sound plak is still pretty much the same sound, except aku tweak sket compressor to make it cleaner, better for fast phrases. The problem is it kills sustain too. I’m not sure yet how to keep the sound clean and still maintain the sustain.

Part last tu, lepas solo tu aku hembus nafas kat mic mase record background track. Ala-ala Sudirman dalam lagu Merisik Khabar la kononnya. :P

 

Audio Recording and Processing

Ni first time aku record gitar acoustic, and the first video with my new guitar. :D
Wow, it’s so much harder than I thought. Just to give you the idea, ni schedule aku. In pencil is the original plan, and in red pen is what it ended up to be. Yes, aku siap buat schedule lagi. I knew this was gonna take a lot of effort, and time was very limited, and I really wanted to meet my deadline.


Memula aku plan to spend just one day (Feb 5th) figuring out the best setup for recording. Haram tak siap. I know that using the guitar’s built-in pickup isn’t the best option for recording, but that was the only option I had.

So I was hoping to get a decent sound out of the pickup. Aku try tweaking GearBox (Line6 bundled amp and effects modeling that I’ve been using all this time), aku try pakai GuitarRig, and Amplitube. Well, I couldn’t get the sound I wanted. Gitar Taylor 114CE aku ni equipped with ES-T pickup system, which is a single under-saddle Piezoelectric type pickup system. It’s not that great I think, the sound is, well, not real enough. The guitar sounds so much better in reality than what the pickup can capture. I guess Taylor Expression System, which comes with more expensive models are probably much better. It’s a more complex system.

So yeah, that pickup doesn’t reproduce the high frequencies well enough for my taste, the “boominess” of the guitar is lost, and I also found it hard to control the dynamics. Aku memang tak leh nak figure out cammana nak dapat sound yang aku boleh terima pakai pickup jek. Aku try gak combine ngan sound dari dynamic mic aku (yang color hitam yang aku pakai untuk nyanyi in previous video). It sounded better actually.  So menjelang Tuesday Feb 9th, aku gave up. Aku decided kena pakai condenser mic jugak. So aku gi kedai music nearby and bought a cheap condenser mic. The thing about mics is that if you don’t like it, you’ll have to live with it. You can’t return it (in the US, you can return most things for a full refund). Mic yang aku berkenan takde jual kat kedua-dua kedai kat umah aku. Since I didn’t have time to buy online, I had to get what I can get. :(

The sound is sooo much better with a condenser, although it’s a cheap one (high-end condenser mics can be tens of thousands USD each). What you hear in the video is still not how the guitar really sounds like, but it’s ok. But problem nye dengan condenser ni is that it’s so sensitive, it picks up a lot of ambient noise. You can hear the hiss in the video. I could clean it up by playing with parametric EQ, but that would end up getting rid of some frequency of the guitar sound that I wanna keep. So I decided not to do any noise reduction.

And since aku nak reduce sket background noise, aku terpaksa turned off heater rumah aku and use my laptop, sebab kipas desktop aku is loud enough for the mic.

Lagi satu challenge recording acoustic guitar ni is the dynamic (we’re talking about range of loudness here). Acoustic guitar is a very dynamic instrument. Main lagu ni dynamics kena bagus. Kalo every single note punye volume sama jek, it would sound lifeless, boring as hell. When recording acoustic guitar (or any instrument for that matter), you wanna make sure that the loudest note you play is as close as possible to the 0db mark, that way you don’t have to do so much to increase the volume later, otherwise you’ll end up increasing the volume of the noise too much as well. (Note to self: Don’t play soft notes too soft next time).

But I was still having problems with dynamics. I played some notes a little too soft to be heard. When doing the final mixing, I tried increasing the volume (using compressor and limiter) as high as possible without touching the 0db. But dalam video tu, especially part ending solo, you can still hear slight clipping noise (clipping noise ni macam bunyi pecah). I was actually tweaking this until the hour before the video was uploaded. Somehow after exporting the video (which still took about 20 minutes each time with a fast machine), the clipping noise became more apparent.

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Ok, this is getting too long, I should stop here. If you’ve read the whole thing, give yourself a pat on the back. I used to hate writing, but now I have a problem of going on and on and on. But in my defense, this one took a lot of effort, a lot of sleep loss, a week of eating the same thing for lunch and dinner. So it deserves more comments than usual. :D

After working so hard on this and the last video, I’m taking a break and work on something new. Don’t expect any new tab or video for another month at least.

Cromok

I do not own the copyright of the original recording nor the music itself. The tablature that I transcribe and the backing track that I make are for educational purposes only.